A Jigsaw Puzzle of Sound: Luigi Russolo‘s Art of Noises manifesto, 1913.
(Compositions by Futurist musicians, including L. Russolo, can be heard at Musica Futurista)

For an introduction to Russolo’s concepts of noise, I have turned to musician and composer David Toop, writing in Tate etc:

“Almost 100 years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo proposed the idea that urban and industrial sounds, including the noises of modern warfare, were a new and enthralling source of musical material. Their nature was unprecedented – their intensity, volume, texture and shape – and so musical history should come to an end. The slow evolution of musical language had suffered a massive stroke, to be replaced by a vigorously healthy art of noises.”

It’s a century since Russolo wrote it, and more than 50 years since John Cage questioned the fundamental difference between music and noise, but but for most, the art of noise is still “a puzzle with no satisfactory solution” [Toop, ibid].

Reading the Art of Noises manifesto by Luigi Russolo, I am aware of the fickle and contradictory nature of hindsight. Reading this letter, written shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, is like reading a palimpsest upon which the history of noise art, sound art, musique concrete, phonology, plunderphonics, electronica, acousmatica – whatever term you’d apply to your own niche interest within the radicalisation of listening habits from the mainstream to the unknown, the classical to the experimental – of a hundred years has been written.

It is an illuminating and illusory, concise and confrontational articulation of the directional shift in music making, sound accretion, instrumental innovation in the mechanised world; from harmony to dissonance, and ultimately the breakdown of music into noise, to be mirrored by the shift from instrument to mechanical tone, and it could have been written yesterday, or in the ‘eighties, the ‘sixties, the ‘thirties, even. It predates Cage, Varèse and magnetic tape, yet true to Futurist form, its radicalism is in the pronouncement that noise can dominate music, much as industrial noise has come to dominate the landscape. Man conquers nature, and the authoritarian tone of the Fascist politics of Italian Futurism is unmistakable even in the championing of noise against the rigid structures of established music.

The world post-mechanical reproduction has altered sound and how we listen as much as it has altered visual media and how we see. This document sets out the ambitions and failures of a manifesto for listening change in as insightful a way as one could hope for from a man with no formal musical training, no knowledge of instruments, an intense distrust of ‘pure sounds’ and desire to hear the noise of the battlefield usurp the harmony of the orchestra.

Ultimately, his manifesto sees the Futurist movement in noise art borne out by musicians conducting a heartfelt study of noises, committing such noises to memory – now recorded – and composing with noise as source, yet not quite in the manner Russolo predicted;

“After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.”.

Whilst the post-industrialisation of global economic centres (the centres of art markets, and we’re to believe, art-making) has put paid to this ambition, the increased influence of noise art, coupled with urban renewal, has led to an audibility, and visibility of experimental sound in our cities. The shift from industry to culture as signifier of urban capital has brought with it the transformation of sites such as Bankside power station, the Baltic flour mill, and Liverpool’s Dockside developments into major contemporary art spaces, and the Turbine Hall, in exhibitions by the like of Bruce Nauman, can once again manifest the sound of industrial urbanism, bringing noise art home to the factory. We may not see with Futurist eyes the beauty of violence in war, but we might be beginning to hear art with Futurist ears.

Looking into Futurist Noise Art led me to trace a small trail – a jigsaw puzzle of ill-fitting parts – through sound and its heightened sensibilities, which I invite you to explore here.

Russolo proposes radically new ways of structuring sound, explored by musicians such as Varèse, Cage [2, 3], Stockhausen, and the proponents of Musique Concrete and Sound Art.

A talk by Douglas Kahn, entitled “Cage & Phonography” [below], and an article exploring the impact of phonography and its application in art.

‘Cage at Wesleyan’ Symposium, Middletown, Conn. 27 February 1988
the means of recording sound – a critique of sound,  Varèse and Cage from outwith music, outwith aesthetics.

The impact of noise and other stimuli on the inhabitants of the city is articulated in terms of anxieties and societal change by theoretician Georg Simmel, in his seminal essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’.

The autistic spectrum of auditory disorders renders 90% of those with autistic characteristics ‘hypersensitive‘ to auditory stimuli, many perceiving all sound without selection, unable to filter the important auditory signals from the irrelevant. Acute sonic perception, hearing every noise for what it is, registered without discrimination – an ideal of sorts in Futurist noise – leads to an inability to cope with the modern urban environment and its incessant stimuli.

The figure of the flaneur enters societal discourse, and his modern counterpart is the citizen sporting headphones – the ipod* user – within, and distinct from the crowd.
*already having supplanted its forebear, the Walkman, by providing digital storage for near-endless continuous play.

The city structure as source of ‘industrial’ soundscape inspires visual artists such as Dadaists, Assemblage and Pop art, Kinetic artists such as Jean Tinguely, and sound artists such as David Cunningham and Christian Marclay.

Films such as Godard‘s Nouvelle Vague, Wenders’ Alice in The Cities, Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy make use of experimental and noise music as soundtracks to visual poems on urbanity. One scene in Delicatessen (dir. Jeunet/Caro), contrived compared to these realists, nevertheless makes plain the link between urban dwelling and concrete noise art.

The literary sphere of Georges Perec’s ‘Life: A User’s Manual‘ [Time Magazine review] allows the reader a lingering view on tenement dwelling in much the same way Jeunet and Caro encourage the viewer to eavesdrop – with each chapter a room, each plotline an apartment in this great Parisian building framing the pieces of the puzzle that create the work. Urban life, as much as sound, is shown to be a jigsaw requiring sorting, the catalyst in this case is mortality – a struggle towards achieving our goals in life, and the mystery left behind in death.

Noise art, in its explosive, anti-form, hidden and recollected nature, could be seen to explore the abject in sound – the aesthetic of noise is death and memory, with rhythm bringing sex to the mix (as witnessed in Delicatessen). Here’s an essay on contemporary musicians that delve into the abject, the excreted and sublime aesthetics of noise, and a timeline of noise music.

Finally, two great experimental music blogs for those interested in hearing more, and an essay on noise as critique…

http://continuo.wordpress.com/

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.