In late 2024 my good friend Liam Keenan and I recorded a short session with our friend David Akerman at his studio Lost Sound in Marrickville. We had been working as art and music curators at a major art museum in Sydney, Australia. We both make music separately but had neglected making a record together for too long.

Country/The Country is the first of our combined love of all things longform, expansive, distorted and it is filled with reverberations. Built on subtle guitars, modular synth pads and sample-based loops, the record is us exploring our experience growing up in similar regional and rural settings.

The music represents parts of the country in Western Sydney and further west in regional NSW in Australia where we both grew up across different periods of time. These places are drifting plains, scowling mountains and at times, simply, rolling suburbia. The music is a score of sorts for these meshing places, a way of us decoding these shared geographies, outside of time. You could almost say, it's a music of place, out of time.

• J.WLSN