|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
BT 094LP
|
Black Truffle announce Drumming Up Trouble, the first release of previously unissued music by Alvin Curran on the label. Collecting works recorded between 2018-2021 and a side-long epic dating back to the early '80s, as the title suggests, Drumming Up Trouble focuses on a hitherto almost unknown aspect of Curran's encyclopedic and omnivorous musical world: his experiments with sampled and synthesized percussion. As Curran's wonderful, wildly sweeping liner notes make clear, his fascination with drumming belongs to the radical investigation of music's fundamental elements that has marked his output since the beginnings of MEV, who aimed (as he says in a recent interview) to return "in some collective way to a non-existent start time in the history of human music". Whatever kind of music our proto-human ancestors played, he writes, "drums were front and center in the mix. Drums rule!" In a paradox typical of Curran's approach, Drumming Up Trouble interrogates this most ancient dimension of music with contemporary technology. On the first side, you hear recent pieces performed using the sampling software and full-size MIDI keyboard setup Curran has refined since the 1980s. Two of them are wild real-time improvisations, primarily utilizing an enormous bank of hip-hop samples. Building from polyrhythmic layers of drum machine fragments to wild cacophonies of clashing vocal samples, scratching, and frantic pitch shifting, these energetic and at times hilarious pieces occupy a space somewhere between John Oswald's Plunderphonics, Pat Thomas and Matt Wand in the Tony Oxley Quartet, and the propulsive Kudoro/Grime fusion of Lisbon's Príncipe label. They are improvisations are accompanied by two austere, minimal compositions realized in collaboration with Angelo Maria Farro: "End Zone" for orchestral bass drum and high oscillator, and "Rollings", where a snare roll is gradually stretched and filtered by digital means into "floating electronic gossamer". The incredible breadth of Curran's output makes it pretty unlikely that a listener familiar with his work would be surprised to find it branching out in a new direction. But no degree of familiarity with his work can really prepare for side B's epic and bizarre "Field it More". It's perhaps best to let the maestro describe this unhinged and infectious offering in his own words: "It features an eight-bar funky minimal riff à la James Brown, played on synth and an-out-of-tune piano, synced to a pre-paid patch on the Roland drum machine. Over this is laid a heavily processed track of the voices of dancer Yoshiko Chuma and movie-maker Jacob Burckhardt discussing an upcoming performance of theirs at the Venice film festival, capped by a track of my playing an increasingly out of control blues over the top of all of the above".. Presented with an inner sleeve with extensive liner notes from Alvin Curran.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
BT 078LP
|
2023 repress. Black Truffle announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran's classic Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, originally issued in 1978 on Ananda, the cooperative label run by Curran, Roberto Laneri, and Giacinto Scelsi. Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (Light Flowers Dark Flowers) -- its title inspired by an intersection in Milan -- is the second in the series of four solo recordings Alvin Curran issued in the 1970s and early 1980s, preceded by Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden (1975), followed by The Works (1980) and Canti Illuminati (1982). Each of these solo works combines field recordings with performances on synthesizer, various acoustic instruments, and voice, arranged in languorously paced, dreamy sequences. Far from the bracing pointillism of much musique concrete, the elements encountered on the meandering course followed by Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri -- whether a frenetic piano improvisation, dense layers of Serge synthesizer and ocarina, or a monologue from Frederic Rzewski's five-year old son, Alexis -- often occupy the foreground of our attention for minutes at a time. As Curran explains, his approach is like that of a filmmaker in the editing process, working with "whole blocks of recorded time." The purring of a cat, toy piano, a child counting, plaintive synthesizer tones, the cacophony of exotic birds at the London Zoo -- each disappears into the next, until, on the LP's second side, a solo piano performance takes center stage, moving unexpectedly from percussive minimalist permutations to a halting rendition of "Georgia on My Mind". A subtle yet stunning work that more than forty years on still seems charged with possibility, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri arrives in a loving reproduction of the original sleeve, featuring Edith Schloss' beautiful cover painting, remastered audio and with new liner notes by Alvin Curran and Francis Plagne.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
BLUME 013LP
|
Blume present the first vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran's Canti Illuminati, originally released in 1982. Between diverse polarities of experimental practice, from free improvisation and modern classical composition, to primitivism, electronic music, and extended techniques, for more than half a century Alvin Curran has stood as beacon in the landscape of organized sound. From his efforts within Musica Elettronica Viva, the collective which he helped found in 1966 with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, to those as a solo-performer and composer, his sounds and ideas have effected immeasurable change. Canti Illuminati, composed and recorded between 1973 and 1977, stands as one of the great documents from the golden era of Curran's singular brand of creative radicalism -- combining a deep sense of social and political consciousness, with creative humanism and visionary compositional ideas. A bridge between the American and European traditions of experimental music, Canti Illuminati is Curran's tribute to the human voice, "the most natural source of music", and it delves toward the very origins of music itself. In lyrical and poetic form, it rethinks the possibilities and potential of organized sound, seeking something fundamentally human. Standing apart from canonical definition, it contributes to a more complex and nuanced understanding of minimalism. Consciously conceived by Curran for the format of the LP, the album takes form as a single work in two parts: "Canti Illuminati [For Choir, Synthesizer, Piano And Tape]", a structured choral improvisation, built from the contributions and voices of Alessandro Bruno, Antonella Talamonti, Antonio Cesareni, David Thorner, Elisabetta Bordes-Page, Giorgio Caruano, Luca Miti, Manuela Garroni, Nicola Bernardini, Pierluigi Castellano, and Sista Carandini; and "Canti Illuminati [For Voice, Synthesizer, Tape]", which Curran realized as a solo performer with his own voice, tape-delayed feedback, and a Serge synthesizer and sequencer. Sinfully under celebrated and all too rarely heard since its initial release, Canti Illuminati remains a profoundly compelling and moving body of sound. a landscape of sustained tone, rippling texture, and structural intervention. Necessity stripped to the elemental, while challenging, endlessly surprising, and complex. Brand new, expanded liner text written by Bradford Bailey. Fully remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
2CD
|
|
NW 80804CD
|
"'Endangered Species states, restates, correlates, instigates, inflates and deflates, elevates, formulates, disintegrates, interrogates, percolates, granulates, germinates, Kiss Me Kates, Tom Waits, Norman Bates and W.B. Yeats, horripilates, adumbrates, prestidigitates, sophisticates, enumerates, integrates and contraindicates songs from the standard repertoire, Standards they were called. Old French, Frankish, estendard 'place of formation.' If you asked a jazz musician what he played, he'd probably say Standards and Originals. Standards being popular songs from Broadway or Hollywood, Originals being compositions written by the jazz players themselves. They became the catalysts for infinite extended play. . . . Alvin's standards rise from an uncodified potential of all the sounds in the world. Recognizable but reformed by what had been worked through the nameless sound fields into a strange new life, now audible here.' --Clark Coolidge (from the liner notes) '... The Yamaha Disklavier was the instrument I was waiting for . . . a grand piano which allowed me the luxury of playing not just its own hammers and strings but my entire archive of sound-files: a magic act where the whole world becomes audible directly from my fingertips -- an 80-proof blend of analogue and digital. The selection of songs on this recording is mostly ballads, slow and easy, leaving me time to think, exit into unverified neighborhoods, begin a piece from the end, enter a spontaneous museum of dysfunctional harmonies, sneak out the back door into the cocktail mists looking for traces of MEV street music in a heap of Pistoletto's rags.' --Alvin Curran"
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
SV 129LP
|
2021 repress. "American composer and multi-instrumentalist Alvin Curran has remained one of the great emblems of experimental music for the last half-century. In 1966, along with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, Curran co-founded Musica Elettronica Viva, a seminal gesture in collective free improvisation. In the early 1970s, his solo work would become a crucial bridge between minimalist traditions on both sides of the Atlantic. Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico, Curran's solo debut, was recorded by the artist himself and issued on Ananda, the small Italian imprint started by Curran and fellow composers Giacinto Scelsi and Roberto Laneri. The piece itself was put together in the winter of 1973 and presented for the first time at Teatro Beat 72 (Rome's The Kitchen). Encouraged by the work of Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti, Curran binds the listener to aberrant notions of place and time: blending field recordings (wind, high-tension wires, beach waves, etc.) with simple and often primitive instruments. Across two sidelong tracks, Giardino Magnetico forms a lyrical collage of synthesizer, glass and metal chimes, plastic tubes, brass and the composer's alluring voice, converging in an immersive realm of Curran's inner / outer experiences. This first-time vinyl reissue is recommended for fans of Harry Bertoia, Michel Redolfi and Lino Capra Vaccina."
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
BT 022LP
|
Restocked; Black Truffle present the first-ever vinyl issue of Alvin Curran's Natural History, originally released on cassette by Edition Giannozzo Berlin in 1983. A founding member of the radical electronic improvising group Musica Elettronica Viva, since the early 1970s Curran has developed an idiosyncratic body of solo work that occupies a unique position in the post-Cageian experimental tradition. Singularly undogmatic, Curran's work takes the Cageian experience as the starting point for a radical openness to all forms of music and sound. Refusing to abstract music from its human functions, his work draws on existing musical genres, cutting-edge electronics and environmental recordings to craft compositions that mimic the hazy texture of everyday life, moving from the abstract to the referential, from the observational to the emotive, from the structured to the random. As he reflects in the liner notes written especially for this edition: "This infinite stream of sound became my life and my music all at once". Curran's other classic solo works of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Songs and Views of the Magnetic Garden (1975) and Canti Illuminati (1982) are elaborate collages that combine keyboard and voice improvisation and composition with field-recorded environments. Natural History consists entirely of field recordings from Curran's archive, arranged as a series of "still lifes", sometimes layered, but without any additional processing. Sounds recorded over the course of nearly twenty years, at Curran's home in Rome or while traveling: constructions sites, insects, children's toys, a piano being tuned, foghorns, familiar to admirers of Curran masterful Maritime Rites (2004), lovemaking, a singing neighbor. It is, as Curran says, an attempt to "put the sound of the entire world on a cassette tape". Heard against the backdrop of the increasing prevalence of field recordings in contemporary music over the last few years, Natural History is like a refreshing breeze, suffused with the joy of discovery. Gatefold sleeve with liner notes and photos by Alvin Curran and design by Stephen O'Malley. Vinyl cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
Book
|
|
CURRAN 001BK
|
2015 release. 300-page paperback book, 11.7 x 8.3 x 1.8 inches. "The alvin curran fakebook is an atypical autobiography in notated compositions, a journey through my musical thought and practice within and without the system, designed and edited by Susan Levenstein. Not just sheet music but a multifaceted compendium, richly designed with photos, writings, and sketches, for anyone to pick through, enjoy, and make their own. The more than 200 works range from raw sonic materials to conceptual musics, fragments, suggestions, itineraries, and completed compositions, containing no secret codes other than my own DNA. They can be played as is, recomposed, looped, arranged, freely improvised on, remixed, layered, spatialized, staged, troped on, or tripped on. A resource and source of pleasure for composers, performers, improvisers, sound artists, scholars, teachers of composition and improvisation, fans, amateurs, terminal avant-gardists, bloggers, buskers, and art book lovers. In some of the 9 sections the music is written out for piano, but the possibilities of instrumentation are limited only by the imagination. The first section consists of sequences, simple strings of single tones that can be used to form looping patterns or as melodic or harmonic generators. The mels were born as pure monophonic melodies but can also be played in quasi-unison by multiple instruments, or overlaid in precise or random ways. The next sections are octaves (rarefied pieces featuring the octave or extended octave interval), music for two parts (just that), and beats (regular and irregular rhythmical patterns that swing, mostly but not only for percussion instruments). The strummz, alternating or rapidly repeated tones or chords, can be used by any chord-capable instrument or ensemble. The 3- and 4-part chorales in choral reefs, for any instruments or voices, bring triadic harmony to another brink. Most of the songs and dances, which were originally applied musics for theater, film, and dance, are presented in conventionally arranged lead sheets. The open aires are large- and small-scale structured improvisations for voices and/or instruments, mostly performed outside the concert hall. This fakebook is a democratic compost heap of musical scraps in the grand tradition of American experimental music. Available for delectation and use by anyone -- without artistic, social, or philosophical limits -- interested in my work or in contemporary musical/performative practices in general." --Alvin Curran
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
Book
|
|
DS 904873
|
Although Alvin Curran is almost universally recognized as one of the leading figures of the late 20th century musical avant-garde, he has never received the recognition he deserves in the form of a proper publication. This is, in fact, the first book ever to present a complete and coherent picture of this gigantic figure of experimental music. A radical experimentalism and a kind of innate volatility have, in fact, long kept the person and the work of Alvin Curran, one of the historic founders of the group Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), at the margins of contemporary musical historiography. His vast and all-inclusive experience refuses to fit into the common schemas and cubbyholes, excluding him from the conceptual straitjackets of current Western musicology. Lavishly produced and conceived, this book is centered around extensive descriptions of the most important works and compositional techniques, providing a historical account of Curran's musical concerns and changing style: in permanent flux between two distinct cultural geographies (Italy and USA), sensitive to an infinity of pressures, encounters, transformations, and provocations, Curran's artistic voyage is presented here through a comprehensive historical and critical study that avoids buzz-word definitions and gives great respect to his otherness -- an otherness clearly and happily a part of the variegated musical universe of our time. Gathered for the first time in a single monograph, the contributions of several of the foremost Italian and international scholars -- enriched by an astounding "travel log" by Alvin Curran himself and by unpublished images from his private archive -- confirm the role of this composer-performer-teacher-writer as a major contributor to the evolution of artistic languages in the late 20th century and beyond. Edited by Daniela Margoni Tortora. 300 pages, softcover, in Italian and English.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
3CD
|
|
NW 80713CD
|
"I am happy to stand again in front of all these free-wheeling tone paintings and look back -- embracing both their concrete and their purely ephemeral, abstract qualities -- while reflecting on how much these four seminal works determined the music I made afterward, similarly inspired by the rhythms, colors, and eternal durations of nature and the immediacy and knowledge of making music with anything at hand." --Alvin Curran
"This historic collection gathers together the four seminal solo albums recorded by Alvin Curran (b. 1938) in the 1970s. Two, Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri (1974) and The Works (1976), are making their first appearance on CD. Author/critic Tim Page, an early advocate of these works, writes, 'Curran weaves electronic technology, an occasional acoustic instrument, voices and musique concrète ('found' music) into a multi-hued tapestry of sound. He holds these dissimilar elements together with a compelling subliminal musical consciousness; the listener never feels that Curran is deliberately being clever, or that he is out to impress, shock or self-consciously 'expand the musical language.' Curran's eclecticism is not willful; his sounds are there because they fit, and they convey a subtle and ingratiating sense of mysticism. These challenging, multi-faceted compositions manage, through their very catholicity, to synthesize and perfect a striking new musical syntax uniquely Curran's own.'"
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
CD
|
|
IDA 020CD
|
2005 release. "Stylistically follows in the wake of his Tzadik release Animal Behavior, to the extent that a plethora of alienated, musical sounds become a single piece of music when altered and thoughtfully mixed together. During his Angelica Festival performance (which was the impetus for this recording), his computer crashed and, by means of a pre-recorded phoneme voice, uttered the syllables, 'It's not my fault. Please make sure the Apple Talking Network is connected.' This happy accident inspired Curran to re-evaluate both our penchant to so strongly rely on technology, and the propitious results when such technology leads the artist into unexplored and unimagined territories by reason of necessity. From this standpoint, the composer examined the entire recordings from all 10 past Angelica Festivals from 1991 to 2001, and set about to mix disparate but somehow complimentary performances together to create a new work. These are otherwise impossible combinations: Fred Frith plays with two Eskimo women. Pavarotti plays with Mike Patton, etc. that logically should not work. But as the world becomes smaller and smaller by means of technology, by design, these instances certainly do. The outcome, while certainly intense, is by no means a nod to the world of lazily thrown together noises or shock-tastic-shivarees; instead, Curran's penchant to carefully consider all of the elements at his disposal left him with a full palette of possibilities for excellence and innovation."
|
|
|
|