Curium
Electronic
Curium is my electronic music moniker, first created at Bennington College in 1987. Rooted in the traditions of early electronic music, the project has always aimed to uncover pure, authentic sounds—stripping away affectation to reveal tone, texture, and atmosphere in their rawest forms. Across decades, Curium has explored ambient drones, glitch experiments, and instrumental works that remain focused on honesty in sound. It continues to serve as a vessel for exploring how electronic music can be both elemental and deeply human.
Nowever
2006
Nowever is Curium’s first full-length release, created by pairing the poems of E.E. Cummings with the unique voices of people close to me. Each reader brought their own cadence and character, which I then set to music—composing soundscapes that mirrored the poem’s fractured lyricism while reflecting the speaker’s persona. The recordings were heavily edited, echoing Cummings’ playful disjunctions and pushing the interplay between word and sound into new territory. The result is an album where poetry, voice, and electronic texture intertwine as a singular, living performance.
Aember
2007
Aember is a Curium EP subtitled “a suite of fieirae portraits.” Conceived as tiny sonic love letters, each track personifies a fire spirit through quiet, reflective moods—moments of stillness that invite thought without slipping into melancholy. Tracks such as Auror, Sophea, Los, Silf, and Chaeus flicker between tenderness and quiet joy, dedicated to my wife, Fonta. It remains a meditation on the fragile but enduring warmth of small flames.
Bism
2008
Bism is a Curium release named after the hidden world in C.S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair—a subterranean realm of molten rivers and living gems far beneath Narnia. The album channels that sense of awe and strangeness through soft electronics and reverberant, plodding drums, evoking vast caverns lit from within. Tracks like Gnomegem, Subshallow, and Cliffbeckon trace soundscapes that feel both luminous and heavy, as if carved from stone. It is a meditation on the unseen life that stirs in depths below.
Novo Vetustum
2013
Recorded over seven years on a battered baby grand in my living room, Novo Vetustum (“New Old”) is a suite of four extended piano pieces that push the instrument beyond its intended use. I scraped strings, thumped, added magnets, wound wire, and sampled it on a an old Yamaha VS-330. The result is an excavation, a document of time, wear, and unexpected things.
Intus Sunt
2018
A cycle of eight one-minute piano works inspired by the strange poetry of number stations. Intus Sunt (“They Are Within”) distills the piano, field recordings and number station fragments into tiny soundscape haiku. Each piece is accompanied by an abstract and expressive video.
Somnia Est
2013
Created as part of a sound installation for Where Monsters Dream in downtown Los Angeles, Somnia Est is a set of seven tracks designed to drift in and out of perception. These are pieces that live between waking and sleep—wandering atmospheres, otherworldly ramplings, and quiet eruptions. They echo the beasts within, dormant yet restless, like the mind’s own landscapes at the edge of consciousness.
