Conor J Curran

Conor J Curran
Also known as CjC
Born 1977
Cork, Ireland
Origin Dungarvan, Waterford
Genres Glitch
Microsound
Ambient music
Drone
Years active 1998 - Present
Labels Forwind
Psychonavigation
Silverdoor
Website

Conor J Curran is an electronic musician and sound artist based in London. He studied at Trinity College Dublin under electroacoustic composers Donnacha Dennehy and Roger Doyle and has been involved in many different music projects such as Sonnamble and his solo project CjC.

Background

His work both music and audio/visual software has been used in modern dance by Dance Theatre of Ireland (Evidence 2001) and in Film by Conor McCourt (Four Cops 1999). Conor's Parallel, a music visualisation application, was featured at London’s Cybersonica 2002, on Rhizome.org, Neural.it and at the Digital Hub in Dublin from January to March 2003.[1]

CjC has released material on Psychonavigation Records, Silverdoor and Forwind. Even though completed in 2003, Form was not released until 2008 on Forwind. It encompasses electronic instrumentals from melodic to abstract. Spatial geometric concepts act as the origins of the timbre and expression. Form was to a large extent influenced by the Parallel software Conor was writing at the time. Track titles, album artwork and the aural visual language all adhere strictly to the spatial concept of Form.

In 2008 Sonnamble was established by Conor and Peter Marsh to explore the possibilities of real-time improvisation between acoustics instruments and extensive digital processing. In March 2010 Sonnamble released their debut long player on the Forwind label. The album offers "contemplative meshing of computer software and digital processing with real-time guitar and bass playing".[2] Described on the themilkfactory.co.uk as "a record which unveils its profound beauty with great care, and requires a level of commitment to fully appreciate its depth".[3]

Sonnamble's second album 'Blindlight' was released in 2011 on Forwind. "Again the focus is on Marsh's lap steel guitar, whose drones, chords and twangs are coaxed into expansive ambient fuzziness or atomised into grains of noise by Curran's home-cooked software patches. But there's a spareness and a more pronounced spikiness to the music this time round; it's still immersive stuff, but more edgy...".[4] Referring to a favourable review by Wyndham Wallace for the BBC - " Much of Sonnamble’s work is improvised, but there’s an art to what they do: Curran’s homemade software seems able to reduce every note down to its even smaller constituent parts and then sieve out what suits their goal. The sound is therefore strangely granular, with the opening notes of Aphelion I spreading out and blurring at the edges until they distort and flutter into tiny sounds of their own. It’s like moving one’s face ever closer to a TV screen, with the picture slowly reduced from an overall pattern to a mass of pixels. What is experienced isn’t identifiable in any standard sense, but is nonetheless fascinating."[5]

Discography

Sonnamble

Albums

CjC

Albums

EPs

Compilations

Appendix

  1. ↑ http://www.thedigitalhubexhibit.com/events-archive/exhibit/exhibit1
  2. ↑ thesoundprojector.com album reviews April 2010
  3. ↑ themilkfactory.co.uk album reviews June 2010
  4. ↑ Blindlight's release page at Forwind
  5. ↑ BBC music review October 2011

External links

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