PERCUSSIONIST Bree van Reyk, one of Canberra music’s big success stories, is back to town this week as part of Ainslie Arts Centre’s Ainslie Salon Series.

The series, put together by 2022 APRA-AMCOS award-winner Sia Ahmad focuses on electronic and improvised music, and you can’t get much more up-to-date than Van Reyk.

Last year, she and Mick Turner, best known as guitarist in the group Dirty Three, were featured artists on her album, “Superclusters”, and that gives the title and them to their upcoming duo concert.

With a hardcopy vinyl release by Hobbledehoy limited to 500 copies, they’re being snaffled up fast, and no wonder, for as well as van Reyk on vibraphone, drums and crotales (cymbals) and Turner on electric guitar, there’s a line-up of extraordinary Australian jazz and classical luminaries, including Véronique Serret on violin, Zoe Hauptmann on upright bass, Nick Wales on viola and Sandy Evans on sax.

Van Reyk is no stranger to the wider Australian music scene, having worked in classical, jazz, rock, and experimental music with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Paul Kelly, Holly Throsby, Gurrumul and Lior, to name a few.

But she is as well known in the town of her upbringing, where she started learning piano at age 10 before switching to drums and going on to the ANU School of Music.

When I catch up with her by phone to Sydney, she says it’s 22 years since she finished up at the ANU in 2000. There she had studied with Michael Askill and Gary France, but she had already done jazz and classical classes in a prep course when she was at Canberra High and Hawker College.

These days, she spends most of her time in Sydney and is doing a doctorate in musical arts under Liza Lim at Sydney Conservatorium, focusing on composition.

She’s had a huge output, including a fanfare for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, but one of the things she’s proudest of is a work for the Sydney chamber opera called “The Invisible Bird”, built around the story of a rare Australian parrot. That was for an ensemble of mixed violins, double bass, flute and percussion. When composing for opera, she runs the gamut.

“Superclusters” is her first solo release and there were about 32 people involved in the recording, not least Turner, a huge coup in her view.

“Mick is one of my favourite guitarists… I have a lot of guitarist friends, but he is a really unique player,” she says.

Oddly, when she performs at the Ainslie Salon it will be the first time they’ve played together live, because his part on the album was recorded remotely.

“It’s really like a dream to be, my teenage self would be beside myself, it’s really a great honour,” van Reyk says.

A very average guitarist who can “strum around a bit,” she appreciates Turner’s mastery.

Her focus is on another instrument.

“I love playing vibraphone,” she says. “You can control the instrument more than any other… a drum is hard to control because it lasts as long as it lasts. I also love organs and accordions because you can hold a tone for a long time.”

When she and Turner appear in the Ainslie Salon Series, their version of “Superclusters” will be “very improvised, very spacious, very surreal… we will be doing ‘Superclusters’ and some new things and some of my old repertoire.”

“Superclusters”, Ainslie Arts Centre, February 3.