Wednesday 12 October 2016, 8pm
Tantalizing duo performance from composer, electronic musician and co-founder of MEV, Alvin Curran, and incendiary bassist Massimo Pupillo.
Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena -- a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. 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.
Curran's music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 200 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale site-specific sound environments and installations, all forge a very personal language from all the languages through dedicated research and recombinant invention.
Massimo Pupillo is a bass player and composer originally from Rome Italy. He is mostly known for his work with the band Zu. For over fifteen years, his modus operandi of straddling and abusing musical genres has resulted in over 15 album releases across labels such as Ipecac, Atavistic, Daymare Recordings and Headz (Japan). John Zorn described Zu as "a powerful and expressive music that totally blows away what most bands do these days".
Massimo has released over 50 albums and performed more than 2000 shows throughout Europe, US, Canada, Asia, Russia, Mexico and Africa, touring with the like of Mike Patton (as the Zu/Patton quartet), also sharing the stage with Faith No More, Sonic Youth, Fantomas, The Melvins, Lightning Bolt, The Ex, Nomeansno, Deerhoof, and countless others.
He has collaborated with a vast number of musicians including Mike Patton, Thurston Moore, Stephen O Malley, Damo Suzuki (Can), Mats Gustafsson, Buzz Osbourne (The Melvins), Dälek, David Tibet (Current 93), Jim O' Rourke, FM Einheit (Einsturzende Neubauten), Peter Brötzmann, Nobukazu Takemura, Eugene Robinson (Oxbow), Steve MacKay (The Stooges), The Ex, Nomeansno, Guy Picciotto and Joe Lally (Fugazi), Toshinori Kondo, Chris Corsano, Otomo Yoshihide, Paal Nilssen-Love, Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt), Oren Ambarchi, Alvin Curran, Lasse Marhaug, Lukas Ligeti, Han Bennink, Ken Vandermark, Hamid Drake, Bobby Previte, Carla Bozulich, and in classical music with Katia & Marielle Labeque, Viktoria Mullova, and many others.
