The Art of the Fluke | Alvin Curran | Cenk Ergün | TEAR004 2007
Available on CD Baby and iTunes
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...flukes happen. Daily occurrences like bottle caps in
the gutter turning to gold; deadly tornados becoming angelic choirs of
harmonic dust; spotting a pair of new women's shoes on the sidewalk in
front of the post office - as if the owner dematerialized in situ.
These are the numbers that spin on the daily lottery wheels in dry
sand...published on the front pages of the Locrian Times next to the
articles about six-headed dogs found in a tar-pit, and underwater
pianos played by tidal changes or little flames shooting out from the
Chimaera mountain in southern Anatolia. Some of these things actually
happen, flukes or not, we should be thankful.
In their new record, The Art of The Fluke, Alvin Curran and Cenk Ergün present an artful survival through a sequence of coincidences, accidents, unknowns, and impossibles. Their tracks flow into each other without pause, creating an intense body of work that often fluctuates between extremes of amplitude, frequency, density, complexity, and momentum.
The duo's commonalities are software samplers and their ears. The rest is molded by their infinite collection of audio samples: the screams of a goat being butchered, the lullaby of a children's chorus, the frenzied murmurs of an auctioneer, a malfunctioning faucet, the horn of a sinking ship… Without prior plans, these ingredients come together to form a sonic anarchy on The Art of the Fluke.
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The Wire Review
December 2007 by Philip Clark
In The Art of the Fluke, Alvin Curran and Oakland based composer and laptop performer Cenk Ergün "present their artful survival through a sequence of coincidences, accidents, unknowns and impossibles". Using a smorgasbord of audio samples - 1970s cop show tenor saxophone freakouts, a cool dance band riff, the yelps of a goat in pain, the frogmarch of an auctioneer in full sales pitch and the sounds of hardcore copulation - Curran and Ergün work without preplanning to construct a meta-collage, conceptual rigour facilitating a rabid stream of audio consciousness.
Randomness never did have much truck with transition, and the eight tracks ram into each other, generating jump-cut structures and incongruous juxtapositions of material. The opening track tosses mulched electronica against the sustained tones of a sampled choir. In the second number the choral sounds elongate into sonorous overlaps, as busy chattering voices are overlaid on top. The structural flow stalls to allow underlying electronic sounds to briefly rise to the surface; the piece has a liberated shape that intention would have been unlikely to stumble upon.
The development of post-Schoenbergian composition in all its forms has essentially been a dialogue between control and intuition. Curran's credo has always erred towards the latter and, when the true potential of non-intention is revealed, more conventional minds often feel threatened. As Curran and Ergün transform their auctioneer into a manic caricature, and build an architectural master plan from the dance band riff, the potential of randomness to yield its own precision becomes a thing of perpetual wonder.
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Online reviews:
The Sound Projector
the one true dead angel