4. Alvin CurranSongs And Views Of The Magnetic Garden
This one is a bit more straightforward in how it’s connected to my own music-making. It was probably about 10 years ago that I first heard it, maybe a little bit more than that. I came into music composition from a really academic place. I grew up playing classical piano, taking music composition class at school, and a lot of the electronic music I heard early on, I respected and appreciated from a certain perspective, but it just didn’t do anything for me. I first got into Alvin Curran through Musica Elettronica Viva [the live acoustic/electronic improvisational group he was part of] and when I first heard a lot of Alvin Curran’s solo music, I knew that he played synthesiser, and specifically the same EMS synthesiser that I used to play a lot. It was really inspiring to see that type of music, the type of electronic music that I wanted to make, something that felt real to me, and not just cold and academic.
