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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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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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