6channel spatial audio + subwoofer - MUTO gallery, Budapest, Hungary
Part of UH Festival: 2-6 October 2019 - Commissioned by UH Fest & MUTO

Details at https://www.recordedfields.net/installations/spectres/
In-situ recordings made across 8 sites in Poland & 1 in Hungary between 19-29 September 2019. 

"upon a threshold, where bodies corporate stand, Spectres’ vapours stood"

Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft…

Recordings in each location made with 2 oscillators, Bose portable speaker, 2 Rode condenser microphones, recorded direct to harddisk - made through an open window which frames the location and its context, the oscillators set the air in motion between inside & outside the location whilst creating an audible phasing anomaly in the room & distinctly within the recording. The combination of these anomalies across the recordings and locations is a key aspect of the installation and the experience of visitors to the gallery.

Presenting a conceptual and concrete undertaking which encompasses the vicissitudes of an epochal concept, from its declaration-as-theory to its Becoming as a “post-“, where the concept proposed is now only a period that follows what once was. The architectural framing of post-Communist eastern-European realities, to create a threshold where the parentheses of two epochs book-end a present, is enacted through a recording process which draws the surrounding air and present manifestation of contemporary society into the buildings – the very monuments of those that stood and are standing, the dwellings and inhabitations of the corporatised bodies – of a period now past. Each location surveyed through this process becomes a layer, emergent from their layering in this exhibition piece is the schism arising in ‘post-Concept’ from ‘Concept’ - an audible movement - an inhabitable zone framing the context of a living, breathing, contemporary society.
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The recordings forming the installation were undertaken in a range of architectural environments in urban, metropolitan and rural areas across a range of 'Eastern European' regions – these were done adjunct to touring and performing a series of concerts with two collaborative works from 19-29 September 2019. All that was required was an open window and the provision of the architecture itself as a platform. No special changes, requests or modifications of the behaviours of occupants or nearby inhabitants were made.

The piece is working on a similar technique to a previous project recording in 15 of James Turrell's Skyspaces - the Climata project had an emphasis on using the architecture of the Skyspace itself to frame but the contextless sky but instead the acoustic aspect of the location and context of the Skyspace itself. Climata was realized as an installation version, double album & a sound atlas.

This project aims to extend those techniques and, unilke the Skyspace recording project - in the opposite aspect to the relative hegemony of Skyspace architectonics - for this new piece the broader diversity to the architectural and locational contexts resulted in a greater the range of textures that combine to form the piece. The recordings were be used to make a multichannel audio piece which will be shown at MUTO gallery in Budapest during UH Fest and be installed to work with the gallery acoustics.

Recordings in each location with 2 oscillators, Bose portable speaker, 2 Rode condenser microphones, recorded direct to harddisk - made through an open window which frames the location and its context, the oscillators set the air in motion between inside & outside the location whilst creating an audible phasing anomaly in the room & distinctly within the recording. The combination of these anomalies across the recordings and locations is a key aspect of the installation and the experience of visitors to the gallery.

SPECTRES

Robert Curgenven's work emphasizes physicality, our embodied response to sound & its relation to location, air, weather & architecture; He has produced works for National Gallery of Australia, Palazzo Grassi Venice, Sydney Festival, Maerzmusik & Transmediale Berlin. The Wire (UK) surmises “behind the music lurk such [disparate] presences as Alvin Lucier, King Tubby, Murray Schafer and Eliane Radigue.”

The universe speaks in echoes of silence.
Between the notes, stars whisper secrets.
In the quiet spaces, time reveals its truth.
Listen, and you will know.
△
Obey the signs.
In the dark, a neon glow marks the way.
⍜

mise_en_scene on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Mise_En_Scene/159859704040506

formulaic conformity and convention the sworn enemy of creation

experimental abstract electronica
modular live sessions

SPECTRES

Recorded_Fields