Last winter, I had an honour to perform at NEXT – Festival of Advanced Electronic Music in Bratislava, Slovakia. Here’s an interview about my performance Art of Noises based on Luigi Russolo’s Futurist Manifest (1913) and consequent workshop OSC^n – Open Source Collaborative Noise. In the performance, the manifesto’s text is translated into morse code light flashes and back to visual and aural noise through live-processed text based video and light responsive synthesiser that we later attempted to re-build at the workshop.
The excerpt heard and seen:
“It is hardly possible to consider the enormous mobilization of energy that a modern orchestra represents without concluding that the acoustic results are pitiful. Is there anything more ridiculous in the world than twenty men slaving to increase the plaintive meeowing of violins? This plain talk will make all music maniacs jump in their seats, which will stir up a bit the somnolent atmosphere of concert halls.
Shall we visit one of them together? Let’s go inside one of these hospitals for anemic sounds. See, the first bar is dripping with boredom stemming from familiarity, and gives you a foretaste of the boredom that will drip from the next bar. In this fashion we sip from bar to bar two or three sorts of boredom and keep waiting for the extraordinary sensation that will never materialize.
Musical sound is too restricted in the variety and the quality of its tones. The most complicated orchestra can be reduced to four or five categories of instruments with different sound tones. We must break at all cost from this restrictive circle of pure sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise sounds!
Away! We cannot much longer restrain our desire to create finally a new musical reality with a generous distribution of resonant slaps in the face discarding violins, pianos doublebasses and plainitive organs. Let us break out! Its no good objecting that noises are exclusively loud and disagreeable to the ear. It seems pointless to enumerate all the graceful and delicate noises that afford pleasant sensations.
We invite all the truly gifted and bold young musicians to analyze all noises so as to understand their different composing rhythms, their main and their secondary pitches. Thus the comprehension, the taste, and the passion for noises will be developed. Our expanded sensibility will gain futurist ears as it already has futurist eyes. This new orchestra will produce the most complex and newest sonic emotions, not through a succession of imitative noises reproducing life, but rather through a fantastic association of these varied sounds.
The variety of noises is infinite!”
And some pictures from the workshop
More on the performance and the festival itself (highly reccomended)
https://nextfestival.sk/2023/artist/michal-mitro-art-of-noises-a-v/