For all the prevailing visceral, startling and bleak tenor, there are passages where crumbling timbres recede into shimmering suspension—a kind of calm, a glimpse perhaps of signposts towards how a seemingly inevitable fate might yet be reversed.
They tore the earth and, like a scar, it swallowed them, Robert Curgenven‘s second album in a few months, following companion, Sirène, to which it yielded a track for remix, is a distinctly visceral listening experience. Known for ‘…drawing on the physicality of sound—not just the physical impact on the body but the way in which the auditory can shape our perception of space and the flow of time, from architectural to open space’ (bio page), for Curgenven ‘…sounds are fundamental to our perception of the world… hearing the complexities of a place and time is intersected by memories of the familiar which are in turn displaced and transformed.’ (Realtime Magazine). From beginnings over 30 years ago as a classically-trained organist, the last decade has seen him release on labels like The Tapeworm, Winds Measure and Line, as well as his own Recorded Fields.
The question of Who tore the earth and was swallowed by it is addressed extensively by the Cornwall-resident Australian, who documents how the privileged and powerful—18th century white colonial types, land-grabbing mega-corporations more recently—have gone about establishing dominance over the world and those of its inhabitants less able or willing to do so, as well as pointing to the return of chickens to roost messily over the perpetrators. The socio-political themes are, naturally, abstracted through the music, but are made explicit via a detailed list (see release page) of references to salient geo-political, colonialist, and imperialist topics illuminating the recording’s sub-text. It targets the colonialists who ravaged the Australian landscape with scant regard for its indigenous people. The album traverses the historical trajectory of this colonial settler trope through the eyes not of the invaded but the invaders of a harsh remote land—no land of milk and honey, but a harsh unforgiving landscape. Curgenven’s ‘Suggested Reading’ goes beyond the local to reflections on colonialism and racism as global issues. An interview with Achille Mbembe, for example, illuminates how colonial attitudes, supposedly driven by humanism and universalism, became vehicles for violence, war and ecological disaster, with Mbembe positing ‘post-colonial theory’ as a way forward. ‘Suggested Viewing’ interestingly includes Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, wherein two rich English children abandoned in the Australian desert are rescued by an Aboriginal youth who comes across them while on a rite of passage involving spending months isolated in the desert. And much of the source material that fed into the album was captured over a ten-year period—field recordings amassed by Curgenven on his own extended and episodic walkabout from remote parts of his homeland; the sounds of buzzing flies, gusts of wind and bird calls became integral, commingling with manipulated pipe organ drones, guitar feedback, dubplates, turntables and LFOs. In keeping with its grim theme, They Tore The Earth… is a tense, often harrowing, work that begins with a thunderstorm before developing through a series of choreographed rustles, scrapes, and drones. The pieces evolve, teeming with details vividly depicting a landscape at once familiar and alien, Curgenven unearthing signifiers of an unsettling archaeology of settled space.
In sum, with its caustic rattle and thrum and sudden irruptions, They tore the earth and, like a scar, it swallowed them bespeaks a congruent subtly doom-laden menace—abrupt and abrasive sounds representing what They may have encountered. Yet for all the prevailing visceral, startling and bleak tenor, there are passages where crumbling timbres recede into shimmering suspension—a kind of calm, a glimpse perhaps of signposts towards how a seemingly inevitable fate might yet be reversed.
They Tore The Earth And, Like A Scar, It Swallowed Them is available on Recorded Fields.
