ALVIN CURRAN AVANT LP GIACINTO SCELSI-LA MONTE YOUNG

	£		41
	$		54

ALVIN CURRAN

 Canti Illuminati LP

Fore 80

Rare early italian Alvin Curran album, an hommage to the great Giacinto Scelsi and a tribute to the human voice.

Some info on the release:  Very rare limited edition issue, released in Italy on the great Fore label (Giacinto Scelsi, Sunny Murray, Alan Silva, Bill Dixon, etc.).

Here's what Alvin Curran wrote in 2002 about this album: Canti Illuminati, was of course my early tribute to the human voice, as the most natural source of music known. In this period there were many experiments going on in the world based on collective vocal improvisation -Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening work at UCSD, Roberto Laneri's Roman group Prima Materia, David Hykes and his Harmonic Choir - in New York, now based in France, and my own work in group vocal Improvisation at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica in Rome, where I taught between 1975 and 1980. I always told my students: don't forget! when the electricity gets turned off, you always have your voice/ your entire body as a basic musical instrument. When this work was being considered for an LP recording I decided to make it into a two part piece, which, on side one, explores a variegated soundscape of structured choral improvisation, and from this (side two) there emerges a solo platform for my own voice, tape delayed feedback, and my then trusty Serge Synthesizer and Sequencer. In later solo performances I concentrated entirely on this latter music, developing an intense and slowly expanding "microtonal" unison by matching my voice with a finely detuned keyboard. In retrospect this could be seen as a direct hommage to Giacinto Scelsi, who opened avenues of magical perspectives to many of us young composers in Rome at that time.

In the 70s when downtown musical-america fully embraced delirious repetition, the key of C, asymmetrical beats, unison everything, performance art, innocent melodies, phase shifting, long delays, fedback loops, wierd instruments, ambient sounds, body art, story telling, emotion and progressive politics; not to mention audiences seated or lying on the floor listening to compositions and improvisations lasting up to 2 hours or more, we all knew we were in for trouble. New York City then was a centrifuge of incredible activity where composers, dancers, authors, performers, electronic engineers and arts administrators engaged in a feverish search for a new art-music accessible to anyone - a utopian trans-national people's music, that reflected above all the elementary and irresistable unifying powers of the great traditional and classical musics from around the world, europe included.

The music of this period and place, never a formal movement, was anchored both aesthetically and philosophically in the vital secrets of minimalism, in the sounds of the environment, however unassuming or flawed, in the cyclical generation of tones and voltage controlled substances, solo voice, and the whole body as solo performer, in men and women as equals, in stories of ordinary people, in gestures of eloquent simplicity as well as open spirituality, in irony as well as transcendental yearning. Improvisation and composition were reconciled as children of the same parents and immaculate mathematical structures could easily cohabit under the same roof with chance . Instrumental virtuosity and implaccable drones were augmented to their human limits. And Rock music and musique concrete both contributed new values to amplification beat and noise. Lofts, garages, storefronts, art-galleries and living rooms along with malls, rivers, ports and other improbable spaces became the new concert halls, and the idolized "musica da camera" of the establishment aristocrats now became exquisitely egalitarian in its pulsing walls of sound, delicate melodies, well-tuned drones and contrapuntal loops. Cage's fatherly shadow was everpresent, but his call for monastic rigor in this ebullient moment went largely unheeded.

In Europe, the feared attack of the young American hordes on the bastions of Western music were way over-rated, and while Darmstadt and IRCAM continued on their ossified missions, the New-Downtowners began captivating large audiences everywhere under the aegis of a new generation of concert producers . Whether it was Laurie Anderson, Lamonte Young or Anthony Braxton, the musical offering was of an imagination, execution and listening experience perhaps as revolutionary as Schoenberg's brilliant but unpopular attempt to liberate the musical tones from their natural tendencies some 60 years earlier. The significant difference here is that the Downtown music was hip, it swung and was in completely tune with the musical currents – both experimental and popular from everywhere.

With a fortuitous bang, he begins his musical journey (1965 in Rome) as co-founder of the radical music collective MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA, as a solo performer, and as a composer for Rome's avantgarde theater scene. In the 70's, he creates a poetic series of solo works for synthesizer, voice, taped sounds and found objects. Seeking to develop new musical spaces, and now considered one of the leading figures in making music outside of the concert halls -- he develops a series of concerts for lakes, ports, parks, buildings, quarries and caves -- his natural laboratories. In the 1980's, he extends the ideas of musical geography by creating simultaneous radio concerts for three, then six large ensembles performing together from many European Capitals. By connecting digital samplers to MIDI Grands (Diskklavier) and computers, since 1987, he produces an enriched body of solo performance works -- an ideal synthesis between the concert hall and all sounding phenomena in the world. He creates a visually striking series of sound installations, some of them in collaboration with visual artists including Paul Klerr, Melissa Gould, Kristin Jones, Pietro Fortuna, Umberto Bignardi, Uli Sigg. Throughout these years he continues to write numerous pieces for radio and for acoustic instruments.

Continues studies and friendship with Carter in Berlin (1964 Ford Foundation Grant), meets Stravinsky, Xenakis, Berio, Yuji Takahashi, Andriessen, Remo Remotti, and above all Rzewski. Goes to Darmstadt, hangs with Babbitt and Earle Brown, hears Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti. Goes to Rome with Joel Chadabe and plays piano in bars on via Veneto, meets Franco Evangelisti and Cornelius Cardew.

In the MUSICA ELETTRONICA VIVA years (1966 -1971 in Rome), performs in over 200 concerts in Europe and the USA with Richard Teitelbaum and Frederic Rzewski, Carol Plantamura, Ivan Vandor, Alan Bryant and Jon Phetteplace; and makes significant artistic encounters with Giuseppe Chiari, Edith Schloss, AMM, Cornelius Cardew, Steve Lacy, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Steve ben Israel, Anthony Braxton, Simone Forti, Steve Reich, Joan La Barbara, Michael Nyman, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier, Larry Austin, Bill Smith, Ketoff, Robert Moog, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, MEV2, Meme Perlini, Mario Ricci, Maria Monti, Prima Materia, Ron Bunzl, Phil Glass, Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, George Lewis, Evan Parker, Gregory Reeves, Serge Tcherepnin, Kosugi, Pulsa, Maryanne Amacher, John Cage, David Tudor, Morton Feldman. Giacinto Scelsi becomes his friend and mentor.

 Condition: Cover lies in mint condition, looks to be in pristine shape, like new. Vinyl looks super clean and plays perfectly, with the exception of 2 minor marks on side b: that unfortunately sound, thus very good++.

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