Curd Duca - Waves 1 (2020)

"Waves 1" is the first part of a trilogy, and the first release of Curd Duca since the legendary "Elevator" series (1998-2000). Waves 2 and 3 will be released on Magazine in 2021.

If we think of Curd Duca’s Waves in terms of sound, rather than in terms of form, each track appears like the large, richly decorated capital letter of medieval manuscripts. We can imagine Duca collecting these letters, developing an alphabet of sounds, a kind of musical phonetics. From "gong" to "gone"; "bell" to "bells minus drone"; from "dome" to "father".

The beauty of Curd Duca’s album lies in the fact that it opens up differently from so many perspectives. That we can understand it as a collection of treasures, as a commentary on our acoustic environment, as an attempt to dissect the world and to stylize its parts. It can be seen as a printer's typesetting box, or as an inventory of musical sounds.

Some of the pieces are exaggerations. Some allusions. Others abstractions, parodies, and transfigurations. It is often not so clear if the music is based on a recording or a synthetic sound. Is the nightjar bird real or is it a simulation? Did Duca use real brass and zither sounds or produce them on the computer? The ambiguity between real and artificial is a central aspect of his sound world.

There is only one thing you must not do with this music: trivialize it or underestimate it. With Waves, Duca is exploring the very essence of sound, and its various layers of meaning.