Robert Curgenven is an Ireland-based Australian composer employing sound as a physical field of perception. His work encourages us to consider our physical experience of sound: how it shapes our understanding of our embodiment; what it tells us about this embodiment and of how we inhabit space, both individually and collectively as an audience; and how the auditory shapes our perception of time and duration. For him sound is weather and his work entreats us to feel and hear air. His live performances, installations and album releases 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 ten 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), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Cork Film Festival, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk), Leipzig Gallery for Contemporary Art, Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art (Darwin) 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), 10 Years of Microsound (Diapason Gallery, New York), National Film & Sound Archive (Australia) as well as galleries throughout Australia, Italy, France, UK, Germany including National Gallery of Australia (Canberra) and a solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Torun (Poland).
RobertCurgenven at Recorded Fields
As of February 2016