Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

Robert Curgenven with AnA Wojak
Recorded Fields  |  RF004  |  2008
2008 edition: CDr housed in folded card & plastic sleeve

Digital available from Bandcamp

CD version of two channel sound installation presented with triLamina, an indoor environmental installation in the Royal Botanical Gardens in January 2008. Stunningly realised full spectrum recordings from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, collected between 9-31 December 2007, capturing the many uses and ecologies of the Gardens through the Sydney Summer. This botanic conservatory is unusually bounded by contrasting environs: the maritime border of Sydney Harbour; the Domain, grounds for many summer festivals; and adjacent to the iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge. This urban/maritime edge brings strange sonic bedfellows into juxtaposition - the booming drone of the Cahill Expressway and its daily traffic of 100,000 cars; ocean liners, ferries, speed boats; ponds, creeks, waterfalls nestled amongst temperate forests and their myriad wildlife - ibises, cockatoos, cicadas, colonies of thousands of fruit bats in their nightly migration, and tourists… The four pieces move from nocturnal murmurings to the still of the metropolitan night, detailed explorations in the shifts in the Gardens to the busy days culminating in Sydney Harbour’s New Year’s Eve fireworks.

Produced in conjunction with the Royal Botanic Garden’s 2007 artist-in-residency, AnA Wojak, her elegiac cover art depicts life, death, renewal: the change in the interstice between the intervention of the conservatoire, maritime and nature.

Tracklisting:
1. Maritime: Enter the Night (9:27)
2. The Teeming Hordes of Summer (13:44)
3. Aprés Midi (3:16)
4. Out of the Night (12:19)