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Play that funky noise intoner! The rumblers, gurglers and howlers of the world’s strangest orchestra
With their funnel-like hooters and cupboard-like shapes, they looked bizarre, sounded wild and left audiences baffled. Now, more than 100 years on, Luigi Russolo’s orchestra of futurist machine instruments is back …
Genres like sound art, noise music, musique concrète, and industrial techno all trace their origins back to that motley assortment of rumbling, gurgling, howling boxes. But an ambitious project to rebuild the futurist instrumentarium will see their replicas return to the London stage this week in a concert featuring new works specially composed for them by Pauline Oliveros, Peter Ablinger, Tony Conrad, and others. “We must break out of this limited circle of sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.” These days it is perfectly common for records to contain samples of car horns, gun shots and cash registers, but decades before the first works composed using real-world noises, Russolo, just 28 at the time, could already imagine a music made of “the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of power saws, the starting of a streetcar on the tracks”.
Or read this on The Guardian