Futurism & Dada Reviewed
(LTM)
emusic
by Simon Reynolds
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
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.
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