Get to know Josten
I’m a musician active internationally in experimental music as a player, composer and organiser. I’m mostly known as a saxophone improviser, and have played at festivals in France, Mexico, Norway, Czechia, South Africa, Malaysia and around this continent. Over the years I’ve been in the bands Ghost Gum Reverb, Breaking Waves, Nika Mo, residues and Land’s Air.
I direct an exploratory music festival in town called Audible Edge, and also helped start the Walyalup Weekend of Improvised Music, alongside numerous other concert series and workshop programs since 2013. The local scene is very important to me, and I think of being part of looking after it as part of what makes making good music possible here: you gotta tend to the soil to grow delicious things.
I started tuning into RTRFM once I heard about Difficult Listening. As a younger person growing up outside of Boorloo I was embarrassingly only interested in things that were experimental, but over time I’ve become more and more just interested in anything that’s tender, emplaced, committed, open, inventive, bizarre, unhinged, cared for or meticulous enough. My proclivity for weirdness remains but I’ve become more of a regular listener to all sorts of programs on the station and its obviously on in the car most of the time when I find myself driving.
Presenting on RTRFM is a meaningful activity: anyone who has listened to the station for a while knows both how invaluable and special community radio of this calibre is, and also ultimately how fragile it is. There is less and less space for alternative expression in today’s world. I genuinely think that by keeping things like this alive we are maintaining the possibility to think other thoughts than what capitalist superstructures ordain us to. Without this the landscape would be both barren and increasingly difficult to change. So, this fun, silly thing we volunteer to do is very real I reckon.
