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Mark Mothersbaugh is one of this era’s most unique and prolific conceptual artists and composers.
Deeply aware of the ability of precise, multi-faceted artistic expression to deliver vital social commentary, he has perpetually challenged and redefined musical and visual boundaries. Mothersbaugh co-founded the influential rock group DEVO and parlayed his avant-garde musical background into a leading role in scoring for filmed and animated entertainment, interactive media, and commercials.
Mark has scored 150 films, television shows, video games, and hundreds of commercials through his multimedia company, Mutato Muzika.
He has had 165 visual and audio art shows, including his retrospective traveling museum exhibition Myopia.
He has received a doctorate in Humane Letters at Kent State University, his alma mater.
Mark contributed the track “Strip 11” to the Moebius Strips project honoring Swiss/German artist and composer Dieter Moebius released in December 2022. He also provided the cover art for the posthumous Moebius album Aspirin in October 2023.
Mark’s limited art print edition Selections from Apotropaic Beatnik Graffiti was released by Curious Music in January 2024.
We are delighted to welcome Peter Chilvers to the Curious Music family with the release of his new composition 'Satellites'.
Peter is a musician and software designer, best known for creating the iOS applications Bloom, Trope, Scape and Reflection with Brian Eno, touring with Karl Hyde (Underworld), and for his collaborations with Tim Bowness.
Since 2006, he has worked as a musical and technical assistant to Brian Eno on projects including the soundtracks to The Lovely Bones and Spore, album collaborations with David Byrne and the releases Small Craft on a Milk Sea, Drums Between the Bells and Lux. He worked as Assistant Producer on Eno’s 2016 release The Ship, for which he also helped develop the multi-speaker installation which has been shown in many countries. His software has played a behind-the-scenes role in many of Eno’s recent albums.
He has recently played keyboards live with Brian Eno, first at his Acropolis concert with Roger Eno in 2021, and then for the acclaimed SHIPS tour across Europe with the Baltic Sea Philharmonic in October 2023.
A spacious and introspective approach to the piano is at the heart of much of Peter's music, expanded by orchestrated electronic textures.
Peter is currently in the studio creating new work to be released by Curious Music in 2024.
We are delighted to welcome Eraldo Bernocchi and Christopher James Chaplin to the Curious Music Family.
ABOUT ERALDO BERNOCCHI
A relentless sound explorer, Bernocchi has collaborated with numerous artists including Bill Laswell, Nils Petter Molvaer, Harold Budd, Russell Mills, Toshinori Kondo, DJ Disk, Thomas Fehlmann, Markus Stockhausen, Robin Guthrie, Colin Edwin, Balazs Pandi, Hoshiko Yamane, Flowdan among many others. He has scored soundtracks for the academy award winning director Gabriele Salvatores and the first ever film on the life of Cy Twombly. His works have been exhibited and played at MOMA NYC, Le Louvre, Paris and the National Portrait Gallery, London,
ABOUT CHRISTOPHER CHAPLIN
British avant-garde composer and experimental artist Christopher James Chaplin studied piano in Vevey, Switzerland before moving to London in the early 1980s. In addition to his solo recordings, Chaplin continued to play numerous collaborative and improvisded live shows with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and other artists such as the Icelandic electronic music trio Stereo Hypnosis.
We are looking forward to releasing their collaborative project with visual artist Petulia Mattioli - The Same and The Other in 2024.
Photo: Christopher Chaplin and Eraldo Bernocchi at The Same and The Other photo exhibition by Petulia Mattioli. Poko Gallery, London. Artist photo - by Antionio Pagan.
Rosa Roedelius is an Austrian artist who was born in 1975 in Forst/Bevern, Germany.
She studied painting, animated film and tapestry at the University of Applied Arts, where she also worked as an assistant and lecturer.
Her artistic research fields are painting, sculpture and prose. These combine to form installations and short prosaic videos. She sees herself in constant change and relies on her somnambulistic security to find what belongs together to show the worlds within the in-between where the conscious and unconscious embrace each other. She sees art as a self-fertilizer and cornucopia that contributes inexhaustibly to what connects souls.
Rosa provided the artwork for the 2023 re-issue of Hans-Joachim Roedelius album Pink, Blue and Amber.
Dom Theobald (born 1963, UK) is a painter, printmaker, digital artist and filmmaker. He studied at Norwich School of Art and the Slade School of Art. His work has been shown in solo and group shows in the USA, Japan, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Italy and the UK, since 1989. Recent collaborations include films, CD covers and audiovisual installations with composer Roger Eno. His work is collected worldwide. Recently he provided paintings for the covers of Brian Eno and Roger Eno's album Mixing Colours and EP Luminous. He has just returned from a highly successful solo show in Trentino, Italy. He lives and works in East Anglia, England.
Artist photo by Susie Taylor
Italian composer, musician and architect Fabio Capanni has been a key innovator of experimental music since the late 1980s.
The refined sonic textures that have distinguished Capanni’s highly personal approach to the harmonic possibilities of the electric guitar have led him to collaborate with musicians such as: Peter Principle, Luc Van Lieshout (Tuxedomoon), Dirk Descheemaeker (Wim Mertens), Harold Budd, David Torn, David Sylvian, Steve Jansen, Richard Barbieri, Roger Eno, Tim Story, Chris Karrer, and Glen Sweeney. Above all, Capanni has worked alongside one of the fathers of ambient music, German musician Hans-Joachim Roedelius, in the studio and live for more than a decade. They also founded the group Aquarello together with Felix Jay and Roman saxophonist Nicola Alesini.
In 2021, after a long silence, Capanni returned to the music scene with his first solo album, Home, a project through which he puts into action a long-nurtured idea: to make a work focused on the electric guitar. Home, as evoked by the title, is a decidedly intimate album in which the piano strings are valuable complements to those of the electric guitar in creating striking soundscapes.
Combining with other art forms has been fertile ground for the evocative power of Capanni’s sonic narratives, expressed in numerous multimedia projects of music, dance, and images, including: Quartetto Capanni plays Ennio Morricone (Contemporary Art Museum Luigi Pecci, Prato); Borges and I (Donau Festival, Krems; Szene, Salzburg); Klang & Malerei (Black Box, Münchner Philharmoniker); Festival de Musica Visual (Jameos del Agua, Lanzarote); Persistence of Memory (Kunst Halle, Krems); and Coppi Arrive (Contemporary Art Museum Luigi Pecci, Prato).
ABOUT EVE MARET
Eve Maret is a Nashville-based experimental artist and composer who employs a wide array of electronic media and techniques in her various disciplines, exploring the possibilities of personal and communal healing through creative action.
“I’m keenly interested in how my sense of hearing relates to the sixth sense, or the intuitive sense, which lies beyond normal perception. There’s a lot that I sense throughout the day that I can’t verbally express, and music is a means for me to process that which lies beyond the visible. Everything has a frequency. Sound is a thought. Sound is a plant growing in my window. Sound is a dream I had last night.” - Eve Maret
To Eve, the act of creating is a wholehearted Yes. Drawing inspiration from visual art, the music of Debussy, the Fluxus movement, Kosmische Musik and funk, Eve makes use of digital and modular synthesizers, a vocoder, clarinet, electric bass, guitar, and MIDI Sprout technology to create works that range from lush cinematic soundscapes to astral disco. Eve’s music practice is a conversation with her numerous curiosities, manifested in the form of video art, drawing, dance, ritual, and cymatics. She studied percussion with Chester Thompson (The Mothers of Invention, Bee Jees) at Belmont University in 2012 and attended Mills University for a semester in 2019, where she studied electronic music and recording media with Laetitia Sonami, James Fei, and John Bischoff.
Eve’s 2019 release, No More Running (Deluxe Edition), was reviewed by The Wire Magazine and was featured on Bandcamp’s Album of the Day series. She is hailed to present “a loving tribute to her community, maintained by a distinct, individual voice that’s impossible to ignore” (Bandcamp, USA). Eve’s music has been featured on Echoes Radio and Iggy Pop’s BBC radio show Iggy Confidential. “Synthesizer Hearts,” off of Eve’s 2020 release, Stars Aligned, appeared on BBC Radio 6 Music’s B-List in December 2020 and premiered on Mary Anne Hobbs’ BBC Radio show “Music From The Near Future.”
Eve has toured across the country, performing alongside Sun Araw, Lydia Lunch, Xiu Xiu, Jack Name, and JEFF the Brotherhood, among others. In 2018 and 2019, she played at Big Ears Festival’s 12-Hour Drone. She also performs in Flower Power Synth and Woodwind Ensemble with JayVe Montgomery and Will Hicks. They released Titanic II in 2019 on Kentucky label Obsolete Staircases.
In addition to her personal creative practices, Eve is committed to providing avenues for others to create and uplift one another. She, Jess Chambers, Deli Paloma-Sisk, and Arlene Sparacia founded Hyasynth House, an electronic music collective and education center for female, trans, and non-binary artists in May of 2018. Together they facilitated workshops, performances, and community-wide conversations in an effort to support and empower marginalized groups. Hyasynth House ceased operation when Eve moved to California in August 2019.
About Suki Sou
Suki is a cheerfully cantankerous creative who draws from arcane inspirations from across the globe. You can hear traces of the blissful minimalism of Terry Riley; the soft and wobbly electronica that Hans-Joachim Roedelius played on his ‘Wenn Der Südwind Weht’ album and ‘Sowiesoso’ when he was in Cluster; the electro-acoustic compositions of Joanna Brouk; the quiet focus of Eliane Radigue, the hypnotic arpeggios of Laurie Spiegel; the fizziness of Suzanne Ciani’s pop and pour, Raymond Scott’s research beeps, and the syncopation of Tom Dissevelt.
Equally influential to Sou is vivid memories of the smell of cigarette smoke from her grandmother’s room listening to Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng in the rain, eating cantonese wonton soup, and watching Hong Kong animation and news broadcasted by TVB Pearl channel 1.
Suki was born in the former Portuguese colony Macau, to a Burmese father who was an electronics engineer and half Japanese, half Chinese mother, who was an accountant. “My parents sent me to a Catholic boarding school in Berkshire to study when I was eight years old. I travelled to the UK on my own with just a dictionary; My mother’s theory was that I needed to learn the language all by myself, without anyone's help”, Sou recalls.
After moving from London to the Peak District, Suki set up a home studio and began using Buchla, Moog modular systems and rare analogue systems like the ARP 2500, ARP 2600 and Serge, Synthi from Willem Twee Studio in the Netherlands – all of which helped create this sensory wonder.
In August 2023, Suki was named on of the ‘50 Key Modular Artists’ by Electronic Sound magazine.
Tim Story, hailed as "a true artist in the electronic medium" (Victory Review, USA) and "a master of electronic chamber music" (CD Review, USA), Tim Story's work has garnered an international reputation for its haunting elegance and meticulous compositional detail. When writing and recording, he often spends months carefully working and refining the shape of each composition until he achieves the desired emotional and intellectual effect. His seemingly effortless pieces distill harmonic and melodic ideas that are often quite complex.
"I like to work with a finite palette of sounds and keep paring things down to a pure, though often ambiguous, expression. Simplicity without simplemindedness."
- Tim Story
In addition to nine solo albums and many compilation appearances, Story's work has appeared on numerous television and film soundtracks, including the original score for the popular NPR documentary “In Search of Angels” (1994), and “Caravan” (2005) , a feature-length documentary from the production company of acclaimed Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar. Story's music has been nominated for a Grammy award (for 1988's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow", a children's recording with Glenn Close), and a NAIRD "Best Album" award (for "Beguiled"). Also a noted producer, recent producton credits include the legendary duo Cluster's final album "Qua" in 2010.
Tim Story was born in 1957 in Philadelphia, and currently lives in the small river town of Maumee, in northwest Ohio.
About Bjarni Biering
Classically trained in traditional modes of score and technique, Bjarni disrupts the clean classicism of his sound with economically dispersed beats and delicately layered piano. He has developed a holistic style as a composer that merges sight and sound through the lens of human emotion. Bjarni revels both in the quiet, reverent solitude of composition and scoring, and the collaborative process - bringing a practical, unfussy artistry to his work with filmmakers, visual artists and musicians.
After training as a pianist, Bjarni immersed himself in composition, drawn to the endless creative potential of modern recording technology and the freedom of improvisation. His obsession with sound and composition began early, during his childhood in Reykjavík where he would sit in concert halls or in front of his parents’ hi-fi laboriously studying the sounds produced. He would spend endless hours at his piano or computer attempting to recreate, construct and deconstruct those sounds, his own melodies and the works of classical and contemporary composers. This construction and deconstruction can be heard in the music of the internal worlds he creates now, gently building and felling the passage of time and our human experience.
After completing his classical training, Bjarni spent a number of years playing keyboard and piano in various ensembles and bands across South Africa, the UK and the Nordics. But soon, he felt the need to return to his classical roots and studied his BA in Music Composition at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, and then on to the UK to do an MA in Composition at the University of Bristol. It was during his time in Bristol that his interest in film grew and he began studying, exploring and creating music for screen and other media.
He has scored feature films, documentaries, animations and shorts, as well as advertisements, and written production albums for EMI, Stereo Royal and No Sheet Music. Projects include The Karman Line, a BAFTA nominated short starring Olivia Colman and Having you, starring Anna Friel and Andrew Buchan.
For over eight decades, Hans-Joachim Roedelius has explored, documented and presented the results of his inward and outward exploration of the human spirit. His creative output, always both artistic and personal, has found expression in numerous disciplines including as a composer, musician, poet, sculptor, painter and singer with results that have influenced a generation of musicians and artists.
Roedelius was born in 1934 in Berlin. His first public appearances were as a child actor in several UFA films. While still in his early teens, he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth as a pimpfen. His rebellion from this assignment resulted in a period of imprisonment. At the conclusion of WWII, Roedelius embarked on an extended period wandering and exploration, gathering knowledge if not expertise in numerous capacities including as a cook, masseuse, hospice nurse, and in other fields with varying degrees of success.
In 1968, Roedelius took his first steps into the arts as a co-founder of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab with Conrad Schnitzler and Boris Schaack. While in existence for only a few months, the Zodiak, quickly became the center of Berlin's free jazz, avant-garde and experimental music scenes. Nebulous versions of groups such as Tangerine Dream and Ashra Temple took their tentative first creative steps at the Zodiak. During this period, Roedelius and Schnitzler invited pastry cook and student of Josef Bueys, Dieter Moebius, to form Kluster.
The trio's performances where characterized by lengthy, sometimes chaotic, improvisations combining the "intentional misuse" of instruments of cello and guitar with noises from everyday items such as alarm clocks and car batteries. The group toured extensively for over two years culminating in an eight hour improvisation "opening" for Jimi Hendrix. The group release three albums of their improvisations after which Schnitzler left. Moebius and Roedelius continued under the anglicized name of Cluster.
Cluster toured and recorded extensively throughout the 70s slowly progressing from an improvisational towards a more structured often melodic approach. Music that in its own quieter way, was no less radical or experimental than their early work. During this period Cluster joined with NEU! guitarist Michael Rother as Harmonia, touring and recording two highly influential albums Musik von Harmonia and Deluxe. Brian Eno, attracted by Cluster's idiosyncratic nature, recorded two albums with them at the fame Conny's Studio near Cologne. Cluster and Eno were also joined by Michael Rother for informal sessions that were eventually released, in part, as Tracks and Traces in 1997.
Roedelius released his first solo album, Durch die Wuste, in 1976. This proved to be the first of many solo and collaborative works that has grown to number almost 200 albums. Roedelius continues to give performances worldwide and release several albums per year in addition to working in theater, dance, painting and poetry.
Roedelius lives near Vienna, Austria.
Roedelius, Lunz am See
Brian Eno & Harmonia, Weserhof, West Germany
Cluster (Roedelius and Dieter Moebius)
Christopher Mueller & Roedelius
Tim Story and Roedelius
Since the end of the 70s, von Hausswolff has worked as a composer using recording technology as his main instrument and as a visual artist using light projections, video and still photography as well as other media.
He has exhibited at dOCUMENTA (Kassel), the biennials in Venice, Moscow, Liverpool, Istanbul, Sarajevo etc and in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Nicosia, Kaliningrad, Tokyo, London, New York, Philadelphia, etc.
His music has been played in festivals such as Sonar (Barcelona), CTM (Berlin), L’audible (Paris), el niche Aural (Mexico City), MUTEK, (Montreal) etc. and released works on record by labels like RasterNoton (Berlin), Touch (London), Laton (Wien), iDeal (Göteborg) and MonoType (Warszaw).
He recently curated the 12th part the sound-installation FREQ_OUT in Vienna and collaborates with artist Leif Elggren, film-maker Thomas Nordanstad, EVP re-searcher Michael Esposito and recently launched new projects with composer/artist Mark Fell, musician Jim O’Rourke and author Leslie Winer.
Von Hausswolff lives in Stockholm, Sweden.
Curious Music released Nordlicht, von Hausswolff's collaboration with Hans-Joachim Roedelius on March 30, 2017.
Kate St. John is a classically trained composer, arranger, producer and instrumentalist (oboe, cor anglais, accordion, saxophone and piano). Her first band was The Ravishing Beauties with Virginia Astley and Nicky Holland. The trio joined The Teardrop Explodes in Liverpool during the winter of 1981 for a series of dates at a small clubs and a UK tour in early 1982. During the 1980's and early 1990s she was a member of The Dream Academy with Nick Laird-Clowes. In 1985 they had a worldwide hit with "Life In A Northern Town" and produced three albums: The Dream Academy (1985), Remembrance Days (1987) and A Different Kind Of Weather (1990). In the 1990s Kate was a member of Van Morrison's live band, playing oboe and saxophone. She played on five Van Morrison albums. In 1994 she co wrote and sang on four tracks with Roger Eno on the album The Familiar on the All Saints Label. This led to the formation of Channel Light Vessel, a band with Kate, Roger Eno, Bill Nelson, Laraaji and Mayumi Tachibana.
Kate has released two solo albums: Indescribable Night (1995) and Second Sight (1997).
She has played and toured with many artists including XTC, Julian Cope, The Waterboys, Damon Albarn, Marianne Faithfull and Lou Reed.
In the last 10 years she has specialized in being a Musical Director for multi-artist shows, including working with Joe Boyd on the Way To Blue tributes to Nick Drake, Hal Wilner on his Rogues Gallery and Nino Rota concerts and the Imagining Ireland/Imagining Home concerts in 2016 at The National Concert Hall in Dublin and The Festival Hall. She is also a string and woodwind arranger and recently orchestrated 9 songs with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra for Laura Marling
Kate, with her husband and writing partner, Neill MacColl, specializes in On Set music production in films, having worked on Far From The Madding Crowd (2015), Tulip Fever (2017), My Cousin Rachel (2017) and The Little Stranger (2018).
Curious Music released Kate's 1997 solo album Second Sight as a limited edition double 180g clear vinyl package and FLAC DL on December 12, 2017.
Harold Budd was born in 1936 in Los Angeles and grew up in the desert town of Victorville. While serving in the army, Harold encountered jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler which resulted in a stint as Ayler’s drummer. From the 60s through the early 70s Harold studied composition and produced a number of avant-garde pieces including “Lovely Thing” and “Lirio”, a 24-hour piece for solo gong. Harold subsequently taught at the California Institute for the Arts from 1970-76. Harold's 1972 piece “Madrigals of The Rose Angel” came to the attention of Brian Eno and resulted in the release of the album The Pavilion of Dreams on Eno’s Obscure Records label. This album included appearances by Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars and Marion Brown. Harold has continued to release a string of solo and collaborative albums including The Serpent (In Quicksilver) (1981), The Pearl (1984, with Eno), The Moon and the Melodies (1985, with the Cocteau Twins), Through the Hill (1994, with XTC’s Andy Partridge), Avalon Sutra (2004), Bordeaux (2011, with Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie), Bandits of Stature (2012), and more.
In 2013, Harold finished a year-long project with the video artist Jane Maru which resulted in two albums, Jane 1-11 (2013), and Jane 12-21 (2014). Harold’s music continues to influence many generations of musicians, from U2’s sampling for “Cedars of Lebanon” on the album No Line on the Horizon (2009) to an anthology of 13 contemporary ambient musicians paying homage to Harold in Lost in the Humming Air (2012). Meanwhile, Harold continues to create and innovate. His book of poetry, Aurora Teardrops (2015), marked his seventh such book.
Harold passed away in December 2020.
Heavy Color's surreal and cinematic compositions explore spiritual jazz, traditional music, electronic and avant-psychedelia, spawning the description Post-World Music. Their first album Arise Ye Spiritual Machine (2014) re-contextualized archival music in a modern beat-tape format. River Passage (2018), a collaboration with musicians in Eastern Congo that combines elements of Afrobeat, minimalist Electronica, and futurist Hip Hop, spans physical environments, cultures and languages. In 2020 Heavy Color composed an original score for the film Invisible Hand, a documentary about the Rights of Nature Movement produced by Actor Mark Ruffalo. The resulting album, which blurred the line between minimalist chamber music and ambient electronic worlds was released by the experimental label, Curious Music.
In 2021 Heavy Color will release Soft Light, a recombination of 60’s spiritual jazz, 70’s fusion, meditations in pattern-based music, instrumental hip hop, and psychedelic pop, as well releasing a suite of music composed and performed in the moments before, during and just after the Sunrise and Sunset. Heavy Color is Ben Cohen and Sam Woldenberg.
Objective Objects by Ashley/Moebius.