Alvin Curran- Under The Fig Tree / The Magic Carpet

Superb early 70s soundscapes from experimental composer Alvin Curran of MEV. Boomkat offers a swell explanation of these two pieces. 2010 LP release on die Schachtel. 320 vinyl rip by yours truly.

From Curran's notes on the back cover:

"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 therealization 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The version I present here was originally made for a performance of trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, playing against the recording.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. 'The whole formed a kind of walk-through harp...no concious attempt was made to tune these instruments nor indicate what to do with them...' The perormance recorded here- is a mix and remix of my original recordings- here brilliantly remastered by Luca Spagnoletto- of 'performances' which Paul and I made before and during the gallery show. This was originally releases on a small record along with the Source Magazine"


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Mediafire Download Link: Alvin Curran- Under The Fig Tree (1972) / The Magic Carpet (1970)