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Subject: Dead Media Working Note 05.8

Dead Medium: Russolo's Intonarumori

From: viktrola_AT_nai.net (Frank Davis)
Source: ELEVATOR MUSIC by Joseph Lanza St. Martin's Press 1994 ISBN 0-312-1-0540-1

Page 15:

"Luigi Russolo, an Italian Futurist, lauded the modern era's beautiful machine clangor. A painter, not a musician, Russolo was nonetheless committed to being the Futurist movement's musical activist. His 1913 manifesto "The Art of Noises" rejected inherited preferences for harmony in favor of the dissonant masterpieces that serenade us everyday without our conscious awareness. Conventional pianos, violins, harps, and horns were inferior to 'the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations, and underground railways.'"

"To realize his dream of a life when 'every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises', Russolo created Intonarumori (Noise Intoners) - gangly speaker boxes that transmitted such chainsaw melodies as an internal combustion engine gurgling in ten whole-tones. He concocted four main noise families: the Exploder, the Crackler, the Buzzer, and the Scraper; the pitch and timbre of each were manipulated by a side lever."

(((It is of note that Russolo's influence can be seen years later in not only the name of a once popular British sampling collective, The Art Of Noise, but also in the industrial movement of the 80's with such groups as Throbbing Gristle and Einsturzende Neubauten re- discovering the "noise as music" principle.)))

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