Today’s guest on The Music Folder is Gavin Bryars, one of the most significant post‑minimalist composers to emerge from the British music scene in the late 1960s and ’70s. With a philosophy degree and a background as double bassist in jazz ensembles, Bryars has explored free improvisation, minimalism, the avant‑garde, and experimental music. His catalog spans more than 50 years, from the seminal The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus’s Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971) to the more recent trio Altissima Luce, a work created to support struggling musicians during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns.

For our new episode, Gavin Bryars is interviewed by musicologist and media historian Veniero Rizzardi. Together, they talk about the composer’s formative years in the experimental British music scene, charting his transition from free jazz improvisation to experimental composition under the influence of John Cage and Morton Feldman. A central focus is the origin and evolution of Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, its use of found audio, its emotional impact, and the significance of its 1993 re-recording with Tom Waits. Bryars also shares personal anecdotes about Cage and Feldman’s generosity, his experiences performing with Steve Reich, and the shifting perception of avant-garde music.

Interview by Veniero Rizzardi, 28/12/2021.

The Music Folder is a talk-series, curated by Archivio Storico Ricordi, which investigates the intersection of music, memory, and arts.

Canadian composer Sarah Davachi is our next guest on The Music Folder. Davachi’s work blends electroacoustic minimalism, drone, ambient, and modern classical. A multi-instrumentalist herself, she’s toured internationally and collaborated with artists like Grouper, William Basinski, and Suzanne Ciani. In 2020, she launched her own label, Late Music. Her decade-long role at Canada’s National Music Centre - curating and interpreting its collection of acoustic and electronic keyboard instruments - sparked a deep interest in critical organology, which she pursued through a PhD at UCLA.

In this episode of The Music Folder, Sarah Davachi talks with music critic and curator Michele Palozzo about her early fascination with the emotional depth of single harmonic moments in Chopin’s music, which led her to explore drone and minimalism as a way of stretching time and sound. She discusses her interest in texture, timbre, and the physicality of instruments - acoustic and electronic alike - rejecting the binary between them. Davachi emphasizes a visual and atmospheric sensibility in her work, drawing connections to cinema, minimalist art, and archival materials. She also speaks about her album Antiphonals, shaped in part by pandemic solitude, and how live performance has renewed her focus on duration and altered temporal perception.

Interview by Michele Palozzo, Milan 11/10/2021. 

The Music Folder is a talk-series, curated by Archivio Storico Ricordi, which investigates the intersection of music, memory, and arts.

The Music Folder’s special guest today is William Basinski, the avant-garde composer and musician whose experimentations with tape loops, delays, found sounds, and shortwave radio static led him to create some of the most influential works of ambient music. With The Disintegration Loops, his most famous work, Basinski created a melancholic, drone-laden tapestry of electronic loops and cracks as the tapes he was trying to digitize kept deteriorating further and further, reaching completion as the 9/11 attacks started to unfold.

Interviewed by art critic Francesco Tenaglia, in this episode of The Music Folder William Basinski reflects on how the iconic Disintegration Loops unexpectedly became a defining milestone in electronic music, introducing personal emotion, nostalgia, and a melancholic, romantic aesthetic into an otherwise process-driven genre. He also shares anecdotes about his formative years, his influences (from classical training to John Cage), his compositional approach, his Brooklyn loft Arcadia, the interplay between his music and physical spaces, and memorable encounters, including opening for David Bowie.

Interview by Francesco Tenaglia, Milan 1 october 2018. 
The Music Folder is a talk-series, curated by Archivio Storico Ricordi, which investigates the intersection of music, memory, and arts.

Alvin Curran, a groundbreaking composer and performer, is the inaugural guest on The Music Folder. Renowned for his pioneering work with sampling, found sounds, and soundscapes, Curran has been a leading figure in experimental music for the past five decades. After studying composition in the US, Curran moved to Rome in 1965, became deeply involved in the experimental theater scene, and co-founded the influential collective Musica Elettronica Viva with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, blending electroacoustic improvisation with early synthesizer experiments. Since 1993, Curran has been developing Inner Cities, an ongoing series of solo piano pieces that collectively form one of the longest non-repetitive piano works ever composed.

For the first episode of The Music Folder, Alvin Curran is interviewed by musicologist and media historian Veniero Rizzardi. They discuss Curran’s early experiences in Rome’s experimental music scene, and the encounters with influential avant-garde figures such as John Cage, Sylvano Bussotti, and Franco Evangelisti, emphasizing how improvisation reshaped his artistic practice. The conversation touches on the blurred boundaries between new and classical music, Curran’s roots in American jazz, and economic considerations shaping avant-garde music.

Interview by Veniero Rizzardi, Milan 21 November 2019. 

The Music Folder is a talk-series, curated by Archivio Storico Ricordi, which investigates the intersection of music, memory, and arts.