User:Noyster/Centazzo

Italian-born American composer/improviser, percussionist and multimedia artist. In the 1970s as a percussion player in free jazz and improvised music, he was "a leading figure in the European avant-garde". In 1976 he founded ICTUS Records, and collaborated with John Zorn and others. After 1986 he turned to video making and composed operas, film soundtracks and orchestral compositions, moving to Los Angeles. In more recent live performances he has given solo multimedia concerts, accompanying his own videos.

He has recorded over 60 LP's and CD's, and has authored 350 compositions and eight musicology books. The Library of the University of Bologna (Italy), his Alma Mater, in 2012 opened the "Fondo Andrea Centazzo" where all his works are collected and made available to students and scholars.

Instrumental inventions
During his earlier career Centazzo developed a number of percussion instruments, including the icebell, a bronze alloy bowl-shaped instrument. Others include ogororo, lokole, tampang, tubophone and square bell, which were based on Native American instruments and appeared in his 1980 work Indian Tapes.

ICTUS
The ICTUS record label was founded in 1976 by Centazzo and his wife, Carla Lugli. Its first release was Clangs by Centazzo and Steve Lacy. Subsequent albums also featured Andrew Cyrille and Lol Coxhill, among others. The label was wound up after eight years owing to financial difficulties, but was revived in 1995.

Compositions
Major compositions by Centazzo include the multimedia opera Tina (1996), The Soul in the Mist (2006), Moon in Winter (2011), The Heart of Wax (2012), and the multimedia project Tides of Gravity (2016). This last was produced in association with LIGO, NASA and Caltech to mark the first detection of gravitational waves.