...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.
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The Wire 286 December 2007
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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side a: a prestigious engineer dies, goes to heaven, and marvels at the construction of the golden gate
side b: lazy summer evenings at sunset spent with friends chamber pot blues
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