Robert Curgenven: ‘This Doesn’t Exist in a Void’

Australian native Robert Curgenven has just released an uncompromising album inspired by the brutal colonisation of this country, past and present. Interview by DOUG WALLEN. Photo by LIHUEN GALLI.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Context is everything, as the saying goes, but rarely is that as apparent as it is with the new album by Australian-born, UK-based composer Robert Curgenven. They tore the earth and, like a scar, it swallowed them doesn’t just include a suggested viewing and watching list (accessible via the album’s page on his label’s website), but a strong visual component in a stunning five-minute album trailer. In fact, as Curgenven says during our extensive email interview, “If many people heard the album and didn’t understand the context, or read the articles, or thought it was just about some white composer flexing some audio muscle (as being just something “loud” with some “grit” in the sound), then I’d feel that the album missed its mark.”

So what is the context for They tore the earth…? Australian colonisation, past and present – from the initial “settling” of the continent by Europeans to continuing interventions with Indigenous affairs. Curgenven calls the album “a very physical negotiation of territories voided by history,” something that’s underscored by 10 years’ worth of field recordings in more than 30 remote Australian locations. He’s added to those field recordings with guitar feedback, dubplates, turntables, low-frequency oscillators and – echoing his other 2014 album, SIRÈNE – pipe organ bent to droning and scathing potential.

Vast and treacherous though it is, They tore the earth… shouldn’t, and doesn’t, stand in isolation. Without knowing Curgenven’s very specific, passionate and extensive goals for the project, it would merely be a fleeting 40 or so minutes most ideal for scorched background listening. Align it with the perils of trying to conquer a land and its people, and the buzzing of flies (among other elements) takes on much more weight.

Below, Curgenven sheds a wealth of light on They tore… and SIRÈNE, both released through his own resurrected imprint Recorded Fields Editions.

How different do you think They Tore… would be if you had made it two or three years ago?
It’s interesting you ask that – the initial long-version of these four tracks were all made at the end of 2009/start of 2010, with some further mixing done during a trip to Australia (after a two-year absence) shortly after. A label approached me for an album, although they later folded, and these tracks grew from trying to make a stereo version of a 12-channel sound installation composed entirely of unprocessed field recordings that had been shown in an initial form at Biorama Projekt in Joachimsthal, Germany in 2008 and then in a completed form at galleries in Poland, New York and Germany in 2009.

Initially the backbone of field recordings were fleshed out with some guitar recordings I had made throughout 2006-2009 in various countries as well as work with feedback and ventilators specifically for the tracks, particularly the opening of a live performance I did around that time. The album sat with a different label for two years and over the next few years the album was remixed a further three or four times. The remixing varied from new mixes, adding turntable and piano parts, intercutting and mixing some of the tracks with one another, adding some new low-frequency oscillators that I’d had made for me by my father as well as layers of pipe organ to every track. I’d been making a lot of pipe organ work since moving to Cornwall at the end of 2010 and these sounds not only enhanced the existing overtones and harmonics, giving them additional depth, but also added a necessary semantic layer.

At the last minute I decided to release an LP of pipe organ work earlier this year first, to make this layer and work apparent. Releasing this preliminary album also meant not coming out quite so hard with an overtly political album, perhaps softening the audience up a little bit first.

How wrapped up in or inspired by the current Australian political climate is it, however subtly or subconsciously?
The politics driving the tracks were infused from the start – I left Australia not long after the Intervention started in the NT, for many reasons. The Human Rights Report in the Suggested Reading list gives a lot of good reasons.

But simply put, it’s not possible to write 600 pages of legislation in six weeks with adequate consultation. The specific aim of the NT Intervention wasn’t a consultative approach to really help Indigenous people – in many ways quite the opposite. I felt that going overseas and returning to full-time music, I could effect greater change than staying where I was and effectively alienating friends by expressing my concerns too constantly and in the wrong fora. As a result, getting this album right – well, as good as I can make it within my abilities – has been an ongoing concern since then.

“It’s a shame that an album like this seems pertinent to our present times even more than since the [NT] Intervention began.”

I can’t purport to tell a story from an Indigenous perspective; that would be presumptive. To illustrate further, 80% of Australians live on the coast; a large percentage of them live on the East Coast. It would be fair to say that many on the East Coast wouldn’t have travelled further into or seen the heart of the country that they call home. Given Australia is the size of Europe – imagine if one country in Europe made claims about “how it is” or “how it should be” for the rest of Europe – an incredible diversity of people and cultures across a huge range of geographic areas? This highlights the problematic nature of applying the same approach in Australia: where stark geopolitical claims about the essential nature of the continent and culture are often made when so little of it has been experienced firsthand by most people or at best from second-hand sources. In the same way, how it would have been for the first colonials, many of whom, as shown in some of the other articles in the reading list, acted in less than benevolent ways to forge the interior of the continent into our present nation.

It’s actually a shame that these politics have become even more prevalent now and an album like this seems pertinent to our present times even more than since the Intervention began.

Would it be accurate to say you started Recorded Field Editions largely to release this album?
Recorded Fields originally had six releases between 2007-2009, which included the limited art edition of the dubplate which formed the core of Oltre (LINE, 2010) and the WM25 split release with Will Montgomery (Winds Measure, 2012).

Given that They Tore the Earth... had been stalled a while waiting for other labels and that many labels are releasing less at present – particularly physical releases, as I wanted these albums not just to be heard on earbuds or laptop speakers – I felt that revitalising the RF label as Recorded Fields Editions of the dubplate which formed the core of (which runs together with nice additional overtones as a single-word URL) was the best approach. I also wanted to package the albums quite specifically, which includes transparent vinyl, the cover stock, the information that accompanies this release. In They Tore the Earth...’s case, that incorporates the suggested reading and viewing list and also the video work, to help make the intention as clear as possible.

How have you found running the label so far, particularly releasing the two albums fairly close together this year?
As far as distribution for a label goes, Richard Chartier had done a great job getting the LINE releases far and wide and in 2012 I did the EU/UK distribution for the WM25 release. Although I’ve had jobs in and around the music industry since I was about 20 I hadn’t done distribution on one of my own releases before. Richard and a few others helped out and gave me pointers and contacts. I used that experience as well as help from a few more people, like Philip from The Tapeworm, to approach some distributors for SIRÈNE and was lucky to have it accepted.

The two releases are kind of companion pieces for one another – both came out of the same period and both deal with very similar themes – migration, culture, connection to country - but in a polar fashion. Aurally and conceptually they inform one another and both make more sense together. Releasing SIRÈNE first and They Tore the Earth... second felt like the best way to present the ideas and the vastly different textures of the works to an audience. The main aim also was to build momentum toward the release of the more political album.

I don’t plan on releasing albums every few months. That would be overkill; these two were a special case. I’ve also endeavoured to make them LPs as affordable as possible while also keeping the presentation quality as an important concern. There will, however, be some more RFE releases in the future, as now the platform is built and some good mechanisms are in place to get the music out to people. People have been extraordinarily supportive; I’ve been quite lucky and very thankful for all the people who have been behind it since before SIRÈNE was even released and how the process has gone generally.

And you said your father makes low-frequency oscillators?
My father was an electrical engineer at an Australian university for 30 years. He built the LFOs at my request – a facility with circuitry is something that has skipped a generation. I felt that the way I was producing my low-end live via turntables/dubplates and industrial fans as well as carrying around/requesting big fans and sensitive microphones was not the most effective, compact or reliable “bass delivery system.” So for the first time I decided to embrace some electronics and he built these. They have a different tone: they play quite differently but I can do quite precise things like find standing waves in a venue then set two low tones a fraction of a Hertz apart so the whole room is slowly ventilated or the floor moves, it adds a nice physical dimension to the experience.

“There is inherently a veil of mystery behind an instrument as large as a pipe organ, a repository of so many possibilities.”

Before the LFOs, a small nick in a dubplate which is producing a lot of bass – via feedback – below 30hz could produce a ‘pop’ that might result in a jumpy sound engineer fading all my bass out and essentially ruining a big element of my sound. It was an experience like this at a gig that got me thinking about alternatives and led me to ask my father some specific questions. For some reason he made them go down to 19Hz (they recently took some ceiling tiles out in a soundcheck on a Funktion One system) but I’m yet to hear/feel or find a PA that exploit the full capability of what they can do. I’m still wondering exactly what he was thinking with that.

In an amusing extra note, it’s his father/my grandfather on the cover of SIRÈNE, but the discovery of that photo came a few years later through his sister/my aunt.

Tell me about your history with the pipe organ and the challenges/rewards you find in the instrument.
I started learning when I was seven, making pieces around eight and nine, then stopped lessons at about 15 or 16. I loved the overtones, later discovering the simple maths behind the stops (1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 2 2⁄3, 5 1/3) but more interested in the “notes between the notes,” which years later I realised was the basics behind the harmonics. (That intervening gap was about 10-15 years, although I always had a keyboard instrument of some kind around me.)

There is inherently a veil of mystery behind an instrument as large as a pipe organ, a repository of so many possibilities. It’s a grand piece of acoustic architecture, an imposing instrument capable of a great many things. I preferred playing Bach when I was learning, but being the ’80s and the advent of “home synths” meant there was some fairly bad sounds about and similarly awful repertoire for organ music. I still find it hard to really enjoy a lot of those sounds now – except perhaps in vastly different contexts and approaches divorced from the veneer-style spirit of those slightly plasticised times. Bach suggested some new ideas to me and I appreciated the scope of the work: fantastic chords and arrangements. Hearing Bach played in the St Thomas Church in Leipzig 10 years ago was a bit of a revelation – the strange pauses in the pieces made complete sense, hearing the overtones interact with the original architecture in which it was composed.

I’ve always favoured playing church organs alone without prying ears, which led to the DAT and some Rode condenser mics for recording – which was its own in-road into field recordings, as it captured so much of the world outside the immediate “music.” The public aspect of churches’ organs also made this solitude and peace frequently quite difficult, but after some years in cities in Europe and moving back to the more remote areas in Cornwall I was lucky to find many out-of-the-way rural churches. After a few years making music through other ‘adopted’ instruments such as pianos, turntables, guitar feedback, etc., it opened up new ways of hearing new possibilities for the organ and also sound production techniques to realise them.

Although They Tore the Earth... is instrumental, you’ve accompanied it with a dozen-strong reading list as well as four suggested films to watch. What exactly do you think/hope those texts might add to the experience of hearing and better understanding the album?
To make sense of what the suggested reading and viewing lists hope to achieve with respect to the album, it can help to see the album in context. The genesis of the album was a political conceptualisation – I didn’t make some music and attach a meaning to it, it drove the process from the beginning. The original concept consisted of four scenes, presenting a clearly delineated chronological narrative, whereas in this final album version these scenes are intercut. Tying that back into the suggested viewing list, that process of intercutting was partly inspired by some of the more brutal editing in the desert scenes in Walkabout, one of the films in the suggested viewing list. The original and chronological four scenes and the underlying geopolitic traverses: a land “discovered” and deemed empty, a kind of ‘terra nullius’; the realisation that the land is not as empty as first thought; the change in occupation bringing a change in the relationship with the land for all concerned; devastation wrought by this desolation.

Regarding it being an instrumental album, “musically” the manner of assembly of the selected field recordings is intended to convey these ideas, as hopefully does the physicality of the frequencies in the overall sound of the album. I don’t sing and have no interest in recording my own voice and although the concepts have a degree of didacticism to them, I don’t feel that translating something that is inherently spatial, temporal and physical into “words” would enhance the listening experience or render it more sensible. So without these vocalisations I guess it is instrumental – I’ve never really thought about that aspect before, but adding recordings of Indigenous voices did feel like that would be token or too didactic.

Primarily I didn’t want this to be an album where it’s a “bunch of sounds” and becomes political because I attach a political text to it. I wanted as clearly as possible to create something which leads people to a particular place or state that they could appreciate and reflect on an issue that I feel is very important as well as being a place which also acts as the frame of reference for the composition of the sound. I’ve presented this album as a live audio set about 40 times since earlier in 2013 and each time I have given a one- to two-minute introduction to contextualise the piece, using spoken text similar to the text which appears throughout the album video trailer.

The idea behind the introduction is I want people to begin hearing the work from the point of appreciating what the intention is behind the work so they can progress into its “world,” rather than have that understanding possibly crystallise at the end when it's all played out. In this way they aren’t trying to piece together that level of “what’s going on here”: the scene is already set and audiences can respond to it at a more physical and intuitive level as they move through the duration and progression of the narrative. And the pitching of this spoken section is to set the audience as the primary character in the “dramaturgy”: that this isn’t a movie happening to someone else. I didn’t feel that I could speak for people that have lost their land and had their culture eroded – I wanted audiences to feel from a first-person point of view what it could be like if they are the invaders/colonists. I want to them to feel the desolation, the isolation and the ultimate futility that these first settlers would have felt in the face of such vast spaces for which they had no comprehension or resources with which to access or deal with them. How alone they must have felt, how trapped they were, unable to leave or even to manage to progress in what would have seemed to them to be “wilderness” which could only consume them.

So in place of a personal introduction to an album, how best to introduce it? The suggested reading and viewing list in this case lateralises that contextualisation. It’s something that the internet easily allows – a series of referenced URLs is easily assembled and made available for people to read through.

Tell me more about the album trailer.
Regarding the album conceptualisation, there’s an inherently cinematic element to it too, which partly motivates making the film that accompanies the live version now, extracts of which appear in the trailer. The filming was done earlier this year in many of the places where many of the field recordings were made between 1999-2010 .The film is just intended to just give context; it is also to create and elicit that first-person perspective.

So the suggested reading and viewing articles, of which I hope to add more over time, is part of this context. The whole project is aimed not at just articulating some points but also to create a visceral understanding about something which should be very important to all of us. All of these scenarios could have played out in Canada, USA, Australia, Africa, Norway, Japan – many places. The fact that it is potentially happening again in Western Australia and South Australia, with the threatened closure of nearly half the remote Indigenous communities, only makes this repetition of colonial history more regrettable.

“If scores of people read the articles and learnt something and didn’t hear the album, I would actually feel the album was a success.”

The whole package is not just intended to be an aesthetic experience through sound and/or an audiovisual presentation. I’m trying to articulate a geopolitical and sociohistorical framework for approaching this critical meeting point between our historical interaction with some of the oldest cultures in the world and the difficult future that we are collectively creating for them. I don’t want to just say in a press release “this album is about...”, which just by virtue of a statement makes the album about that thing. There are levels to the album and I’ve tried to make the intention evident in all of these levels. In terms of that intention and also the reading/viewing list, this album doesn’t exist in a void; there are others who have created similar imaginings and renderings of these themes before so the album could, I hope, form part of a teleology of critiques of settler colonialism particularly with regard to First Peoples, their sovereignty and their self-determination.

How would you sum up this album personally, and what do you hope to achieve with it?
I mentioned previously why I left the Northern Territory and Australia. In the years before that, I’d really learnt a lot working with indigenous people. Making people aware of the NT Intervention too, the first article on the list, also helps provide a starting point for where the contemporary situation is at now. I’ve had comments, particularly relating to the “Brutal Truth” article, that people didn’t realise quite the extent to which the forces of colonialism had acted in this context. If scores of people read the articles and learnt something and didn’t hear the album, I would actually feel the album was a success. But inversely, if many people heard the album and didn’t understand the context, or read the articles, or thought it was just about some white composer flexing some audio muscle (as being just something “loud” with some “grit” in the sound), then I’d feel that the album missed its mark.

Rather than the articles necessarily helping to better understand the album, it’s almost a reverse process – I feel the album might help to better understand the broader world which the articles themselves delineate and provide a point around which all these points can hopefully be articulated.

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‘They tore the earth and, like a scar, it swallowed them’ and ‘SIRÈNE’ are out now through Recorded Fields Editions.