The countryside has an image problem. In popular culture, it tends to arrive pre-packaged with acoustic guitars, wholesome sunsets, sentimental memories and a suspiciously high number of people who look as though they have never had to deal with a blocked drain. J.WLSN and Liam Keenan have little interest in this postcard version of rural life. On "Country/The Country", their shared recollections of Western Sydney and the more distant regions of New South Wales emerge through distorted guitars, modular synthesis, cassette loops and the patient accumulation of sound. This is a landscape in which the horizon has lost some of its definition, the past refuses to stay in its allotted decade, and even suburbia can acquire the solemnity of an ancient geological formation.

The album grew out of a recording session in October 2024 at Lost Sound, the Marrickville studio of their friend David Akerman. At the time, both musicians were working as art and music curators at a major Sydney art museum, while maintaining their own musical practices. Their collaboration had been postponed for long enough to become one of those projects that friends keep mentioning until somebody finally books a room. The session became an opportunity to explore their overlapping experiences of places inhabited during different periods of their lives. J.WLSN handles a Make Noise modular system, a Pulsar-23 and cassette loops, while Keenan contributes Bass VI, a 335 guitar and effects. Lawrence English subsequently provided additional treatments, mixing and mastering, helping situate the recording within the carefully considered sonic world of Room40.

The title is a small but productive ambiguity. "Country" might suggest a genre, although anyone expecting twang, tidy choruses or a lyrical account of heartbreak beside a pickup truck should probably check their assumptions at the door. "The Country" points instead towards territory: land, distance, habitation and the peculiar ways in which a place persists in the imagination after its immediate details have changed. The slash between the two terms acts almost like a border on a map, separating two ideas that the music continually allows to bleed together. For these musicians, geography is neither neutral scenery nor a collection of picturesque views. It is something absorbed over time, carried around in the body and recalled imperfectly. Their music approaches this inheritance obliquely, through textures that seem to retain the pressure of their origins without offering a documentary account of them.

The opening "Teflon Blues" occupies nearly twenty-one minutes, a generous stretch of time in which the guitar's identity gradually becomes less certain. Keenan's string work is processed and softened at the edges, while electronic layers and repeating fragments accumulate around it. The blues in the title is less a recognisable musical form than a residue: a suggestion of something once expressive, perhaps even songlike, that has been left out in the weather. The sound has a curious, worn surface, as though a familiar tune had been recovered from a box of old photographs stored in a damp shed. Yet the music avoids the obvious drama of decay. It proceeds by small alterations in density, tone and emphasis, allowing the listener to notice how a sound changes character when it has been encountered repeatedly. A guitar note can begin as a gesture and end up resembling a distant landmark, while the surrounding electronics blur the distinction between foreground and background.

There is a quiet intelligence in this refusal to hurry. Long-form music can occasionally mistake duration for profundity, as though a track becomes automatically more meaningful once it has outlasted an average television episode. Here, the extended form has a clearer purpose. Repetition provides a framework in which memory can work: details return, but their significance shifts according to what has happened in the meantime. The recording feels less like a performance advancing towards a destination than a mind circling a place it cannot quite describe. There is no need for a dramatic climax, because the subject itself is the gradual transformation of perception.

"The Power of Emptiness", at more than twelve minutes, makes the album's central paradox more explicit. Emptiness is not an absence of material; it is a condition that allows material to become perceptible. The guitar tones are suspended in an atmosphere of electronic haze, with noise and resonance subtly reshaping their contours. What might initially seem spacious acquires weight through the pressure of its own lingering sounds. The title could easily have introduced a solemn lecture on metaphysics, complete with a lecturer wearing an expensive black shirt, but the piece is more persuasive than that. Its spaciousness is physical and audible. There is room for tones to breathe, but also for them to be swallowed, obscured or reduced to traces. Silence, in this setting, is less an empty room than the room's capacity to remember what has been inside it.

Then comes "Planned Obsolescence", a brief interruption of just over a minute. Its title brings industrial cynicism into a sequence otherwise preoccupied with slow time and geographical memory. The phrase usually describes the deliberate shortening of a product's useful life, the sort of business philosophy that ensures your perfectly functional appliance will eventually become an expensive paperweight. Placed here, it introduces a wry counterpoint to the album's concern with duration. Sounds are allowed to persist, degrade and change, but the modern world is organised around replacing things before they have finished telling us anything. The track's brevity makes it feel like a small crack in the album's temporal fabric, a reminder that the landscapes we remember are also subject to development, demolition and the relentless logic of the new.

"Suburban Dopamine" stretches out over fifteen minutes, and its title brings the record closer to the environments that often escape the romantic vocabulary of landscape music. Suburbia is neither pristine wilderness nor the city centre's theatrical density. It is a world of repetitive streets, scattered commercial zones, familiar journeys and modest domestic routines. For many people, it is also where childhood actually happened, rather than where childhood is retrospectively staged in glossy advertising. The music reflects this less glamorous familiarity through loops and gradual shifts in texture. Repetition suggests routine, but the surrounding guitar and electronic layers prevent it from settling into mere mechanical sameness. Small changes acquire disproportionate importance, much as a road travelled hundreds of times can suddenly appear different under a change of light or after a building has disappeared.

There is something affecting about the way the piece allows suburban space to become strange without turning it into a horror film. Its atmosphere is neither idyllic nor overtly threatening. Instead, it hints at the oddness concealed inside ordinary surroundings, where places can be emotionally charged without possessing any obvious beauty. A shopping strip, an empty field beside a road or a row of houses seen from a moving car can become inseparable from a particular period of life. The music seems to understand that nostalgia does not always need a beautiful object. Sometimes it attaches itself to the most unremarkable things, which is unfortunate for anyone attempting to explain their feelings at a dinner party.

The closing "Teflon Blues (edit)" compresses the opening piece into a little over five minutes. Its return changes the meaning of what came before. Rather than functioning as a simple bonus version, it offers a different experience of the same material: what was initially allowed to spread across an extended duration is now encountered as a more concentrated fragment. The edit inevitably sacrifices some of the slow accumulation that gives the longer version its character, but that compression is revealing in itself. Memory rarely preserves an event in its original proportions. It extracts a few details, discards others and constructs a version that can be carried around. The shorter "Teflon Blues" feels like such a recollection, a partial image of something whose full dimensions remain beyond reach.

Keenan's wider practice makes this collaboration particularly apt. The Gomeroi guitarist and curator has explored the possibilities of extended guitar techniques and improvised sound, including a 2024 Room40 collaboration with David Grubbs. J.WLSN, meanwhile, has pursued a musical practice attentive to the relationship between sound, perception and time. Their work together benefits from the difference between the two instrumental approaches: the guitar provides a human, tactile point of reference, while modular electronics and tape loops introduce repetition, instability and a sense of duration that is not necessarily governed by conventional musical development. Neither side dominates. Instead, the instruments become difficult to separate from the environments they appear to evoke.

That sense of place deserves a qualification. "Country/The Country" does not attempt to reproduce the Australian landscape through literal field recordings or a collection of recognisable environmental sounds. Its geography is interpretive, shaped by the musicians' histories and the friction between remembered terrain and present perception. The album's broad, blurred surfaces could evoke rural plains, distant hills or suburban sprawl, but they do not insist on a single picture. This openness is one of its strengths, although listeners looking for strong melodic signposts or sharply differentiated movements may find the material deliberately elusive. Its changes are often incremental, and its emotional vocabulary is built from tone, repetition and the interaction of sounds rather than conventional dramatic gestures.

The result is an album that treats memory as a process of editing, distortion and return. The past is neither restored nor neatly archived; it is continually revised by the person doing the remembering. In the hands of J.WLSN and Liam Keenan, guitars become weathered objects, loops behave like habitual routes, and electronic resonance gives ordinary spaces an unfamiliar scale. "Country/The Country" is not a musical travel guide, and it offers no guarantee that revisiting one's origins will lead to enlightenment. Sometimes the old place looks different, sometimes the road is still there, and sometimes all that remains is a sound that refuses to explain itself. That may be the most honest kind of country music: a record less concerned with where home is than with the strange, persistent ways in which home continues to sound.