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"Curgenven makes the point that sounds are fundamental to our perception of the world... hearing the complexities of a place and time is intersected by memories of the familiar which are in turn displaced and transformed." --Realtime Magazine (AUS)
Robert Curgenven (1974) is a composer/sound artist drawing on the physicality of sound -- not just the physical impact on the body but the way in which the auditory can shape our perception of space and the flow of time, from architectural to open space. His works span pipe organ through to feedback, immersive resonances via turntables and custom-made vinyl, as well as carefully detailed field recordings from remote areas in Australia where he lived for many years. The Wire surmises that "behind the music -- to these ears at any rate -- lurk such [disparate] presences as Alvin Lucier, King Tubby, Murray Schafer and Eliane Radigue."
From beginnings over 30 years ago as a classically-trained organist, the past 10 years have seen him release work on labels such as LINE, The Tapeworm, Winds Measure and his own Recorded Fields Editions. Curgenven has performed extensively across Australia and Europe, including TodaysArt festival (Den Haag/NL), Ultrahang Festival (Budapest), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Cave12 (Geneva), STEIM (Amsterdam), Audiograft Festival (Oxford/UK), Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk), Alice Springs Desert Festival as well as residencies in Milan (O?), Venice (C32/Forte Marghera), Rotterdam (Worm), Berlin (Transit Lounge) and Alice Springs (Art/Land/Culture). He has presented sound, audiovisual and sculptural work in group exhibitions for Transmediale (Berlin), National Film & Sound Archive (Australia), 10 Years of Microsound (Diapason Gallery, New York) as well as galleries throughout Australia, Italy, France, UK, Germany and a solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Torun (Poland).
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LP
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RFE 002LP
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"It is with regret I have had to record the existence of such large areas of desert land encountered in my travels in Australia." --Australia Twice Traversed (1889), Ernest Giles (1835-1897). They Tore the Earth and, Like a Scar, It Swallowed Them is a very physical negotiation of territories voided by history. Forged from the historical dynamics of the settler colonial trope, the album plays out across four scenes, through the eyes not of the invaded but of the invaders of a harsh and unforgiving land. Visceral psychogeography of settler colonialism rendered via field recordings gathered over 12 years in over 30 remote locations across Australia, mixed and expanded within immense, shimmering harmonics wrought via pipe organ, guitar feedback, dubplates, turntables, and low frequency oscillators. Amidst the heat and the dust, in a landscape populated only by the insinuation of characters, settler colonialists' blind enactment of will and violence against and into an unforgiving, arid interior is a manifestation of a mortal struggle -- a starkness dwelling within an unfillable horizon. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Released on red transparent vinyl.
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LP
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RFE 001LP
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It was the discovery in Australia of a 1932 photograph of Robert Curgenven's grandfather -- whose grandfather in turn had emigrated from Cornwall to Australia back in the 1800s -- which was the inspiration that brought Sirène together. Five generations after that first migration across the ocean, Robert Curgenven had been the first of his line to return to the Atlantic peninsula after many years in central and northern Australia. In Cornwall, living amongst the familiar climes of wild country, he'd returned also to his first instrument, the pipe organ, where his ideas about composition, pursued since his earliest pieces made over three decades before, were consolidated though hours of recordings in centuries-old Cornish churches to become the selection of works etched on Sirène. In part a companion piece prefacing a visceral forthcoming album about settler colonialism, Sirène proves just as visceral in its own right. As with the Turner painting, "Snow Storm - Steam Boat Off a Harbour's Mouth," that adorns the back cover and whose story is at the heart of an eponymous track which bodily charts this myth of biography, Sirène sends listeners across roiling oceans billowing humid air, beneath plunging coastlines. Amid this elemental immersion, Curgenven asks what is it to belong to a land, or even to this ever-changing country? Cornwall has been home to thousands of years of tin mining, with a tin trade dating back beyond the Bronze Age and the Phoenicians. With a colonial history of its own, empires around and within it have come and gone like its rugged granite cliffs, which once stood miles away in the days of Cornubia. Like that coast, the citizenry has remained in a slow process of transformation -- waves of imperialism wash over and across Cornwall, as they did on Caliban's horizon in his own Tempest. Sirène is not a kind of nostalgia or looking back, nor a looking forward into an imagined future, but instead it views time, lineage, and nationhood as a process and a continuum of change. Pressed on limited clear vinyl.
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Cassette
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TTW 058CS
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A1: various recordings of live performances in the UK from late 2011 remixed; pipe organ recordings from Cornwall from 2011-2013; a 78rpm acetate from 1927; series II resonating dubplates, stereo test LPs, generalized record and turntable abuse, industrial fans, custom-made low-and high-frequency oscillators. B1: pipe organ recordings from West and Mid-Cornwall, turntables, series II resonating dubplates. No electronics. Robert Curgenven (1974) is an Australian composer/sound artist currently based in Cornwall. His work draws on the physicality of sound, not just the physical impact on the body but how it can shape our perception of space and the dramaturgical flow of time. After many years living and working in the elemental vastness of the tropics and deserts of Northern and Central Australia and subsequently five years in Europe, relocating to Cornwall has facilitated a return to wild country and the pipe organ. The renewed focus on pipe organ comes following over 30 years of active engagement in composition, radio, and performance since his beginnings as a classically-trained organist. Edition of 150 copies.
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CD
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LINE 042CD
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"The 'Transparence' dubplate, developed at O ' in Milan, Italy, works within the physical limitations of the vinyl medium, employing the object as sound source and also sound medium, to become an instrument in its own right. Using the non-linear acoustics of the gallery at O', the dubplate was recorded, and later cut to disc in Berlin, at very low volume. This ephemeral audio signal becomes present during playback only at high volume, which subsequently produces, by design, a unique physical response from the room, air and amplification - creating deep undertones and blossoming overtones via these manifold resonances; simultaneously, the action of the stylus gently abraids the soft vinyl surface, causing the dubplate's sound to gradually disappear and evolve, successively losing higher frequencies whilst acquiring new artifacts and crackle. Oltre documents this degradation and transformation over two months of live performances. The integrated system of subsonic feedback from ventilators, acoustically gated binaural microphones, modal micro-variations in guitar feedback, field-recordings from across remote areas of Australia and the live, physical interplay of the turntable, dubplate and stylus, combine to create a field which moves beyond the original recordings and their individual spaces. Working with harmonics and textures as articulated not only through instruments/objects, in space and place, but also in time and the dislocation of the remote, Robert Curgenven's sound explores shifting layers in the fabric of fields of perception, creating vast landscapes from carefully detailed recordings through to immersive resonances via deft manipulations of sound pressure. Employing only analogue means, in a variety of contexts from pure field recordings to feedback and instrumental harmonics to shape relations through sound, his work interweaves the unfolding of complex beauty and the quiet brutality of nature in all of its forms, described by one audience member as 'like a punch in the face while elsewhere flowers bloomed.'"
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