ZÖJ’s sophomore release crafts an evolving sonic landscape where the edges between sound, silence and nature dissolve. Attuned to the moment, the music unfolds slowly and deliberately; drawing you in, asking you to listen deeply, and feel fully.

This isn’t background music; it’s an invitation to be present.

ZÖJ is not just a duo but a conversation—between worlds, between past and present, between the known and the unnameable. Since 2016, Gelareh Pour and Brian O’Dwyer have been making music under this name, though their collaboration stretches back further, to when they first began tracing the edges of each other’s sound in 2012.

Their debut album, Fil O Fenjoon (2023), was unrushed, inevitable. It resonated, not just in accolades (the Australian Wettest 100’s number one album, the Excellence in Experimental Practice award at the 2024 APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards) but in the way it settled into listeners like something remembered rather than discovered.

Their second album, Give Water to Birds, is something else again—an expansion, a deepening. Here, guitarist Brett Langsford enters the space, not as an addition but as a shifting of light, a reshaping of the landscape. His playing pulls at the edges, offering new textures to ZÖJ’s intricate, intuitive world. It is music that holds both silence and sound, absence and presence, the fleeting and the enduring.

Give Water to Birds emerged from an unplanned yet inevitable moment. At Hello Daydreamer Studios, ZÖJ - Gelareh and Brian - invited Brett to join them in uncharted musical terrain. As they played, a microphone outside the bathroom window captured birdsong, an unintentional symphony woven into the recording. This is how it remains on Give Water to Birds. Nothing has been arranged or composed beyond what naturally occurred. The two worlds coexist, not layered for effect but entwined in their own right, one sound breathing through the other. A symbiosis neither forced nor sought, only recognised—the pulse of an album that embodies presence and absence, connection and distance.

Gelareh’s haunting vocals, Brian’s fractured rhythms, Brett’s murmuring guitar and the nature that surrounds them create a place outside time, a language beyond words. Inspired by Persian poetry, it is a quiet reckoning—an offering, fragile yet unyielding, carrying echoes of lifetimes and the silence they leave behind.