Working with harmonics and textures as articulated not only through instruments/objects, in space and place, but also in time and the dislocation of the remote, Robert Curgenven’s sound explores shifting layers in the fabric of fields of perception, creating vast landscapes from carefully detailed recordings through to immersive resonances via deft manipulations of sound pressure. Employing only analogue means, in a variety of contexts from pure field recordings to feedback and instrumental harmonics to shape relations through sound, his work interweaves the unfolding of complex beauty and the quiet brutality of nature in all of its forms, described by one audience member as "like a punch in the face while elsewhere flowers bloomed."
From 1999 he lived in Australia's Northern Territory, where for much of the ensuing nine years he worked in small towns and remote locations in health, radio and the arts. He relocated to Europe at the beginning of 2008.
Since returning to performing live in 2004 he has played at over 150 events throughout Australia and Europe, including Club Transmediale (Berlin), Feste dell Acqua (Vicenza), Mikro_Makro Festival (Slupsk), Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk), Radial System V (Berlin), Gallery for Contemporary Art (Leipzig), C/O Pop (Koln), Alice Springs Desert Festival, Darwin Festival, Electrofringe (Newcastle), Tura New Music Festival (Perth). He has collaborated with many Australian and international artists including Jörg Maria Zeger (guitar), Katrin Bethge (overhead projections), Andrea Belfi (Hapna), Attila Faravelli (Die Schachtel), z’ev (Ideal), Jason Kahn (Sirr), Sumugan Sivanesan (Cronica), Derek Holzer, Jonathan McHugh, KK Null (Touch) and leading Indigenous Australian artists. He has also exhibited group and solo work in Germany, Italy, Poland, France, United Kingdom, United States and Australia.
“Curgenven makes the point that sounds are fundamental to our perception of the world and significant to notions of the familiar and our sensing of otherness. … The complex micro and meso-structure of these field recordings … included familiar sounds … as well as more all-encompassing sound events evoking specific places.… Our ability to completely hear the complexities of a place and time is intersected by memories of the familiar which are in turn displaced and transformed.”
– Realtime (AUS), “surrealestate” concert review, 2007
“…a gentle audio suspension of time. This is the kind of subtlety that really works, becoming an almost total transference of realities.”
– Furthernoise (UK), 2006
“Ce matériau de base lui permet d'organiser des paysages imaginaires au-delà de l'idée de reportage ou de réalité. Poésie du sonore et de l'environnement naturel. Réussi et recommandé”
– "Silent Landscapes", Metamkine distribution, 2008
