Alvin Curran

Two masterpieces of the early 70s by released by Die Schachtel for the first time ever. Using VCS3 live electronics and environmental sounds, Alvin Curran created a hypnotic and meditative transcendency of minimalist beauty. Limited deluxe vinyl LP edition.
"The two works presented here are “seminal” pieces of two genres from which a great part of my musical practice springs and to this day continues to evolve from. Under the Fig Tree is in fact the realization of one monophonic piece  contained in my well known early collection of single line melodic compositions entitled Music for every occasion. The version I present here was originally made for a performance of trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, playing against the recording. It is realized by myself playing a VCS3 (Putney) synthesizer, one of the first a famous line of portable electronic synthesizers from the early 70’s. Notable are electronically produced timbres which approximate, acoustic flutes, clarinets, trombones and tubas… long before the availability of multi-track tape machines, these “tracks” were recorded on multiple Revox tape recorders and mixed on a custom-made mixer.
The Magic Carpet is remarkably my first “sound installation” long before that phrase came into our daily vocabularies. It was inspired by a project of my dear friend and sculptor Paul Klerr – an American with Italian-Jewish roots, who lives in Rome. He had this brilliant idea to fill a gallery with steel and gut wires, to which I suggested that he was actually building a fantastic musical instrument which could even be played by the visiting public… so my intervention in this spontaneous collaboration, was to figure out how to amplify this jungle of long steel wires – which I did with simple contact microphone placed at various connecting points; and further adding a “vertical” element of sounding glass chimes plus aluminum and brass tubing as occasionally placed metal chimes." Alvin Curran