Frédéric Acquaviva is a French experimental composer, avant-garde sound artist and curator living between Paris, Berlin and London who works with voices, instruments, electronics, film and body sounds. In 2020, he is awarded the SWR Karl Sczuka Prize for his music ANTIPODES.

"A composer identifiable by his radicalism, Frédéric Acquaviva creates powerful, uncompromising works. For him, the concept is just as important as the sonic result. Without concessions or compromises, he always pushes an idea to its very end, whether it pleases or not, and some of his creations even resemble experiences to be lived. His sounds—microphonic or synthetic, firmly rooted in the present—are hardly transformed at all. He says he does everything possible not to repeat himself from one work to the next, and it is this radicalism at every level that makes him so recognizable.
— Denis Dufour, in Entretiens avec Vincent Isnard – La Composition de l'écoute, Éditions MF, 2021, Paris

"An absolute autodidact, an eccentric firebrand, an absolutely, totally, completely amateur, passionate about experimentation, a tireless rummager, working at the intersection of visual, sonic, verbal, and gestural territories".                                                                                                                                                                      — Michel Giroud, " Paris Berlin London " in Freeing (Our Bodies) n° 2, Les Presses du Réel,  2018

" For anyone willing to pay it a little attention, he stands at the forefront of contemporary artistic practice in much the same way that Erik Satie did for Dada in the last century."                                                                      — Jean-François Bory " Musica Scripta " in Freeing (Our Bodies) n° 2, Les Presses du Réel, 2018

" Sir, I was deeply irritated to hear your sound production on the public service broadcaster. It constitutes, indeed, a complete lack of respect for the urban listener first and foremost, who must endure on a daily basis the noise nuisances and sound pollution of an ultra-noisy city such as Paris."                                                       — Jack Lemernier, about £pØ@n®diØ$n's diffusion on France Culture, " A Radio Hoax " in Freeing (Our Bodies) n° 2, Les Presses du Réel, 2018

" ANTIPODES for voices and dead electronics is a piece that challenged all of us to confront our listening habits ".                                                                                                                                                                           — Olaf Nicolai, Jury President for the Karl Sczuka Prize, Baden-Baden, 2020.

"I DO NOT HAVE WORDS FOR THIS - I JUST FELT REBORN! Thank you so much!!!"                                             — Alvin Curran (to F.A) after hearing the creation of ANTIPODES on web radio, April 24, Italy, 2020

"frederic we listened phantastic"                                                                                                                                     — Phill Niblock (to F.A) after hearing the creation of ANTIPODES on web radio, April 24, New York, 2020

"The aim of this work is to pay tribute to a singular creator through an analysis of his plural and complex body of work—an unsettling and stimulating multidisciplinary oeuvre that I consider fundamental for its modernity, and which already occupies an indispensable place in the history of music and, more broadly, in the history of avant-garde art."                                                                                                                                   — Yoann Sarrat, Phonosophie et corporalité compositionnelle : L'art sonore de Frédéric Acquaviva, Al Dante, Les Presses du Réel, 2021

A self taught composer, Acquaviva (born January 20, 1967) works on the notion of oxymoron and in the intersection of instrumental or voice with computer editing since 1989, stopping his practice of musician (violin, electric guitar). He sometimes includes video-texts or live streams, mixing a conceptual approach with physical body sounds forms, also creating chronopolyphonic installations and using what he calls dead electronics. His music pieces, spatialised in concerts on multiple speakers, are thought from the compositional phase to the form of the final object. For Acquaviva and his phonosophic approach, "Music is thinking with one's ears."

Acquaviva has been prolific on the underground/experimental music scene, working with major figures of the historical avant-garde including Isidore Isou, Pierre Guyotat, Bernard Heidsieck, Maurice Lemaître, Dorothy Iannone, Henri Chopin, Jean-François Bory, Jean-Luc Parant, Joël Hubaut and ORLAN as well as with instrumentists such as the cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, MUSARC ensemble, violinist Chihiro Ono, trombonist Vinko Globokar, saxophonist Quentin Rollet, theorbist Caroline Delume, pianists Marc-André Hamelin, Mark Knoop and Yoko Yamada, vocalist Joan La Barbara and mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg.

He has performed in major festivals such as Donaueschingen (Germany), Hcmf (UK), Experimental Intermedia; Deep Listening (New York), Oxford Lieder Festival (Oxford), Kontraklang, Unerhörte Musik, Art's Birthday (Berlin), Futura (Crest), Licences (Paris), Spor Festival (Aarhus), Non Classical (London), REM, Museum Weserburg (Bremen) and venues such as Café Oto, Kings College, Royal Opera House, Tate Modern, LSO St Luke (London), Cambridge University, Jacqueline Du Pré Music Building (Oxford), White Box Gallery, Emily Harvey Foundation (New York), Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou, La Topographie de l'Art, Instants Chavirés, Conservatoire, Donjon de Maîtresse Cindy (Paris), Khodynka Gallery (Moscow), MAAT (Lisboa), Hamburger Bahnhof, La Plaque Tournante, BKA, Berghain (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Le Lieu (Quebec), Fylkingen (Stockholm), XP (Beijing), Levontin 7 (Tel Aviv), Black Box (Copenhagen), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich), Musée des Beaux-Arts (Nantes), CMMAS (Morelia), LAB; FAMUS, ESMDM, CEIDDA (Monterrey).

His visual sound art works, including his photoscores, are collected by Institut Français of Monterrey, CEIDDA (Monterrey), Beinecke Library (New Haven), Bibliothèque Kandinsky (Centre Pompidou), Emory University (Atlanta). They have been exhibited as mute concerts at Galerie Lara Vincy, Galerie Satellite, La Topographie de l'Art, Galerie Incognito (Paris), CEIDDA (Monterrey), The Outsiders Gallery (London), La Plaque Tournante (Berlin). Acquaviva's music was also broadcasted on Deutschlandfunk Kultur, SWR, BBC-Radio3, Resonance FM, France Culture (Atelier de Création Radiophonique / Creation on Air), France Musique(s), Radio Libertaire, Radio Canada, ClockTower Gallery, WGXC (NY). Composing residencies include Emily Harvey Fondation (Venezia), EMS (Stockholm), CEIDDA (Monterrey), Institut Culturel Français (Bremen), La Grande Fabrique (Dieppe). Acquaviva received commissions from ACR, France Culture, a State Command from the French Ministery of Culture, Motus (Crest), Arts Birthday's (Berlin) and received the SWR Karl Sczuka Prize,  Fondation Beaumarchais Prize with Maria Faustino and was nominated for the Phonurgia Nova Awards "Hors Compétition". 

The music critic Franck Mallet wrote an essay "Introducing Frédéric Acquaviva" in Art Press no. 393, Paris, in  2012 and by 2018 the scholar Yoann Sarrat published a special issue of his magazine "Freeing (Our Bodies) #2" on the music of Frédéric Acquaviva with 39 contributions including Henri Chopin, Maurice Lemaître, ORLAN, Dorothy Iannone, Jacques Lizène, Otto Muehl, Jean-François Bory, Philip Corner, Bernard Heidsieck, Tom Johnson. In June 2021, Yoann Sarrat published at Al Dante / Les Presses du Réel the first study (350 pages) on Frédéric Acquaviva's music : Phonosophie et corporalité compositionnelle : L' art sonore de Frédéric Acquaviva. In 2022, Denis Dufour dedicated a 67′ piece to Frédéric Acquaviva, FA 67-54, his sound portrait that was premiered at Futura Festival in 2023.

Frédéric Acquaviva is also a self taught free lance curator, member of the International Art Critic Association (AICA), having received two fellowships from Yale University (Beinecke Library), the FILAF Prize for the best contemporary Art Book in 2019 with his first monography of Isidore Isou (Editions du Griffon), the Berlin Senate Awards in 2017 for the artist place La Plaque Tournante that he ran with Loré Lixenberg in Berlin and now as a nomadic space. His Lettrist Corpus, in 3 volumes of 500 pages, was shortlisted for the Bibliographic Prize at Grand Palais hors les murs. Acquaviva has published or written around 80 books for OEI (Stockholm), Editions du Griffon (Suisse), Al Dante (Paris), La Différence (Paris), Les Presses du Réel (Paris), Francesco Conz (Verona), Marval/Rue Visconti (Paris), created the multimedia magazine CRU and curated around 100 international exhibitions including major retrospectives at MACBA, (Barcelona), SERRALVES (Porto), Reina Sofia (Madrid), De Montfort University (Leicester) and Passage de Retz (Paris).