Luigi Russolo’s variety of acoustic noise-generating instruments called Intonarumori performed entirely unique compositions, specially written by Russolo between 1910 and 1930. They were so unique that, after the originals were destroyed or lost, highly studious reconstructions were created, painstakingly. What I find interesting about Russolo’s work, and the intricate philosophy that permeated it, is how it acts almost as a bridge between Romantic occultist theory and Italian Futurist modernity of the era. François Escal, as paraphrased by Luciano Chessa posited that ,’in the development of the art of noises Russolo’s aural frame of reference first shifted from the Nature to the Real… the meeting place of noises from nature and those produced, directly or indirectly as a result of human industry, by machines’ (Chessa, 2012, p.137). This intersection of a contemporary understanding of what constituted the ‘natural world’ and the oncoming, ever-increasingly relevant study and application of noise in art is extremely prescient, and places Russolo as a man ahead of his time. It’s very exciting to read, as this perspective really informs my own practices and experiments, as not ‘imitative of life, but rather through a fantastic combination of these varied tones”: in between the noises and the art of noises there is the mediation of the artist as full, inspired subject’ (Escal, 1975, p.92f). Russolo believed the interaction of raw noise generated by the mechanisms inside the Intonarumori was sculpted and shaped by the artist in an act of near-alchemy; the fusion of natural energy and mechanics to create sound art.
In Russolo’s Futurist manifesto The Art of Noise (1913), he preempts electronics as an emergent technology that would require the human ear, and the way we hear sound, to evolve. I am inspired by his blurring of the definition of ‘man-made’ as a concept; how many layers of chaos and unobstructed interference can render the designation of man-made sound obsolete, or at the very least obscured? In my own work, I am deeply interested in embracing the unpredictable chaos magick in the interaction between so-called nature and technology. They ways they relationally interplay with each other. Informed by Russolo’s philosophies, this is a vein I want to mine more.
Chessa. L. (2012) Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.137
Escal, F. (1975) ‘Le futurisme et la musique’, Europe 53, pp.92f