"Threshold Works" engage directly with specific architectures and their locations via a concise and transparent sonic process, bringing architectural volumes of air into motion across thresholds which open onto adjacent volumes or outside spaces. The resulting out-of-phase sound creates a 3D effect which 'appears' to surround listeners.

"Threshold Works" can be presented as a multichannel installation, audio performance or light/sound performance. In all cases the highly spatial and immersive effect of the audio creates an omnipresent effect to the sound - the sound 'appears' to come from everywhere. The quality of the sound is subtle yet very physical and plays with the listeners' experience of orientation in the space, sweetspots of complete separation from the surrounding acoustics. For the light/sound performance the use of custom-made DMX software translates the phase-anomalies embedded within this process into changing lights which, alongside the manipulation of colours, leads to a depth-perception collapse. Presenting an installation or performance in the architecture in which the Threshold Work was recorded is especially effective, as the original process behind the recording of the work is doubled, treating the audience to a second application of this process again within the architecture leading to a heightened immersive effect.

REVIEWS
Climata
"Robert Curgenven uses sound to transmit something about the space in which sound occurs. He has a natural affinity with James Turrell, who uses light to transmit something about the space in which light occurs... In each piece on  “Climata”, recorded in Skyspaces across different countries, you hear mellow, subtly shifting oscillator hums... sure enough, your brain starts to conjure the space as you listen.." - Ben Ratliff, New York Times (USA)

"Curgenven plays with the sound of the flow of air within the Skyspace, so that it is abstracted and the source of sound is unspecified, but omnipresent. " - Sydney Morning Herald (AUS)

"an extraordinary piece... artfully weaves the elements into a multipart composition... [that] explores the role of sound art as a psychological reflection and also as a social commentary" - Bernard Clarke, RTE (Ireland)

"the sonic byproducts of sound installations can sometimes prove crushingly prosaic. It's a truism comprehensively overturned by Robert Curgenven's Climata." - The Wire Magazine (UK)

"Using just two oscillators and a portable speaker he turns each Skyspace into a single pipe of a pipe organ, freely modulated by the weather moving the column of air through its opening; the sonic equivalent of throwing dust into a room to reveal invisible presences" - the Quietus (UK)

"achieves an almost perfect symbiosis between space and sound ... creating new spaces for new ways of listening." - Dusted Magazine (USA/UK)
 

SPECTRES
"The scale and scope ... is almost too massive to comprehend... Curgenven pushes his music outside physical limits into the transcendental." - Marc Masters, Bandcamp Daily, Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp for October 2021

"encapsulates so much [of what] I already love about Curgenven’s work.. the palability of air flow - how harmonics illuminate how air is pulsing, bristling" - Jack Chuter, ATTN Magazine's Crucial Listening podcast (UK)

"the context very much brings an added dimension to the act of listening" - Jeremy Allen, Electronic Sound magazine (UK)

"Superb...sublime studies in shifting air in built space" - Seth Cooke, Every Contact Leaves a Trace (UK)

"an enveloping, often ecstatic and mystic effect recalling resonances and sound intended as a physical field of perception." - SoundOhm (IT)

TECHNICAL
To create "Threshold Works" a series of thematically-related architectures are chosen or a significant single architecture with a range of internal open-form volumes - with a particular focus on apertures, doorways or open windows (thresholds). Recordings are made in-situ of a simple oscillating process which activates the Helmholtz resonance of the architectural volumes (see diagram) by using 2 custom-made sine-tone oscillators, speaker and 2 Rode condenser microphones  - through the particular threshold which acts to frame the location and its context. The audible sine-tone oscillators set the air in motion between adjacent volumes (e.g. inside & outside the location, adjacent rooms, ceiling aperture in skyspace etc), drawing in the outside sound 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. Three clear features in each recording is the sine-tone beating frequencies/oscillations, the sound drawn-in from the adjacent space/outside and the 'whooshing' of the phasing sound. Recordings are overlaid to create a microtonal multi-phase composition - effectively creating a composition one (quietly beating) note at a time - where each of these 3 elements interact with the other recordings made via the same process that forms the composition - a gestalt multi-part location.

- SPECTRES (2019/20) - comprises 6 installation works, composed entirely of in-situ recordings with tone generators made in a series of post-Communist architectures across Poland on the 30th anniversary of the Solidarity movement. SPECTRES was realized as an installation, album & live light/sound concert. See the digital booklet from the album which outlines the project here. Photos from the live light/sound concert from Katowice here

- Threshold Works No 17 (2022) – is a single 40minute multichannel work commissioned by the National Museum in Krakow (MNK) and permanent MNK collection acquisition. The work is presented as the entrance sound installation for MNK's permanent exhibition  ‘Sections: Gallery of Polish architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries’ ('Przekroje: Galeria Architektury Polskiej XX i XXI Wieku'). The installation was made using the resonances of the architecture of the bulidings of several branches of the MNK's buildings as a threshold, filter and frame for the city of Krakow, Watch an interview (in English and Polish) recorded at MNK's Hotel Cracovia branch about the project here.