Where do you start with Alvin Curran? Ahead of Rewire 2025, which hosts a multi-day focus programme around his work, let’s look into the prolific and winding career of this renowned composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and writer.
A master of alchemising experimental electronics and environmental found sounds, Curran’s idiosyncratic compositions have spanned decades. His humble musical beginnings took place in 1960s Rome as part of its avant-garde theatre scene. It was during this time that Curran experienced “a compelling need to toss my bourgeois ambitions and 12-tone music training in the trash and re-embrace music-making in an uncorrupted innocent way – a conceptual re-boot to an imagined primeval state.” Creating a kind of music that’s intended to belong to the people performing it – both professional and untrained musicians alike – Curran’s approach to music is one of radical egalitarianism and radical simplicity.
Watch "Spacecraft - 1967" by "Musica Elettronica Viva - Topic" on https://www.youtube.com/
In the mid 1960s, Curran formed the collective Musica Elettronica Viva with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum. They were early adopters of the synthesiser whose participatory and unpredictable concerts sometimes ended with riots – earning the group a certain kind of punk-before-punk-existed notoriety in Italy at the time. Curran says he “is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political, and spiritual forms.” This 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.
Spurred on by the experimentation happening around him, as composers and performers leaked out of the concert halls into their surroundings, Curran’s work of the 1970s is immense, thoughtful, and brimming with radical sounds. Speaking to Sound Propositions, Curran says: “I looked around me and I thought every space is a concert hall, everywhere. Every space is a musical space.” Composed and recorded between 1973 and 1977, Canti Illuminati is a haunting yet playful piece for choir, synthesizer, piano, and tape. It is optimistic and utopic, gleaning pre-language vocal sounds from the performer’s throats that churn and sputter out hypnotically – their underlying tones and timbres give a contradictory sensation of chaos to this utopic vision. Fog horns blow, voices beam, noises unfurl, and field recordings wash in and out like waves in Curran’s immense sea of sound.
Watch "Alvin Curran - Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri" by "goshdarnchef" on https://www.youtube.com/
Fiori Chiari Fiori Oscuri, released in 1978, builds upon the primeval and burgeoning sounds of Canti Illuminati, evolving into a bright, emotional sound world of ambient electronics, twinkling bells, reverberating playground field recordings, toy box xylophones, and improvised piano. “With Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, [Curran] leads you by hand through a wide expanse of sounds and emotions,” says Joshua Minsoo Kim, reviewing the record on Pitchfork. “All of it remains as down-home as it is ambitious, as if a reminder that music is both infinite in its scope and, more importantly, readily accessible. Music belongs to everyone who seeks it out.”
Truly flexing the versatility and unpredictability of his body of work, a work of Curran’s from the early 1980s, the James Brown-inspired “Field It More,” recently appeared on his album Drumming Up Trouble (2022) – showcasing his experiments with sampling software, drum machines, and MIDI programming. The same record features some recently composed (and deeply Curran-esque) sampledelic diatribes, with the raucous hip-hop sampling of “Bay Area 1” and the playful field recording manipulation of “Rollings.”
This is just a small glimpse into Curran’s prolific work – which spans over 200 compositions, experimental radio works, and large-scale site-specific sound installations – among other forms – utilising field recordings, nature sounds, piano, synthesisers, computers, violins, percussion, shofar, accordion, and even ships’ horns. Whether as a solo performer, a sound collagist, or as part of chamber music ensembles, Curran’s mixture of structure and indeterminacy, chaos and harmony, abstraction and clarity, leads to myriad morphing sounds suited for a world in flux.
Full details on the Alvin Curran focus programme at Rewire 2025 will be announced soon.