Curd Duca

The productions of electronic mood music figure Curd Duca look back to the late-'60s dawn of popular synthesizer music, the age of Wendy Carlos' classical-synth fusions and studio producers who experimented with computer music by yoking it to pop pieces. Duca's been in the music business since the early '80s, originally playing keyboards for the German groups Auch Wenn Es Seltsam Klingen Mag and 8 Oder 9 -- the latter released a half-dozen LPs during the '80s. In 1992, he recorded his solo debut, Easy Listening, the first in what became a five-volume series on Normal Records that took up most of the subsequent four years. Moving to the solid experimental/techno label Mille Plateaux in 1997, Duca released Switched-On Wagner, a series of synthesizer translations of works originally by the German romantic giant Richard Wagner. The following year, he inaugurated yet another series, Elevator, each volume of which included dozens of short tracks in a muzaky mode. ~ John Bush