An evening dedicated to lower case, immersive sound environments and sonic sculpture, with Steve Roden and special guests Robert Curgenven and FOURM.
Exploring ideas initially conceived of during a residency at Chinati (the Donald Judd museum at Marfa, TX), Steve Roden will perform improvised responses to soundscapes from various sites and architectural spaces. Taking his initiative from architectural inspiration, recently shot HD video footage, and his immense library of sound – recordings gleaned over an 18 year period – Steve will improvise with acoustic and electronic equipment: analogue guitar pedals and electronics; field recordings – both digital and analogue, some visual, others solely audio; found objects – stones, wires, leaves, bowls, etc.; instruments – melodica, whistles, bells, etc.; and other sound-making objects, such as vinyl records, and children’s toys.
Examining shifting layers in the fabric of fields of perception. Robert Curgenven creates vast sonic landscapes from carefully detailed recordings through to immersive resonances by way of his deft manipulation of sound pressure. Robert employs only analogue means, in a variety of contexts from pure field recordings to feedback and instrumental harmonics to shape relations through sound. As with many of his performances, expect his work to interweave the unfolding of complex beauty with the quiet brutality of nature. Specifically, Robert will be working with brand new dubplates, constructing a “system within a system” through a secondary set of speakers, heightened overtones within the room and accentuating the space, PA and diffusion.
FOURM is currently working on quiet and reduced material featuring microsamples of archive material gleaned from some 40 mini discs of his experiments from the last 5 years. FOURM will manipulate this material to perform decidedly lower case material. Highly reduced, clean sounds will be “framed” around sculpted, protracted silences.
STEVE RODEN
Steve Roden's working process uses various forms of specific notation (words, musical scores, maps, etc.) and translates them through self-invented systems into scores; which then influence the process of painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound composition. These scores, rigid in terms of their parameters and rules, are also full of holes for intuitive decisions and left turns. The inspirational source material becomes a kind of formal skeleton that the abstract finished works are built upon.
In the visual works, translations of information such as text and maps, become rules and systems for generating visual actions such as color choices, number of elements, and image building. In the sound works, singular source materials such as objects, architectural spaces, and field recordings, are abstracted through humble electronic processes to create new audio spaces, or 'possible landscapes'. The sound works present themselves with an aesthetic Roden describes as "Lower case'' - sound concerned with subtlety and the quiet activity of listening.
Robert Curgenven (1974) suffuses immense fields of constantly shifting sound with an elegant tactility and mesmerising detail. His compelling work spans immersive resonances created with turntables and custom-made vinyl, instrumental harmonics and guitar feedback to carefully detailed field recordings from remote areas in which he lived for many years.
Curgenven has performed throughout Australia and Europe, including Club Transmediale, Ultrahang Festival (Budapest), Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk), Radial System V (Berlin), Gallery for Contemporary Art (Leipzig), Feste dell Acqua (Vicenza), C/O Pop (Koln), Alice Springs Desert Festival and Darwin Festival. He has presented sound, audiovisual and sculptural work in group exhibitions including Transmediale (Berlin), and 10 Years of Microsound (Diapason Gallery, New York), as well as galleries throughout Australia, Italy, France, Poland, UK and Germany, including a 12-channel work made exclusively from field recordings in remote areas of Australia at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Torun (Poland).
Curgenven's 2010 album, “Oltre”, a documentation of two-months of live concerts across Europe in 2009, was announced by Boomkat as “The best LINE/12K release in ages”.
FOURM began in 2007 as an experimental offshoot of the highly successful Level project taking a more exploratory and investigative approach to sound outside of the established frameworks and boundaries of “composition”.
Si_COMM and Level artist, B.G. Nichols initiated FOURM primarily as a REMIX project. For him “The digital medium is infinitely fluid and malleable, and those of us that work in digital sound and image use this fluidity as an essential component of our work.”
FOURM attempts to re-site and reconfigure sound, taking it beyond the level of passive entertainment by creating structures and atmospheres that work in harmony with personal space, and within, and through architecture (dubbed .ARCHISONICS. by the artist), and has being developed to explore the digital medium, and, in collaboration with other artists, promote digital sound, image and design in a minimal format.
More recently, FOURM has been working on microsonic, and particulate structures, taking examples from a fusion of natural, architectural, and pure sculptural form. Rather than being interpreted as music, these auditory patterns and formations should be approached as temporal sculpture created with sound, at once fixed and recorded, yet emerging from a fluid and transitional digital medium.
Complimenting and supplementing FOURM’s practice, his WHITE_LINE Editions packages are currently being produced in highly limited editions, consisting of a 3_ CD, with accompanying artwork and texts. These packages are set to develop into a hybrid form, something between a CD and an art multiple, with hand-made works in limited editions, all with FOURM’s minimalist aesthetic.
