Bologna July 5

NO Video today as its all been logging and travelling down from Portogruaro via Venice to Bologna. Instead I thought I would flesh out some of the ideas and background behind this project.

BOLOGNA SUNSET OVER TRAIN STATION

Part One - Back in the day

I first became aware of Luigi Russolo in my early twenties ( that's a while ago now!). I was pretty much a full time experimental musician ( unemployed ) in Melbourne. The flavour of those years was grunge, so we were all pretty anti-grunge instead spending our nights creating and laughing about some pretty strange sounds. Russolo's famed text contemporary music. The fact that it had been written at least 60 years before any real sign of Industrial music still amazes me.

Over the years and particularly as the internet developed it was possible to learn a little more. But not much! Russolo's grand plan to change the face of modern music was jettisoned in the post war years as he returned to painting and, more importantly to me, the esoteric. Knowledge of his activities was hard to find, in Italy slightly easier but for the most Russolo became a forgotten pioneer in the development of experimental music and noise art.

In 2012 I was asked to write a tribute to Russolo on the 100th anniversary of the publishing of L'arte de rumori . It was a wonderful opportunity and quickly snowballed into a 13 person ensemble, the complete re-design and building of his most famous instruments the Intonarumori , power tools galore, scissor lifts and just to make sure it was noisy enough we handed out hundreds of whistles and clappers etc to the audience. Everyone had a good time.

Something else happened too, all that noise was transformative, not I think purely through extraneous volume but something else. Something about physically pounding and cranking those machines. It's not like I thought I saw god or anything, nothing like that, but the energy released through ensemble and audience going nuts tasted a bit like anything was possible, it was organic and soulful if brutal to the senses.

I have been using the intonarumoris in various projects ever since and was always intrigued about the 'high' the was somehow produced playing them. it seemed much more than just a means to destroy the status quo which is thrust of L'arte de rumori .

A couple of years ago I stumbled across an amazing book by Prof Luciano Chessa, an Italian/American musician and academic who did his thesis on Russolo. He argued strongly that there was a spiritual component and basis for the use of the Intonarumori. This of course set my mind racing as it seemed suddenly I had found someone who thought something along the same lines as I had been thinking. Even better Luciano Chessa is extremely clever and well respected, much cleverer than I could ever hope to be!

Luciano Chessa's book has opened up new artistic paths for my continuing interest in Russolo. This project is in a large part about exploring those paths. The connections between Futurism and the spiritual ( a seemingly unlikely coupling), between Russolo's urge to destroy and to connect and, as always investigating further into the mind of one of the 20th centuries most influential and overlooked musicians.

More to come on this, maybe on another day of transit and logging.