Robert Curgenven

Silent Landscapes, the first volume in Recorded Fields’ “Field Recording Series”, reveals four crisp, meticulously layered vignettes composed from field recordings made throughout Australia. Somewhere between beauty and brutality, the restrained fury of this landscape becomes quietly perceptible upon the threshold of silence; creating an intense exploration of uncharted territories at the edge of human experience. This country, given voice through one of the world‘s oldest living cultures, can unexpectedly raise its whisper to a storm of sound for those with patience enough to wait and listen.

Composed from unprocessed recordings made between 1999 and 2008 in places that include some of the world’s oldest - the 2.5 billion year-old rock-shelves of the Tanami Desert in north Western Australia, Litchfield National Park and Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory; volcanic fields by the imposing Mount Warning (Wollumbin) in northern New South Wales; the desolate open plains between the Channel country and Barkly Tableland in Central Queensland; along Indigenous songlines that cross and connect the ancient continent – from Muggadah (Echo Point) in the Blue Mountains near Katoomba to Coober Pedy in South Australia - these recordings combine to present a compelling insight into the experience of space, place and time across a country that can offer much but often says little