Alvin Curran is an American composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and writer. A master of alchemising experimental electronics and environmental found sounds, his idiosyncratic compositions have spanned decades. From Curran’s humble musical beginnings in the 1960s as part of Rome’s avant-garde theatre scene, to his formation of collective Musica Elettronica Viva with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, to his canonical Canti Illuminati (1973–1977), up until the present, he has always stood as a singular force in the landscape of experimental music: whether working in contemporary classical, free improvisation, sound collage, or electronics, his work has remained uncompromising for over 50 years. A determined commitment to experimentation and the resistance of commercial co-option roughen Curran’s oeuvre with jagged counter-cultural corners – maybe not sonically so, but he’s punk by every other measure. His prolific work spans over 200 compositions, experimental radio works, and large-scale site-specific sound installations – among other forms – that utilise field recordings, nature sounds, piano, synthesisers, computers, violins, percussion, accordion, and even ships’ horns. Curran’s mixture of structure and indeterminacy, chaos and harmony, abstraction and clarity, leads to myriad morphing sounds suited for a world in flux. 

Rewire is excited to host a conversation with this fabled artist, in which his storied and inspiring practice, working in and through sound, will be discussed together with Amsterdam-based composer and sound artist Yannis Kyriakides. Kyriakides is a composer and sound artist querying the act of listening. Communication through music is a recurring theme in his work, which in recent years has explored the relations between words and music, both in concert compositions and installations through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projecting text to music. As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematise the act of listening. The question as to what music is actually communicating is a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion, and language and how that defines people’s experience of sound. 

This conversation is part of a focus programme around Alvin Curran’s work hosted by Rewire.