futuredada

Various Artists

Futurism & Dada Reviewed

(LTM)
emusic

by Simon Reynolds

This compilation is a time capsule from early Twentieth Century Europe, when the continent swarmed with -isms: not just famous ones such as Cubism and Constructivism, but nutty lesser-knowns like the Nunists and Rayonists too. Although they differed on the precise details, these manifesto-brandishing movements typically called for an utter overhaul of established ideas of art, arguing that Western Civilisation, enervated and sagging into decadence, needed an invigorating injection of barbarian iconoclasm to renew itself. The material from the Italian Futurists on this anthology overlaps somewhat with LTM’s Musica Futurista collection, but includes a much longer version of “Risveglio di una Citta,” a symphony of scrapes and whirs woven by Luigi Russolo, the movement’s chief musical theoretician and coiner of the enduring buzz-concept “the art of noises.” His brother Antonio’s “Chorale” sounds like a conventional classical overture, except there’s this roar of turbulence that intermittently rears up, as though’s there’s a gale raging outside the concert hall. Wyndham Lewis, British futurist sympathizer and leader of his very own -ism Vorticism, recites a poem that once probably seemed audaciously “free” with its run-on stanzas, but now positively creaks with starchy quaintness. The Dadaist material, however, retains a good portion of its originally scandalous shock of the new. On the noise-poem “L’Amiral Cherche Une Maison A Louer”, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck unleash a polyphonic babble of multilingual nonsense, punctuated with circus-clown irruptions of  rude noise, enough to get your blood boiling with excitement almost a century later. Huelsenbeck also contributes a great reminiscence of the genesis of Dada, incongruously backed with a Indian raga drone. Kurt Schwitters’ life-long work-in-process “Die Sonate in Urlauten”, captured for posterity in 1938, is a tour de force of phonetic poetry, peppering your ears with flurries of phonemes and scattering consonants like confetti around your head. It’s oddly reassuring that works by the Socialist-leaning Dadaists have aged far better than the efforts of the Futurists, Mussolini fans almost to a man.

                                                                                   

Various Artists

Musica Futurista: The Art of Noises

Salon/LTM
emusic

by Simon Reynolds

As their name suggests, the Italian Futurists worshipped technology and urban life, while stridently despising the romanticisation of the pastoral and the pre-industrial past. They proposed a stringent program of modernism that would radically reinvent everything from from painting to politics to pasta (which their leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proposed replacing with an entrée of perfumed sand!). Music was not left unscathed. To put into practice his theories about a new form of composition called “the art of noises” that would abandon tonality and the traditional orchestral palette of timbres, Luigi Russolo invented brand-new instruments, the famous Intonarumori (which roughly translates as “noise-intoning machines”).  On Musica Futurista, the most exciting tracks are test-tone showcases for Russolo contraptions like the Gorgogliatore (“gurgler”), which generates a sproing-ing metallic rustle, and the Ululatore, which supposedly translates as “hooter” but sounds more like a peevish vacuum cleaner with a piece of sandpaper stuck in its craw.  When the Futurists relied on conventional instruments, their efforts suffered from being, well, not futuristic enough, such that you can you can see why Russolo went to the bother of building the Intonarumori. On Musica Futurista, there’s rather too much clunky piano bombast, heavy on left-hand basso profundo chordings, from figures like Francesco Balilla Pratella, who supplies a series of etudes entitled “La Guerra”. Apart from the Intonarumori offerings, the best tracks come from the non-musician Marinetti. His prose poem “La Battaglia Di Adrianopoli” uses onomatopoeia to recreate the siege cannons and machine guns of the Balkan Wars, and like “La Guerra” showcases the Futurists’ highly suspect exaltation of modern mechanised warfare. Also relying solely on that most ancient instrument, the human voice, his “Parole in Liberta” offers more abstract sound-poetry, although if you don’t understand Italian most of the liberties Marinetti takes with sense and syntax will necessarily be lost on you. Composed in the 1930s and constructed out of found sounds (water  splashes, motor cars,  weeping babies, birdsong, etc) and protracted stretches of near-silence, the 13 minute “Cinque Sintesi Radiofoniche” anticipates and preempts the post-WW2 musique concrete of  Pierres Schaeffer and Henry.  Bravo, F.T., bravo: this time at least, you reached the future way ahead of the pack.