Tuesday, April 28, 2009
russolo intonarumori futurism who gives a damn?
alight music nerds, i've been researching russolo and futurism, specifically the intonarumori, instruments that made "noise" instead of traditional "musical" sounds. aside from the whole neubatuen, srl, grimey industrial trajectory, who are some others that have been influenced by this directly? the development of synthesizers isn't really what i'm thinking about here since the initial goals of synthesis were to create musical sound. Musique concrete i suppose is a good path to follow, using recorded sounds of the city, machinery, modern living. Are there more modern examples anyone can think of?
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merzbow or that cute asian lady that used to be in Atari Teenage Riot. Forgot her name, but she wears white facepaint.
ReplyDeleteThis is maybe way off base, but i think about shoenberg' reinterpretations of tonality and experiments in atonality (serialism? 12-tone, etc..) and he was pretty instrumental (no pun intended) in chromatic music... but all that used regular instruments... the trick was that the songs didn't have tonal centers... SO.. maybe if you played a piano, but not as a piano in the tone/melody generating sense, but as a noise maker, maybe that's philosophically close enough..
ReplyDeleteumm... who else... john cage (duh) prepared piano and all that.
steve reich and his phase experiments.... one of which used clapping (i think it was "violin phase") and was intended to be a piece that used "no other instrument than the human body"
lessee... uh.. George Crumb, who composed vox balenae.. requires musicians to play their instruments as non instruments, or at least in nonconventional ways, like using their bows on small goblets and shit..
who else.. who else... i can't think of anyone else
bing bang boom
AGL
harry partch may fit, but his deal was that he built instruments to fit his micro tonal scale. It still may be musical notes, but not the 12 note western scale. He made all kinds of instruments, and he was a railroad bum.
ReplyDeleteTo make the discussion more interesting, you can argue that even the "noise" instruments in discussion are still using frequencies that can be associated with "tonal" notes or micro tones. So, a white noise machine is just a combination of all the frequencies a human can hear.
A musical sound's only factors in making it "musical" would be 1- the fact a noise/sound/tone/wave is present (or not present if you get into that Cage philosophical battle) and that it was organized in time.
I will interject more once I have thought about it more . . .
boom boom pow
Merzbow is definitely the best example I can think of and he's been doing it since the 70's.
ReplyDeleteBuy The Japanese/American Noise Treaty and you'll have like 40 answers. Starting to think I lucked out for a 14 year old in CLT.
OK OK OK .. .so i think i was pretty off base with the shoenberg thing... here is some other stuff i came up with.. maybe it's closer to what the fuck is up with this crazy shit. ...
ReplyDeleteMessiaen- he did the hit jam "symphony for the end of the world", which i've actually seen performed at EMF... he did a sound installation for some light and water shows @ the french expo using a thing called "the ondes martenot" which seems like a weird theremin sounding thing, but the wikipedia chart of the noises it makes looks neat and in keeping with "making new sounds".... BTW, messiaen was really fascinated by birdsong, which he tried to notate... neat..
um, there's stockhausen who was pretty crucial in exploring electronic music.. he has come to conclusion that "it was an unacceptable oversimplification to regard timbres as stable entities" and started looking into statistical criteria for note generation (that leads into 'chance music' stuff)... looking into the studio he researched electronic music at might yield some zingers... also check out a piece of music he wrot to be performed by 4 different musicians circling the theater in 4 helicopters synchronized by a click track..
----> and this thing i copied from wikipedia:
Mantra is a composition by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. The work is scored for two ring-modulated pianos; each player is also equipped with a chromatic set of crotales (antique cymbals) and a wood block, and one player is equipped with a short-wave radio producing morse code or a magnetic tape recording of morse code.
I know you're being careful about using too much modern stuff to reference (read industrial music/noise) but what about little tweaks musicians like the beach boys used, for instance picking up one side of their amp and dropping it to make the reverb tank go off.... or the weird sounds and backmasking that the beatles used.... or the dollar bill johnny cash used to put under his strings to make it sound like there was a drummer...
i dunno... i want to compose a symphony for 47 airhorns to be played in a YMCA bathroom... you can reference me if you want..
YR DUDE
AGL, DJ-1993-J
Nic Endo is the girl that was in ATR. Also Kites, Wolf Eyes or even Black Dice might also work.
ReplyDeleteMost non-industrial modern examples I can think of straight off (e.g. A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure) utilize sampling and thus miss the mark you're trying to hit a bit (I think). I would follow a Google trail starting with the most inaccessible 1% of William Basinski or Monolake and see where it takes you. There's also circuit-bending, which is probably the closest present-day analogue to what Russolo did.
ReplyDeletedamn. matmos is good. i was thinking about foley room too.
ReplyDeletei think, in keeping with futurist doctrine, neubauten kinda' takes it. building their own instruments, being about destroying shit and building shit. i'll post up my paper when i finish it.