Black Truffle’s first ever vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran’s seminal 1978 LP, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri - issued in a beautiful edition immaculately reproducing the original - is a truly historic event. Among the composer’s most famous and sought-after releases that has remained out of print for decades, it is a masterstroke of pulsing minimalism, glacial ambience, musique concrete, and forthright experimentalism. Absolutely stunning and still managing to turn experimental music on its head more than 40 years on. It doesn’t get better than this!

Over the last few years, Oren Ambarchi's imprint, Black Truffle, has steadily picked up the pace and emerged as one of the most exciting labels working within the field of experimental sound. Guided by an artist’s ear, it’s brought us incredible, contemporary and archival releases from David Rosenboom, Alvin Lucier, John Duncan, Crys Cole, Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Annea Lockwood, Kassel Jaeger, and so many more. Their latest, the first ever reissue of Alvin Curran’s seminal 1978 LP, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (Light Flowers, Dark Flowers), is easily among the label’s most exciting releases to date.

With a career spanning more than half a century, the composer, Alvin Curran, stands among the most important figures in contemporary experimental music. Widely celebrated for his long-standing efforts within Musica Elettronica Viva - the collective which he helped found in 1966 with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum - his gestures as a solo-performer and composer have arguably yielded even greater levels of influence and change. Beginning to emerge during the mid-1970s, Curran’s first decade of solo recording remain among his most celebrated, but have largely remained out of print and virtually unobtainable since their original releases. These albums - far more personal, intimate, and irreverent than those created within MEV - reveal a visionary, radical, poetic, and political voice that has rendered an almost unparalleled influence over the ensuing decades, birthing a temperament and approach that has evolved into a dominant gravity within the heart of experimental music itself.

Originally issued in 1978 on Ananda, Curran’s Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, is the second in the series of four solo recordings - following Canti E Vedute Del Giardino Magnetico, and preceding The Works and Canti Illuminati - that interweave a palette of field recordings, synthesiser, various acoustic instruments, and voice into stunning expanses of ambience, texture and tone.

Comprising a single work that stretches across the album’s two sides, each of the elements that make up Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri - a purring cat, toy piano, a child counting, synthesiser tones pulsing and droning, the sonorous dance of exotic birds, ocarina, a monologue by Frederic Rzewski’s five-year old son Alexis - effortlessly shift a diverse number of territories within experimental music into a rich, evolutionary zone that feels as alive, chance driven, and free as everyday life. As Curran explains, his approach is like that of a filmmaker in the editing process, working with “whole blocks of recorded time”.

Moving at a dreamy pace, the album represents a fascinating rethinking of minimal music, placing a vast range of sonic materiality - delivered with elegant restraint - into a field marked by long tones, improvisation on the piano, and percussive, arpeggiating sequences on synth. Captivating, overwhelmingly beautiful, and creatively enthralling from start to finish, Black Truffle’s first ever vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran’s seminal 1978 LP, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri is issued in an edition that perfectly reproduces the album’s original sleeve, featuring a painting by Edith Schloss, as well as lovingly remastered audio and brand-new liner notes by Curran and Francis Plagne.