Robert Curgenven // SIRÈNE LP

過去にLINEやTapeworm、Touchなどから作品を発表しているアイルランド在住オーストラリア人サウンドアーティストRobert Curgenven諸作を入荷しました。

本作は、彼の故郷であるオーストラリア・コーンウォールをテーマとしたレコードです。ミニマルドローン4曲を収録。DLコード付属。

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2014 album of pipe organ works.

FACT magazine :
“Curgenven really excels as he charms easily with a selection of expertly treated pipe organ recordings… his most definitive work today… astounding”

The Quietus:
"A frequently beautiful, often overwhelming yet always intriguing record”

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Accompanying text:

" In Australia the discovery of a 1932 photograph of Curgenven’s grandfather - whose own grandfather had emigrated from Australia from Cornwall back in the 1870s - was the inspiration that brought SIRÈNE together. Five generations after that first migration across the ocean, Robert Curgenven was the first of his line to leave Australia, to return to the family’s roots on Cornwall’s Atlantic peninsula.

In Cornwall, living amongst country as wild as his former home in Australia’s Northern Territory, Curgenven returned also to his first instrument, the pipe organ. Here 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 on SIRÈNE.

In part a companion piece to a visceral album (rfe_02) 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 and a tin trade dating back beyond the Phoenicians. Legend has it that “Ulysses” epic told the journey west for tin to make bronze: the Isles of Scilly to Cornwall’s south-west, the treacherous home to the Sirens, where – like Turner – Ulysses tied himself to the mast, instead to resist their call.

Empires have come and gone, like Cornwall’s rugged granite cliffs, which once stood miles away in the days of Cornubia. As with the coast, the people have remained in a slow process of transformation - waves of imperialism come and go, like on Caliban’s horizon in his own Tempest. SIRÈNE is not a kind of nostalgia, but instead presents time, lineage, nationhood as a process and continuum of change."

Artist : Robert Curgenven

Label : Recorded Fields