SPECTRES live concert features live lighting driven by the sound.
Lighting by Kat McDowall. Sound by Robert Curgenven

SPECTRES is composed entirely of in-situ recordings with tone generators in 9 post-Communist architectures, it presents an interrogation of contemporary society across the threshold of the architecture from a former, but recent, epoch. A statement at that epoch’s inception, “alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft”, is often poetically translated as “all that is solid melts into air”, but literally is “all that is Standing and has Stood [will] vapourise”. These ‘Standing entities’ incorporate institutions (‘Bodies’) and corporations - in physical terms: the architectures and the utopian sociocultural visions these architectures framed.

SPECTRES uses the air itself to interrogate a series of post-Communist architectural locations across Poland via a simple intervention/modulation: drawing the surrounding air and current manifestation of contemporary political and geographical economies into the buildings, their volumes: the very monuments of those that Stood and are Standing, the dwellings and inhabitations of the corporatised Bodies. SPECTRES’ 10day recording in 2019 traversed cultural centres, social housing projects through to northern and southern centres of the Polish Solidarity movement at its 30year anniversary, their architectures present a threshold, framing each location and context.

SPECTRES is one of three albums from 2021’s triple album release Beyond Enclosures by Robert Curgenven