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PRICE:
$23.50
LOW STOCK LEVEL
1-2 Weeks
01. ROBERT CURGENVEN - Ressuscitant de l'étreinte de la Sirène
02. ROBERT CURGENVEN - Cornubia
03. ROBERT CURGENVEN - Turner's Tempest
04. ROBERT CURGENVEN - Imperial Horizon (for Caliban)
ARTIST
TITLE
Sirène
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
RFE 001LP RFE 001LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
9/16/2014

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.