Robert Curgenven’s "AGENESIS" feels like a fractured mosaic, an album that doesn’t simply confront sound but interrogates space, absence, and memory. Curgenven, a sonic explorer whose career spans from elegiac pipe organ drones to stark field recordings and bass-driven electronics, ventures into disorientation with "AGENESIS" through a meticulously curated array of sounds and influences. Curgenven’s early infatuation with grindcore and dense, orchestral tones emerges here, punctuating his ambient minimalism with the punch of bass-heavy electronics that reshape our auditory space with seismic sub-bass waves.

The album’s composition feels akin to an abstract painting - one where each track’s title is stripped down to single letters, echoing the album’s very title, "AGENESIS", suggesting an absence or a gradual coming-into-being. Tracks like “_GENESIS” and “A_ENESIS” serve as sonic sketches, evolving gradually with rattling sub-bass that reflects his years spent performing live with his partner Kat McDowall, using sound to control light in immersive, nearly synesthetic experiences.

Robert taps into his roots with influences from grindcore to orchestral compositions, which he transforms here into a meditative yet intense journey through both presence and absence. This release draws together field recordings and compositions from various locations, including the intense drone of pipe organs at St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork and the Abbey at Kylemore in Connemara, Ireland. These dense tones are interwoven with field recordings from places as disparate as the remote Katherine region in the Northern Territory of Australia and the bustling electronics hub of Akihabara in Tokyo, Japan.

Curgenven further embeds bass notes from the early tracks into a spatial re-recording through a Funktion One system at the Pastwowa Galeria Sztuki in Sopot, Poland. This unconventional step transforms the listening experience into a physical event, one that feels as if it’s pushing against the very walls, grounding "AGENESIS" in a kind of sonic geography that juxtaposes vast, haunting quiet with intense bass. Curgenven’s use of aging acetate recordings and an array of dubplates shapes "AGENESIS" as a sonic palimpsest - a layered architecture of sound that, in both concept and execution, invites listeners into its fragmented, incomplete whole.