Bronze Lands (Tailte Cré-Umha) Live at Sydney Festival 2020

Robert Curgenven
Bronze Lands (Tailte Cré-Umha) Live at Sydney Festival 2020
CD + digital download
Part of Beyond Enclosures t3CD set in hand-folded cover
Recorded Fields Editions  |  RFE08
Release: 17 September 2021
1 track with 6 index points
50mins

Follows Tailte Cré-Umha – live at Cork Midsummer FestivalRFE04

Full live concert recording of the Australian premiere of Bronze Lands (Tailte Cré-Umha) for Sydney Festival on the 64ft Sydney Town Hall grand pipe organ with in-house soundsystem featuring twelve 18" subwoofers.

Performed before a live audience at the sold-out Sydney Festival event, 300 people lying down and 300 more seated upstairs, in the 80metre long Centennial Hall before the 64ft grand pipe organ (20metres high by 30metres wide).

Bronze Lands (Tailte Cré-Umha) is a solo performance for live pipe organ and soundsystem, the accompanying soundsystem part using recordings a range of turn-of-the-century unmodernised pipe organs across County Cork and rural Cornwall.

The piece combines live pipe organ with a soundsystem which allows audiences to hear two pipe organs together - each in different tunings - effectively a piece for 4 hands (and feet), sounding together to create a physical and architectural experience. The live part on the venue’s pipe organ in standard tuning works with and against the part heard through the soundsystem. The soundystem part comprises tracker-action pipe organ recordings made in Cornwall and Ireland. These unmodernised pipe organs allow precise control over wind to the pipes - effectively creating custom-tunings. Curgenven's composition extends standard practice, combining these two tuning systems, rigorously working across their enharmonic beating frequencies to find a momentuous solution.The recording is 100% acoustic, all sound is entirely made by these pipe organs, with the exception of an 80-year-old 78rpm acetate which forms part of the piece's narrative structure. 

Mastered by Antti Sakari Saario, Cornwall, 27-30 June 2021
Registrations - Stop development & STH performance: Grace Chan (Organist Registrant)
Pipe organ performance & composition: Robert Curgenven
Mixed at Gorumna Island, Connemara, Ireland (August 2020-June 2021)
Thanks to: Sydney Festival & Sydney Town Hall teams, Kat Anastasiou-Bell, Nathan Da Cunha, Kat McDowall, City of Sydney
Cover photo: Erin Keys

The basis for the piece's score and structure draws on Ireland’s relations with Cornwall and Mediterranean Europe. 5000 years ago, coming into the Bronze Age, Ireland’s copper and Cornwall’s tin traversed the continent to make bronze. Tailte Cré-Umha derives the shape and movement of the score from the shape and movements of that route. This route traverses mostly marine, coastal and river systems, covering 4000kms over the piece’s 50minute duration. Tailte Cré-Umha uses this navigation of the landscape itself as the score as those people and materials travel land, sea, sky and Europe at a time of change.


REVIEWS:
"The scale and scope of Ireland-based artist Robert Curgenven’s latest work is almost too massive to comprehend. Altogether, Beyond Enclosures fulfills the promise of its title, as Curgenven pushes his music outside physical limits into the transcendental." - Marc Masters, Bandcamp Daily, Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp for October 2021

"decisively orientating the receptive apparatus towards a mesmerized condition... while keeping our alert level sufficiently high...  However, the significance of the whole lies in the insidious resonances initiated by overtones of different types and intensity. This writer was left in a state of marvelous vacillation: eager to continue the learning process, delighted to have been glimpsed by the inexplicable wonder caused by unintended patterns of engagement." - Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes (IT)

"Writing about Curgenven's music is a backbreaking endeavour. How, after all, can one render the anxiety associated with the distinct sensation of sound waves approaching the ear? Or the cognitive dissonance of the “Bardo” listener, arising from a perspective disrupted by the composer, resulting in the unusual leveling of certain sounds?" - Filip Lech, Ruch Muzyczny (PL)

"encapsulates so much [of what] I already love about Robert’s work.. the palability of air flow - how harmonics illuminate how air is pulsing, bristling" - Jack Chuter, ATTN Magazine's Crucial Listening podcast (UK)

"an ambitious three-disc set for pipe organ, piano and turntables, exploring the natures of music and air.  The third disc holds a live concert from the Sydney Festival.. it has an experimental approach and takes the form of modern composition, yet has the tone of drone...  The outside sounds lend the project a solemn authenticity." - A Closer Listen (USA)

"Curgenven serves up three releases all connected to 'air'... In each case the context very much brings an added dimension to the act of listening" - Jeremy Allen, Electronic Sound magazine (UK)

"Superb... three sublime studies in shifting air in built space via organ, soundsystems and turntables." - Seth Cooke, Every Contact Leaves a Trace (UK)

Best of 2021 - "captivating new solo album...Curgenven - highly regarded for his majestic, coruscating pipe organ through to feedback, immersive resonances via turntables and custom-made vinyl, as well as carefully detailed field recordings, experimental turntable techniques inter-woven with piano and extended pipe organ techniques with an enveloping, often ecstatic and mystic effect recalling resonances and sound intended as a physical field of perception." - SoundOhm (IT)

"this is a sound record of an incredible realm that easily transcends the boundaries of installation or sound art. An important publication product for 2021." Art-Into-Life (JPN)