Limenfeld

limen, lat. threshold — the point at which a stimulus becomes just perceptible, at which one state tips into another without the moment of transition ever being nameable.

In 1936, Edgard Varèse described a music built not from a line moving through time, but from mass moving through space — sound as volume, condensing and dissolving, forming zones of differing intensity that a listener could move through as through light and shadow in a forest. These zones, he imagined, would remain distinct rather than blend, felt as isolated as different colors on a map.

His contemporaries already heard this cosmic register in his music. Writing in 1925, the critic Massimo Zanotti Bianco described Varèse's sound in terms of “sound masses molded as though in space,” moving through what he called astral space. Varèse himself later spoke of sound projection as a sensation close to that of a searchlight beam sent outward with no hope of return — a feeling of departure into space rather than of an object being placed within a room.

For Varèse, sound was never simply material to be shaped by taste; it was a physical phenomenon, subject to forces. Working with the mineralogist Nathaniel Arbiter, he developed an analogy between musical form and crystallization: form is not a mold to be filled, but a resultant — the outcome of attraction and repulsion, of ordered packing at the smallest scale, from which structures of unlimited variety extend outward. What held for atoms held equally, in his thinking, for masses of sound moving through space.

That thought is where Limenfeld begins.

ORF musikprotokoll 2026 takes Supernova as its theme this year, searching for origin — for the connection between microcosm and macrocosm. Looking up at the stars, the festival's own words note, is a way of looking into a mirror: the elements that compose us and every living thing around us were forged either moments after the Big Bang or inside the nuclear furnaces of stars. What appears furthest from us turns out to be constitutive of us.

Limenfeld takes that mirror literally. A star, before it collapses, is itself organized in shells — concentric zones of differing density and composition, layered and distinct, until the moment they are no longer held apart: penetration, collision, transmutation, the release of everything the star had gathered inward. Varèse's zones of intensity describe almost the same structure, decades before astrophysics gave it a name.

The courtyard of the Volkskundemuseum is, to begin with, simply a place — a location with fixed walls and a fixed geometry. Following Michel de Certeau's distinction between a given site and the space that is only produced through movement and practice, Limenfeld treats that courtyard as raw ground: it becomes space only through the listening walk of each visitor, through a trajectory no one else will repeat.

There is no visible apparatus to guide that walk. No speakers, no screen, no map — only headphones, position, the orientation of the body, and hearing. Sound is rendered binaurally in real time, with head-tracking as a compositional parameter: turning one's head changes what is heard as directly as taking a step does. Sharma calls this practice sonic worldmaking — building acoustic architectures that answer to no physical constraint: zones exist only acoustically, can occupy the same physical position without colliding, and shift in intensity as a body draws closer or turns away. Orientation, here, has to be built entirely out of listening — or not at all.

The installation is walk-through and durationless, with no preferred entry point, no front-to-back axis, no beginning or end in the conventional sense. Position in the room becomes position within the process. A step to the side, or a turn of the head, does not change volume but density — leaving a zone where frequencies gather for one where they disperse. The boundaries between zones are never drawn sharply; they slide into one another. Limen, here, is a state passed through, not a line crossed.

What Varèse described as sound-masses adrift in astral space, and what musikprotokoll's Supernova asks us to recognize as our own origin in the interior of stars, meet in Limenfeld as the same gesture: matter organizing itself into zones, dispersing, and reforming — audible, and walkable.