Book review: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult

Abstract

Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. 296 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-27064-0 (paperback). $34.95.In 2006, I visited an exhibition entitled Luigi Russolo: Life and Works of a Futurist at a little gallery in London, the Estorick Collection, dedicated to modern Italian art. Included in the show were not only Russolo's paintings, a curious mix of typically dynamic futurist scenes and rather less stereotypical mystical reveries, but also peculiar wooden boxes. Upon request, the attendant turned a handle attached to these boxes, filling the gallery with strange sounds. These were Russolo's intonarumori [noise intoners]. Well, they were reconstructions: the original noise-creating machines which Russolo built between 1913 and 1921, and which were infamously demonstrated in the concert halls of London and Paris at the time, were destroyed during the Second World War. Indeed, as Luciano Chessa explains in his fascinating account of Russolo's noise experiments, Luigi Russolo, Futurist, we cannot know what Russolo's original intonarumori really sounded like. Recordings made at the time are too crude and we do not possess precise enough specifications to rebuild them faithfully. According to Chessa, astonishingly, the best source of reference to appreciate the intonarumori's sound is the use of glissando in Maurice Ravel's L'enfant et les sortile`ges. Ravel had originally intended to use one of Russolo's noise intoners in the score and, according to Chessa, given his 'supreme ability as an orchestrator', Ravel's L'enfant 'may be considered a more faithful picture of the intonarumori than any gramophone recording' (150).The true aural quality of the intonarumori matters because, contrary to received wisdom about Russolo and the Italian futurist movement, Chessa argues that futurist noise machines were scientific experiments in the mystical and spiritual power of sound vibrations. In such experiments, the spiritual effects of sound were dependent on precise

The Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media & Culture 2023: Official Conference Proceedings

“…The use of glitching in art is not new, and glitching is already recognized as a form of expression in art. There have been attempts to use glitch sounds for quite some time: Luigi Russolo built a mechanical noise generator in the early 1900s (Luciano, 2012); Michael Pinder created glitch sounds through the intentional misuse of the Mellotron (Fabbri, 2017); and the Mellotron (Mellotron) was developed in the 1960s as an analog playback device. Christian Marclay is creating sound collages using damaged vinyl records (Christian, 2023).…”