St Cyrus & Juliette

Anyone who's heard his immense Live at the Exchange, Cornwall - one of the highlights of the Touch Radio series (#93, trainspotters...) - needs no persuading about Robert Curgenven's powers at the pipe organ. 

Even so, it's hard to keep the jaw undropped at the flaunting of those powers on the recent SIRENE (on his own Recorded Fields). Curgenven, a Cornish re-immigrant from Australia with organ scholarship seemingly on his complex CV too, welds his field recording & duplate sonics on to gripping workouts at this improbable, highly site-specific instrument ("16-foot pipe organs recorded in Cornwall at the churches of St Paul (Ludgvan), St Winnow (Towednack), St Uny (Lelant), St Wyllow (Lanteglos), St Cyrus & Juliette (St Veep). Unprocessed pipe organ recordings, equalisation only"). 

The result is as tempestuous as its rich back story (The Tempest & late Turner) & sea-pounded Cornish setting implies. Curgenven as a new Prospero? Certainly there are spell-binding moments here, both ones of gathering, swelling force & others of beautiful becalmed resolution after the storm...


Robert Curgenven - Ressuscitant de l'étreinte de la Sirène from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.


The first part of SIRENE (Ressuscitant de l'étreinte de la Sirène) is reworked from a section of a second new self-release. They tore the earth and, like a scar, it swallowed them comes with a very different back story: it "traverses the historical dynamics of the settler colonial trope through the eyes not of the invaded but of the invaders to a harsh, remote land...a very physical negotiation of territories voided by history".

Finally, a recommended live date: Curgenven heads the Ologies' latest Winchester weigh-in, Dendrology, on November 1. 

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.  

Line In

2013 transmissions from Basinski + Chartier, AGF, and Simon Whetham notwithstanding, still being received here are four Line Ins from 2012. Lest its late-period labours at the interface between digital minimalism and microsound go unsung, here’s an ear-pique at a spread of chewy offerings from this once Difficult Twin of LMYE label of 2012, 12k (now, of course, non-aligned, under sole stewardship of Richard Chartier) that further cement its place in the vanguard of experimental electronics.

 















 







Built Through finds Line manager Chartier once more ‘exploring inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself’ with trademark microsonic prowess. He ideates an engrossing enquiry into acoustic architecture with more feet-in-the-soil sonician, Robert Curgenven, dealer in immersive resonances via turntables and custom-made vinyl, instrumental harmonics and guitar feedback, and field recordings from remote areas. Built Through’s four pieces find Chartier’s ideology of relationism between sound, silence, focus and the listening act fully realized with Curgenven’s collusion,variously fusing digital and organic. All very academic and process music pukka, to be sure, but does it butter the listening product parsnips? As if in reply, the kat booms: ‘Their sounds are of an incredibly fine calibre and arranged with such a sense of unfolding, albeit abstract, narrative, that we’re sucked in to near-extreme levels of concentration to focus on the slightest fluctuation, and sent reeling by the presence of such overpoweringly physical bass frequencies.’



























Previously on Line, there was Curgenven’s Oltre on which ‘his orchestrations of slight textural shifts, the interplay between hum and drone, found sounds and vinyl crackle effect a satisfyingly uneasy suspension between rapt contemplative and grim angst-ridden.’





The Subharchord, a rare electronic instrument built in a limited edition during the 1960s at the RFZ, the technical centre for radio and TV of the East German postal service, is the obscure object of Frank Bretschneider’s desire on Kippschwingungen. His aim, in line with contemporary electronic music’s current fixation with its pioneering history, is to harness the technology of Then to the music and production methods of Now. It pares things back to basics - one sonic generator and a reduced range of functions. The album deals largely in droning pitches and ring modulator-type sustains, interspersed between rhythm-driven pieces. A sound, in fact, not entirely unfamiliar from a recent release…



… though Kippschwingungen (= ‘tilting oscillations’) ends up quite differently configured from Bretschneider’s recent signature style, whether the tech-gnosis of Komet or the bass-space-funk of Rhythm. A Mancy enthusiast finds it: ‘A long alluringly austere continuum of sound unfolding into astringent spaces - eerie alien plateaus of tone give way to insectile sounds evoking all kinds of minimal rhythm explorations’ and ‘A wormholing 37-minute experience, deftly and intently exploring the machine’s limitations to discover mind-warping cosmic turbulence and penetrate extraordinary, otherworldly sonic dimensions whilst somehow sustaining a tangible narrative arc.’




















 






Those who thrilled to LMYE 2011 pick, The Peregrine, will find in Lawrence English’s For / Not For John Cage a less effusive but no less engrossing work. Cage’s centenary inspired what was conceived as homage to a man who has been a constant touchstone for English; he sought something that offered an openness, that might invite a new perspective of exploration of Cage’s ideas, alighting upon a less celebrated piece - the film for solo light performer, One11.



With video artist Scott Morrison they developed a new piece, One11 (refocused), devised from diverse esoteric Cageisms. The audio outcomes are immediately compelling - soft-edged slightly eerie whorls in slow-mo whirls, shapes with form dissolving, colours collapsing, ravaged by radical reverb - indeterminacy drawing tones from consonance to dissonance and back again, in its shape-shifting blurscapes. ‘It is almost as if themes of music and texture have been extracted from various sections of this original work and gone on to become or inform a much more cosmic and arguably contemporary counterpart,’ projects Fluid Radio, before pertinently observing ‘there is no real extreme positive or negative effect to any of the tracks, the otherworldliness is instead at the forefront and thrusts the listener into a strange, exotic mental space where such psychological concerns are skewed and thrown into a rather more mysterious abstract.’



























Returning to source, Chartier’s Recurrence is a re-imagining of inaugural Line release, Series, which, after its coming out in 2001, apparently remained unperformed, even “unperformable” due to noise and audio system limitations of live environments. More recently a revisiting was finally essayed - to impressive effect, as heard on “Recurrence (room/crosstones),” an exploration of wavering sinetones captured from (one assumes) room reverberations; essentially a slow-mutating tonal throb, it has echoes of his Transparency (Performance), though a more assertive than customary demeanour yields an unusual hybrid reference point: ‘the kind of low-end destruction you’d more likely expect to hear from doom pioneers, Sunn o))), but with the meditative edge of Steve Roach.’ 



‘If Transparency was a spotless white laboratory room, Recurrence is a swamp of thick vibration, deliberately swirling crumples of static in with the whines and beeps of the foreground’ is this writer’s analogy, further extended to ‘throbbing gently like a power generator or chirping like electronic crickets, or stuttering between tone and static like a radio transmission falling away from clear signal.’





Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Syrupy dream

Talking of Line, as we were, ahead of Richard Chartier's revived William Basinski collaboration comes a showdown with Robert Curgenven. Built Through feels like a further instalment of the earlier Oltre's austere, challenging beauty, but though also on Line that was solo Curgenven (with a little help from Joerg Maria Zeger, his partner in TSU). 


In contrast, all but one of BT's four pieces of industrial hum & whisp are based on previous Chartier work between 2000 & 2005 - then duly processed (through a 16-foot pipe organ in invariance strata's case & "a matrix of pieces for nine turntables, linear dubplates and ventilator" in acquisition eviction's...). Only displacement takes Curgenven material (Australian field recordings) as its point of departure - on through "an improvisation for binaural microphones, wine glasses, two turntables and linear series dubplate". 


Blurb: " The acoustic architecture of Robert Curgenven and Richard Chartier forms a delineation of space built through dismantling the constitution of internal and external. Beyond dividing space, creating a façade or habitable zone, the perceptibility of the surface is turned back in on itself and with it a shift in the ideological and social context of the space. A seamless integration of digital and analogue, a suffusion which creates a mutual modulation, transforming purpose chosen materials—dense, undulating foundations through to stratified filaments and needle-point framework—defining the approach, the entry, the walk-through, the departure." So there... 


Both collaborators have valuable solo offerings out too. Honorary Cornishman Curgenven splits a Winds Measure 12" with Will Montgomery. His share is the richly crackling "impossible topology" of Looking for Narratives on Small Islands  - an extract of which loomed out of futuresequence's first mega-compilation last summer. 


Meanwhile, at the opposite end of his admirably broad spectrum Chartier's pinkcourtesyphone alter ego ("the sonic essence of some nicely dressed 1960s housewife wistfully peering out her window while reclining on some lovely couch or divan, with, of course, a slowly sipped cocktail and perhaps half of a Valium") surfaces with a playful, deviantly post-pop debut "formed from places, plastics, and particulars during 1997, 2004, and 2011". 


Foley Folly Folio is also a debut for the sub-label Line Segments. This "will highlight some, perhaps, very non-LINE-like works. Works that stray from the norm... more maximal, maybe... louder, maybe... noisier maybe... beat-oriented, maybe. So many possibilities... a chance to showcase some things LINE loves."


Other voices populate the indisputably more maximal (though none too beat-oriented) FFF, particularly wishful wistful wanton's woman-child. Chartier's tongue features too - wedged firmly in his mouth, terming the release "lugubrious" & himself "considered by some to be quite fancy" & characterising the possibly punning pcp as "dark but not arch, with a slight hint of humor".  

robert curgenven + richard chartier - built through (album preview)


Robert Curgenven + Richard Chartier - acquisition eviction (extract)




Pinkcourtesyphone - wistful wishful wanton


pinkcourtesyphone - foley folly folio (album preview)

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.