Vivid Art After Hours: Air Land Sea

Vivid Music & Vivid Ideas presents: AIR LAND SEA as part of a curated evening of talk, music & art.

Over three successive Wednesdays, Vivid  Sydney will take over the Art Gallery of NSW to create an intimate portrait of our better selves. Our special guests dare to ask if we can improve dying, how we can find common ground when and where there’s conflict, and why we should nudge perceptions around female sexuality. Linger after all the intellectual stimulation for drinks and live music.  While you’re there, catch the Archibald Prize — a snapshot of the people who are important to us and capture our imaginations.

7.30 - 8.30pm
Vivid music presents: Air Land Sea

When three best friends (who all happen to be musicians) spend a weekend sitting around a fire place, playing guitar and sipping scotch in a remote eco-cabin in rural Victoria surrounded by Alpacas, its not surprising that they will accidently write a record. Vibing on the years of travel, childhood memories, good times and heartaches they’ve seen each other through, Air Land Sea became the band that was never going to happen — but was always meant to happen.

Tony Buchen, Lior and Nadav Kahn first met in high school, and have been the closest of friends ever since. Now with their thriving independent musical careers, they certainly still remember their early days, supporting each other and at times being each other’s only audience members. Over the years somehow, the opportunity for collaboration had never presented itself. Finally, fate had its way.  

Beginning in 2010, that boys weekend in the little town of Daylesford, Victoria, turned into another weekend, and then a few more weekends after that, where musically things began to coalesce. Though there was no plan in place for the songs, the songs kept on coming, one after the other, and soon enough, a small collection of songs was in place, each tune a perfect blend of each other’s musical influences and differing personalities. It was a quiet spirit that took over them with force on those weekends, and these sessions somehow permeated the rest of the journey that was to unfold, taking them from Daylesford to Melbourne to Sydney, Joshua Tree and Los Angeles.

Over the coming years the three friends’ independent careers continued to blossom and demand much of their attention. Lior continued his stellar career as one of Australia’s most treasured singer-songwriters, branching into the classical music world with a lauded ARIA award winning work with Nigel Westlake. Tony built his own reputation as one of Australia’s leading record producers yielding multiple ARIA award nominations. And APRA award winning songwriter Nadav, after years of touring in bands (Gelbison, Kahn Brothers), focused on songwriting between Sydney, LA and India, simultaneously establishing his reputation in the Yoga music world performing devotional mantra-based songs at retreats around the world.

When time permitted, the three would come together, diving back into their collaboration, which by now had taken on the name Air Land Sea. Informal recording sessions began at Tony’s studio in Sydney where the demoing and writing of the songs merged into an amorphous process — a warm, textural sound based around three-part harmonies, analogue synthesisers with acoustic guitars began to emerge.

“We wrote for the sheer joy of writing, for the sheer joy of crafting something together. It was effortless in many ways. It was an opportunity to not have any other thoughts, even in the back of our minds about where this was going, what it could be or how it would be received. That was liberating and beautiful. But once we had a bunch of songs we’d written, we got curious. The demos we had recorded had such a clear vibe, that the next step was to make the time to record in earnest and see where the project would lead us. We took it slow and now we are here."

In 2014, they decided to hit the desert and record their three-part harmonies in the famous quadraphonic echo chamber dome called the Integratron — one of the most mysterious desert buildings in Joshua Tree, in which even a whisper has a three dimensional reverb.

It was during this trip that they felt that an outside pair of ears would bring things into focus, and enlisted record producer and friend Justin Stanley (Leonard Cohen, Prince) out of his studio at Henson Studios in Hollywood. In 2017, with the final batch of songs in the can and mixes complete, the project felt ready to be shared with the world. If this collaboration was a piece of nature, it would be a meandering river, taking its time to find the necessary turns that would naturally but surely lead it to an open valley.

Where: Art Gallery NSW 5pm – 10pm
Free admission to the galley
Talks: 6.30pm
Music: 7.30pm – 8.30pm