"The Art of Noises " by Luigi Russolo :: Italian Futurist

'The Art of Noises'
Luigi Russolo

Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,

In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.

Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.

And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.

The Middle Ages, with the development and modification of the Greek tetrachordal system, with the Gregorian chant and popular songs, enriched the art of music, but continued to consider sound in its development in time, a restricted notion, but one which lasted many centuries, and which still can be found in the Flemish contrapuntalists' most complicated polyphonies.

The chord did not exist, the development of the various parts was not subornated to the chord that these parts put together could produce; the conception of the parts was horizontal not vertical. The desire, search, and taste for a simultaneous union of different sounds, that is for the chord (complex sound), were gradually made manifest, passing from the consonant perfect chord with a few passing dissonances, to the complicated and persistent dissonances that characterize contemporary music.

At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.

This musical evolution is paralleled by the multiplication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.

To excite and exalt our sensibilities, music developed towards the most complex polyphony and the maximum variety, seeking the most complicated successions of dissonant chords and vaguely preparing the creation of musical noise. This evolution towards "noise sound" was not possible before now. The ear of an eighteenth-century man could never have endured the discordant intensity of certain chords produced by our orchestras (whose members have trebled in number since then). To our ears, on the other hand, they sound pleasant, since our hearing has already been educated by modern life, so teeming with variegated noises. But our ears are not satisfied merely with this, and demand an abundance of acoustic emotions.

On the other hand, musical sound is too limited in its qualitative variety of tones. The most complex orchestras boil down to four or five types of instrument, varying in timber: instruments played by bow or plucking, by blowing into metal or wood, and by percussion. And so modern music goes round in this small circle, struggling in vain to create new ranges of tones.

This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of "noise-sound" conquered.

Besides, everyone will acknowledge that all musical sound carries with it a development of sensations that are already familiar and exhausted, and which predispose the listener to boredom in spite of the efforts of all the innovatory musicians. We Futurists have deeply loved and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the "Eroica" or the "Pastoral".

We cannot see that enormous apparatus of force that the modern orchestra represents without feeling the most profound and total disillusion at the paltry acoustic results. Do you know of any sight more ridiculous than that of twenty men furiously bent on the redoubling the mewing of a violin? All this will naturally make the music-lovers scream, and will perhaps enliven the sleepy atmosphere of concert halls. Let us now, as Futurists, enter one of these hospitals for anaemic sounds. There: the first bar brings the boredom of familiarity to your ear and anticipates the boredom of the bar to follow. Let us relish, from bar to bar, two or three varieties of genuine boredom, waiting all the while for the extraordinary sensation that never comes.

Meanwhile a repugnant mixture is concocted from monotonous sensations and the idiotic religious emotion of listeners buddhistically drunk with repeating for the nth time their more or less snobbish or second-hand ecstasy.

Away! Let us break out since 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, double-basses and plaintive organs. Let us break out!

It's 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.

To convince ourselves of the amazing variety of noises, it is enough to think of the rumble of thunder, the whistle of the wind, the roar of a waterfall, the gurgling of a brook, the rustling of leaves, the clatter of a trotting horse as it draws into the distance, the lurching jolts of a cart on pavings, and of the generous, solemn, white breathing of a nocturnal city; of all the noises made by wild and domestic animals, and of all those that can be made by the mouth of man without resorting to speaking or singing.

Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes, and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din, from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways.

Nor should the newest noises of modern war be forgotten. Recently, the poet Marinetti, in a letter from the trenches of Adrianopolis, described to me with marvelous free words the orchestra of a great battle:

"every 5 seconds siege cannons gutting space with a chord ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB mutiny of 500 echos smashing scattering it to infinity. In the center of this hateful ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB area 50 square kilometers leaping bursts lacerations fists rapid fire batteries. Violence ferocity regularity this deep bass scanning the strange shrill frantic crowds of the battle Fury breathless ears eyes nostrils open! load! fire! what a joy to hear to smell completely taratatata of the machine guns screaming a breathless under the stings slaps traak-traak whips pic-pac-pum-tumb weirdness leaps 200 meters range Far far in back of the orchestra pools muddying huffing goaded oxen wagons pluff-plaff horse action flic flac zing zing shaaack laughing whinnies the tiiinkling jiiingling tramping 3 Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craaac [slowly] Shumi Maritza or Karvavena ZANG-TUMB-TUUUMB toc-toc-toc-toc [fast] crooc-craac [slowly] crys of officers slamming about like brass plates pan here paak there BUUUM ching chaak [very fast] cha-cha-cha-cha-chaak down there up around high up look out your head beautiful! Flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing flashing footlights of the forts down there behind that smoke Shukri Pasha communicates by phone with 27 forts in Turkish in German Allo! Ibrahim! Rudolf! allo! allo! actors parts echos of prompters scenery of smoke forests applause odor of hay mud dung I no longer feel my frozen feet odor of gunsmoke odor of rot Tympani flutes clarinets everywhere low high birds chirping blessed shadows cheep-cheep-cheep green breezes flocks don-dan-don-din-baaah Orchestra madmen pommel the performers they terribly beaten playing Great din not erasing clearing up cutting off slighter noises very small scraps of echos in the theater area 300 square kilometers Rivers Maritza Tungia stretched out Rodolpi Mountains rearing heights loges boxes 2000 shrapnels waving arms exploding very white handkerchiefs full of gold srrrr-TUMB-TUMB 2000 raised grenades tearing out bursts of very black hair ZANG-srrrr-TUMB-ZANG-TUMB-TUUMB the orchestra of the noises of war swelling under a held note of silence in the high sky round golden balloon that observes the firing..."

We want to attune and regulate this tremendous variety of noises harmonically and rhythmically.

To attune noises does not mean to detract from all their irregular movements and vibrations in time and intensity, but rather to give gradation and tone to the most strongly predominant of these vibrations.

Noise in fact can be differentiated from sound only in so far as the vibrations which produce it are confused and irregular, both in time and intensity.

Every noise has a tone, and sometimes also a harmony that predominates over the body of its irregular vibrations.

Now, it is from this dominating characteristic tone that a practical possibility can be derived for attuning it, that is to give a certain noise not merely one tone, but a variety of tones, without losing its characteristic tone, by which I mean the one which distinguishes it. In this way any noise obtained by a rotating movement can offer an entire ascending or descending chromatic scale, if the speed of the movement is increased or decreased.

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an over familiar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure.

Although it is characteristic of noise to recall us brutally to real life, the art of noise must not limit itself to imitative reproduction. It will achieve its most emotive power in the acoustic enjoyment, in its own right, that the artist's inspiration will extract from combined noises.

Here are the 6 families of noises of the Futurist orchestra which we will soon set in motion mechanically:

1 2 3 4 5 6
Rumbles Whistles Whispers Screeches Noises obtained by percussion on metal, wood, skin, stone, tarracotta, etc. Voices of animals and men:
Roars Hisses Murmurs Creaks Shouts
Explosions Snorts Mumbles Rustles Screams
Crashes Grumbles Buzzes Groans
Splashes Gurgles Crackles Shrieks
Booms Scrapes Howls
Laughs
Wheezes
Sobs

In this inventory we have encapsulated the most characteristic of the fundamental noises; the others are merely the associations and combinations of these. The rhythmic movements of a noise are infinite: just as with tone there is always a predominant rhythm, but around this numerous other secondary rhythms can be felt.

Conclusions

1. Futurist musicians must continually enlarge and enrich the field of sounds. This corresponds to a need in our sensibility. We note, in fact, in the composers of genius, a tendency towards the most complicated dissonances. As these move further and further away from pure sound, they almost achieve noise-sound. This need and this tendency cannot be satisfied except by the adding and the substitution of noises for sounds.

2. Futurist musicians must substitute for the limited variety of tones posessed by orchestral instruments today the infinite variety of tones of noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.

3. The musician's sensibility, liberated from facile and traditional Rhythm, must find in noises the means of extension and renewal, given that every noise offers the union of the most diverse rhythms apart from the predominant one.

4. Since every noise contains a predominant general tone in its irregular vibrations it will be easy to obtain in the construction of instruments which imitate them a sufficiently extended variety of tones, semitones, and quarter-tones. This variety of tones will not remove the characteristic tone from each noise, but will amplify only its texture or extension.

5. The practical difficulties in constructing these instruments are not serious. Once the mechanical principle which produces the noise has been found, its tone can be changed by following the same general laws of acoustics. If the instrument is to have a rotating movement, for instance, we will increase or decrease the speed, whereas if it is to not have rotating movement the noise-producing parts will vary in size and tautness.

6. The new orchestra will achieve the most complex and novel aural emotions not by incorporating a succession of life-imitating noises but by manipulating fantastic juxtapositions of these varied tones and rhythms. Therefore an instrument will have to offer the possibility of tone changes and varying degrees of amplification.

7. The variety of noises is infinite. If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.

8. We therefore invite young musicians of talent to conduct a sustained observation of all noises, in order to understand the various rhythms of which they are composed, their principal and secondary tones. By comparing the various tones of noises with those of sounds, they will be convinced of the extent to which the former exceed the latter. This will afford not only an understanding, but also a taste and passion for noises. After being conquered by Futurist eyes our multiplied sensibilities will at last hear with Futurist ears. In this way the motors and machines of our industrial cities will one day be consciously attuned, so that every factory will be transformed into an intoxicating orchestra of noises.

Dear Pratella, I submit these statements to your Futurist genius, inviting your discussion. I am not a musician, I have therefore no acoustical predilictions, nor any works to defend. I am a Futurist painter using a much loved art to project my determination to renew everything. And so, bolder than a professional musician could be, unconcerned by my apparent incompetence and convinced that all rights and possibilities open up to daring, I have been able to initiate the great renewal of music by means of the Art of Noises.

Switched On: Early Electronic Oddities

EARLY ELECTRONIC ODDITIES is an exploration of the strange and subliminal sounds of early electronic musical instruments from 1860 to 1970, and many now almost obsolete daring and experimental creations like the Mixtur-Trautonium, the Ondes-Martenot, the Rhythmicon, the Ondioline, the RCA synthesizer, electro-theremin and the inventions of the Italian Futurists and Raymond Scott. Live discussions, field recordings and amazingly unearthed rare recordings presented by two theremin players, Miss Hypnotique and Bruce Woolley. Features recorded contributions by Bob Moog and Jean-Jacques Perrey.
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Download MP3's of the archived broadcast:

[Early Electronic Oddities Pt. 1 (33 MB)] // [Early Electronic Oddities Pt. 2 (30 MB)]

(*Originally broadcast 10/29/04 on London's Resonance 104.4fm.)

Playlist:

Part 1:
1. Radio Nottingham - the Radiophonic Workshop
2. Chorale - Antonio Russolo
3. Celestial Nocturne - Samuel Hoffman (theremin)
4. Concerto for Ondes-Martenot - Andre Jolivet featuring Jeanette Martenot
5. Various soundtracks - Paul Tanner plays Electro-theremin
6. Now in heaven you can hear the latest Fall album - Hypnotique (Rhythmicon)
7. Jean-Jacques talk about the Ondioline
8. Demonstration from Fantasy for Mixtur-Trautonium - Oscar Sala
9. Telstar - The Tornadoes (Clavioline)

Part 2:
10: Bob Moog - talks about the RCA Synthesizer (background music: the Man from Uranus)
11: Nola - Felix Arndt (RCA synthesizer)
12. Return of the Elohim Pt 1- Zorch (VSC3)
13. CoilANS - Coil (ANS synthesizer)
14. Silver apples of the moon - Morton Subotnik (Buchla Modular)
15: Bob Moog talks about Raymond Scott (music from 'Manhattan Space Research')
16: Zwi Zwi oo oo oo - Delia Derbyshire (Wobbulator)
17: Modified clarinet - Reed Ghazal (Circuit Bent instrument)
18: In a Delian Mode - Delia Derbyshire (Radiophonic Workshop)
19. Return of the Elohim Pt 2 - Zorch (VSC3)
20: Futurama (Raymond Scott advert)

Written resources:

Early Sound Experiments

Even before the invention of electricity, man has experimented with mechanics to produce sound, from ancient Tibetan prayers wheels and the Greek's Aeolian Harp's which were played by the wind, through to the first wind up barrel organ in the sixteenth century, and in the eighteenth century, mechanical birds and the glass harmonica which anticipated the sound of electronics.

In 1752, the world became, quite literally Switched On, when Benjamin Franklin performed his famous experiment with a kite, drawing down electricity from the clouds and first stimulating the fusion of science and nature which is electricity. One of the founding fathers of electricity, Thomas Edison, illuminated the world with his demonstration of the light bulb in 1879, two years after inventing the phonograph. Telegraphs and telephony began to connect people, and in 1910 the first radio broadcast took place in New York. The world became connected by the power of electricity, and sound produced through electricity and electronic sound reproduction was set to take over the 20th century.

The story of early electronic instruments is the story of pioneers, dreamers, schemers and losers. It's a story of bold ideas and bad debts, bizarre lives and forgotten deaths, and events of "synchronicity" - actions which extend beyond mere coincidence. The relationship between sounds found in our environment and music has become closer, classical instruments and the old masters have become increasingly redundant, as new sonic possibilities have been unleashed to challenge the warring world.

The Futurists

Before electronic instruments became commonplace in the 1910s and 1920s, the Italian avant-garde Futurists called for an exploration into the possibilities of new sound worlds in their manifestos, like Busoni's exploration of Microtonal Harmony and the breaking of classical timbres in Russolo's Art of Noises. The futurists experimented with homemade 'sound boxes' to produce original and novel sounds. Edgar Varese, composer of percussive-sonic piece Ionisation saw the scope for 'sound producing machines' that would ultimately lead to the 'liberation of sound'.

The first electronic instruments

Towards the end of the 19th century, a number of instruments that can be considered electronic were invented by scientists and academics. Helmholtz's 1860 'Helmholtz Resonanator' used electro-magnetic vibrating glass and metal sphere to create different sensations of tone.

Although Elisha Gray was piped by Alexander Graham Bell to the patent of the telephone by just a few hours, he didn't miss a beat when he invented the Musical Telegraph in 1876 which amplified sounds from an electronic oscillator - the world's first electronic keyboard.

The greatest of the early electronic beasts, the Telharmonium, was drawn to live like Frankenstein's monster by Thomas Cahill in 1906. The 200 tonne 60 foot long sand, water and cement constructed keyboard instrument used dynamos to produce alternating current over various audio frequencies. Controlled by many keyboards, gears and wires and amplified by giant acoustic horns, the idea was to hook up the machine to a phone network to pipe music into restaurants, stores and theatres - a forerunner to Musak. So vast was the machine, during concerts it broke the stage, and the machine interfered with the phone network, so consequently it died a death before the first world war. Cahill was ahead of his time; it was to be another 50 years before electronic keyboard instruments finally caught on, as the principle of the Telharmonium formed the basis of one of the most successful electronic instruments of all time - the Hammond organ.

Vacuum tube technology

De Forest was a prolific inventor with 300 patents to his name. Shortly after a failed collaboration with Thomas "Telharmonium" Cahill, De Forest discovered a method of combining two inaudible high-frequency sound waves to produce an audible low-frequency wave, a technique called heterodyning, or beat frequency oscillation. In 1915, De Forest created the first vacuum tube instrument - a small monophonic keyboard called the Audion Piano (nicknamed by De Forest the "Squak-a-Phone"), but once more, it quacked an early death. However, vacuum tube technology was to take over the next era of electronic instruments from the 1920s onwards.

The theremin

The theremin, invented by Russian Lev Termen (also known as Leon Theremin), in 1920 remains the world's only true space control instrument - and one which has proved enigmatic, mysterious and popular for the last 85 years. Originally marketed by the RCA radio corporation as an instrument that "anyone who can hum, sing, or whistle" could play, it's unusually design of a cabinet with two aerials and nothing short of unconventional playing technique of the hands moving in the ether creating part of the electromagnetic circuit, one hand for pitch, the other for value - is visually hypnotic, but near impossible to master - which caused an untimely death, before it was revived in film soundtracks in the 1950s. The giant theremin, the Terpsitone, which the musician had to 'dance' the melody in a huge playing field was an even more challenging and bizarre incarnation which no longers exists. Only a handful of players over the years have truly mastered it, namely: 1930s Russian virtuoso Clara Rockmore, whose Art of the Theremin CD remains the classic theremin recording; Dr Samuel Hoffman, a chiropodist by day and thereminist by night who played on the soundtrack for spooky sci-fi and horror films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Spellbound.

Nowadays, everyone who is anyone plays the theremin to standards good, bad and indifferent- from Comedians like John Otway and Bill Bailey to more serious contenders like Leon Theremin's grand-niece Lydia Kavina - considered the world's greatest living thereminist. Slide, glide, shape, gyrate, imitate, modulate or create - although just a simple pure electronic tone, the theremin remains the ultimate electronic oddity. Its scope extends far beyond the spooky sounds of sci-fi popularised in the movies, it delves into the deepest realms of the sonic imagination.

More information:
http://www.thereminworld.com/
http://www.theremin.info/
http://www.hypnotique.net/theremin/index.htm

Ondes-Martenot

Another instruments using the principle of heterodyning oscillators actually caught on a little. In 1928, French telegraphist and cellist Maurice Martenot conceived and constructed the Ondes-Martenot. Much like the theremin, Martenot's instrument was intended to be integrated into the traditional orchestra and it is still featured in orchestras across the world, principally in Olivier Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony.

Some argue that the reason for the Ondes Martenot's success was that, unlike the theremin, it used a traditional keyboard layout, with a separate finger control for glissando and vibrato as well as keys to adjust the timbre. Martenot wowed the French academia to love and admire his instrument, even at the curse of more commercial electronic instruments like the Ondioline, and to an extent Martenot had a stranglehold over other electronic instruments being used in serious contemporary music, thanks to the support of French composers like Varese and Messiaen. The Ondes-Martenot also found its way into the sounds of Hollywood with Franz Waxman's 1936 score for The Bride of Frankenstein and the three Ondes-Martenot's score for Hitchcock's film Rebecca. Today the instrument is still manufactured and ever-popular, even Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead plays one on their albums Kid A and Amnesiac.

Electro-theremin

This instrument really does give off Good Vibrations, as it was used on THAT Beach Boys track. The electro-theremin is not actually a theremin as it isn't played in space, but uses an oscillator with a guiding keyboard base to allow for better pitch accuracy - a sort of cross between an Ondes Martenot and a Hawaiian slide guitar. The sound is closer to that of the Ondes than the theremin as it is less rich, using only a sine wave and no vibrato, sounding more 'other worldly' than the vocalistic theremin sound. The electro-theremin was created by actor and electronics wizard, Bob Whitsell in 1958, and it was made famous by former Glen Miller Trombonist Paul Tanner on the album Music from Heavenly Bodies, numerous TV and film soundtracks, and recordings with the Beach Boys. Tanner sold his electrotheremin in the late 1960s to a hospital to use for checking hearing when he felt keyboard synthesizers were taking over.

More information:
http://www.electrotheremin.com/

Rhythmicon

The brainchild of American avant-garde composer Henry Cowell in 1916, the Rhythmicon was the first prototype of a drum machine and sequencer. Cowell commissioned Russian inventor Leon Theremin to build him a machine capable of transforming harmonic data into rhythmic data and vice versa, which used broken up light playing on a photo-electric cell. Cowell wrote only two piece on the instrument before losing interest. The Rhythmicon featured in some movies in the 1950s and 60s including Dr Strangelove and the Tangerine Dream album Rubicon. No working instruments exist today, but you can use a four part digital simulation on the internet on The Online Rhythmicon website, and record your 'hit' to their internet database.

More information:
The online rhythmicon

Ondioline

A rival instrument to the institutionally powerful Ondes-Martenot, the Ondioline achieved a little popularity in cabaret and popular music - and it was possibly the first instrument capable of imitating the sound of other instruments. Few working Ondiolines exist today, but one who has championed its cause is composer Jean-Jacques Perrey on his early albums with Gershon Kingsley like Kalaeidoscopic Vibrations and The In Sound From Way Out.

The Clavioline and Joe Meek

M Constant made the Clavioline in 1947, a monophonic, portable keyboard which can control octave, timble, attack, and vibrato. It recreated sounds of brass and string in a natural way, and was widely manufactured as a dance-hall organ, marketed as being suitable for "twist, trad and rock". The Clavioline was made popular by pop musicians like The Beatles, Sun Ra, and Joe Meek with the Tornadoes hit Telstar, inspired by the 1962 first satellite transmission. Meek added the sound of the Clavioline to create an otherworldly sound, and he also supposedly added the sound of a flushed toilet played backwards. The weird space-age single rocketed straight to No. 1 and became a worldwide smash hit. Symbolically, when the Telstar satellite became damaged, Meek's life became more and more shattered as his career failed and demons took him over. He killed his landlady in Holloway Road in London before taking his own life in 1967, aged just 37. Meek was a true sonic pioneer and his "Meeksville sound" of compression and close-micing influenced a generation of music producers.

More information:
http://www.clavioline.com/

Trautonium

In 1930, Dr. Friedrich Trautwein invented the Trautonium, the only instrument in the world capable of producing subharmonics, which are the mirror opposite of harmonics, or 'ghost' note like playing a string on a violin only half held down. Oscar Sala, a young student of Trautwein's, pioneered the development of the instrument and made the Mixtur-Trautonium, an improved polyphonic instrument which was used in the soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, as the instrument sounded more ominous than the sound of real birds. The Trautonium has advantages over a synthesizer giving freedom of intonation like a fretless string instrument to play microtones and continuous, unrestricted variations of pitch, tone and volume. The player makes contact with a wire stretched over a metal strip to create a circuit. It was a forerunner to the modular synthesizers of the 1960s. Nearly all knowledge of the performance and workings of the Trautonium has died with Oscar Sala in 2002, but the album My Fascinating Instrument, which is available today, is testament to Sala's musical genius.

The evolution of the synthesizer

By the end of the 20th century, synthesizers had take over the world's aural landscape. To synthesize means to take many parts and make it whole, which is basically what a synthesizer does. It is a purely electronic instrument, in other words, it won't make a sound until you amplify it. The early synthesizers were analogue and huge - a whole room full of equipment - but 1970s transistor technology allowed for more portable instruments - and thus classic analogue synths like Bob Moog's Mini Moog, which is still being manufactured today, the ARP Odyssey and the WASP are still revered by techno and electronic musicians today for their "phat" and squelchy sounds. Electronic music took over the world - the highly conservative Musician's Union condemned synthesizers as non-musical, worried that they would replace the need for real, acoustic trained musicians - which indeed they have, as virtually every popular music track now uses synthesized, sampled and sequenced parts. The Japanese 1980s electronics boom made a cheap keyboard possible in every home - with Casio, Yahama and Roland models now available from only a few pounds.

RCA synthesizer

The synthesizer revolution started in 1956 when RCA unveiled its Electronic Music Synthesizer. Originally invented in the 1940s by engineers Harry Olson and Herbert Belar, they produced a machine based on random probability, which would be capable of creating melodies based on the folk songs of Stephen Foster . It used Sixteen Function Binary Selection and pitch sequencing, but the device failed miserably in its intention, as the machine was incapable of determining characteristics that only a human ear can - idiosyncrasies of form, structure and melody. Olson and Belar intended this prototype synthesizer not to explore new sonic worlds yearned for by the avant-garde, but to reproduce the conventional. The result was a series of seemingly random notes and bleeps. Their prototype synthesizer was eagerly seized by the intellectual music academia of Princeton University and the avant-garde composer Milton Babbit, and premiered in 1956 as the RCA MK 1. It featured vacuum tube oscillators and a punch paper interface that allowed the user to program and control a wide range of sound parameters, a little like a 19th century pianola. The output was fed to disk recording machines, which stored the results on lacquer-coated disks.

More information:
- Peter Forrest's The A-Z of Analogue Synthesizers, RCA synth
- Mike Schutz's RCA synthesizer page

Synthesizers, their technologies and inventors have come and gone like the winds from world fairs to car boot sales in a flash. Here are a few of the more esoteric and innovative synthesizers:

EMS Synth

The EMS studios, founded in 1969 by English engineers and composer Peter Zinnovieff, created some of the more important synthesizers of their era, including the forerunner to software synthesis. The VCS3 was their classic synth which is still made today - operated with a joystick and a pinboard (instead of bulky patch leads) - making it also perfect for a game of battleships. The amazing sounds of the VCS 3 are unmatchable and great for ethereal sound effects. Zorch were Britain's first all synthesizer band who headlined the first Stonehenge Festival, their psychedelic "head" music was matched with a mind blowing lightshow. Their first album "Ouroboros" is the only album ever recorded at Peter Zinovieff's EMS studio in 1975, featuring the classic VCS3 Synthi 100.

More information:
- Zorch's official website
- EMS Studios Homepage

ANS glass synthesizer

The ANS is a photo-electronic instrument from Russia, made in 1958. Based on the photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography to create a visible image of a sound wave, the machine has a rotating glass disk with 144 optic phonograms of pure tones, or sound tracks, from high in the centre to low at the rim; the player selects a tone from a "score" made from a glass disk. The ANS is capable of producing 720 pure tones of everything from microtones to white noise.
You can hear the mysterious and somewhat "glassy" sounds in the new album COILANS by Coil members Jhon Balance, Peter Christopherson and Thighpaulsandra who recorded the album during a few days at the Moscow State University.

More information:
www.martin.homepage.ru/ans.htm

Buchla Modular

Don Buchla has been making world class modular synths since 1963, his latest invention the Piano Bar - a way of converting sounds from an acoustic piano to a midi (computerized) map - is now manufactured and produced by his old competitor, Bob Moog. With Serialist composer Morton Subotnik, they produced the seminal work, Silver Apples On The Moon (1967), the first work to be commissioned for record rather than live performance. A 'studio art' work, they believed it could be played, via a phonograph, by anybody, in intimate surrounds - a kind of 20th century chamber music style. Subotnik believed that using both programmed and random parameters allowed him complete artistic control, and "…the flexibility to score some sections of the piece in the traditional sense; and to mould other like a piece of sculpture". The Buchla allowed for evolving timbres during a single note duration, making possible "sustained yet transforming streams of sound".

More information:
www.buchla.com/

Inventors & pioneers

The evolution of electronic music, until the corporate 1980s, was driven by inspired individuals - inventors, scientists, musicians who were more often than not part-genius and part-lunatic. Many created equipment and instruments to create new sounds for their own recordings, purely out of a desire to produce something new more than for commercial gain. Here are a few of Switched On's favourite electronic pioneers:

Raymond Scott

In the early 40s, Raymond Scott, the young leader of the CBS radio house band found fame composing quirky jazz-influenced scores for Warner Brothers' "Merrie Melodies" and "Loony Toons" cartoons. Despite his success with his quintet, Scott preferred working in the studio with machines rather than the musicians who could never quite match his exacting standards. Jazz singer Anita O'Day believed that Scott "reduced musicians to something like wind-up toys."

In 1946 Scott founded Manhattan Research, Inc., "Designers and Manufacturers of Electronic Music and Musique Concrete Devices and Systems," where he focused his efforts on creating the machines that could meet his requirements. In 1949, Scott remarked:
"Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely THINK his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener".

He created a sound effects machine called the Karloff, and his most commercially successful instrument, the Clavivox, like a theremin played with a keyboard. To realize his notion of "thought transference" composition, Scott spent twenty years working on the Electronium, an "instantaneous composition-performance machine". It had no keyboard, only switches and settings, and was a pitch and rhythm sequencer that controlled a bank of oscillators, a modified Hammond organ, an Ondes-Martenot and a few Clavivoxes. In 1960 on the Electronium he produced his three-volume work of minimalist synthesized lullabies, Soothing Sounds for Baby.

Despite his success, Scott was very protective, perhaps even paranoid, of people stealing his ideas, thus Manhattan Research remained purely research. In 1955 a young theremin maker, 20 year old Robert Moog, called at his studio on Long Island, and he was given a job assembling the Clavivox. Raymond Scott's work was to directly influence the next generation of electronic instrument designers who went on to realise his dream of what he called the "artistic collaboration between man and machine."

BBC Radiophonic Workshop & the Wobbulator

In 1957, a group of BBC producers used radiophonic technique to create music for dramas, modifying natural sounds using tape loops, tape modulations and splicing, similar to Pierre Schaeffer's academic technique of music concrete. In the 1960s, the Radiophonic workshop became a household name with their pioneering recordings on the BBC science fiction show Dr Who. Stars of the workshop including Delia Derbyshire and its founder Daphne Oram, who created the technique of Oramics - drawing onto strips of 35mm film read by photo-electric cells which controlled the sound characteristics - a technique developed from the RCA synthesizer. Daphne later left the BBC to pursue her career of creating serious art music. Early on, the Workshop acquired a wobbulator, originally designed as a test tone generator, it created a tone varied by a second oscillator which providing sweeping waves of sound. Delia Derbyshire's Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO, composed for a sci-fi play based on an Isaac Asimov story, uses backwards voices and the tones of the Wobbulator.

More information:
Radiophonic workshop: an engineering persective

Reed Ghazalas Circuit bending

Reed Ghazalas is know as 'the father of circuit bending' - he's been doing it since the 1960s. The circuit-bent instrument, often a re-wired audio toy or game, creates a new instrument and a new musical vocabulary, which is part of Reed Ghazalas' 'anti theory' of opening up electronic to all audio frontiers, creating chance music and unpredictable audio events. You don't need to be have money, expensive instruments, or knowledge of electronics - just a speak-and-spell machine and a few parts from a radio store! Body contact is encouraged for the electricity to flow through the player's flesh and blood. Don't try this one at home, kids!

More infomation:
www.anti-theory.com

As electronic hardware is increasingly replaced with electronic software, perhaps the era of electronic oddities, bizarre boxes with sliders to fade, knobs to twiddle, and keys to hammer, is drawing to a close. Yet in the 1990s, musicians brought their old synthesizers, machines and theremins our of the bargain bin and began to recognize again the magical sounds which had so nearly become lost. So why not invent your own electronic oddity? It could prove to be the sounds of the future.

Industrial Prehistory - [Intro, Part 1 & 2]

-- from an essay written in 1995, by Brian Duguid --

[Introduction]
I've often thought that somebody really ought to write a history of industrial music. After all, there are histories of reggae, rap, and countless rock, jazz, folk and classical histories. Unfortunately, the best books on industrial music (Re/Search's Industrial Culture Handbook and Charles Neal's Tape Delay) were both written when the genre was still fresh, still on the move, and neither tells us much about where the music came from. A more recent contribution to the field, Dave Thompson's Industrial Revolution suffers from Americocentrism, major omissions, basic errors and from a concentration on electrobeat and industrial rock to the near exclusion of all else. Still, this article isn't that history; that will have to wait for someone better qualified than I.

Instead, I offer a prehistory, a look at heritage, tradition and ancestry. For all that industrial music set out to provide the shock of the new, it's impossible to understand its achievements without a context to place them in. Few, if any, of its tactics and methods were truly original, although the way it combined its components was very much of its time.

Before the prehistory can be properly explored, we need to know what this "industrial music" is, or was. It would be hard to disagree with the suggestion that prior to the formation of Throbbing Gristle as a side-project of performance art group COUM Transmissions in late 1975 [2] industrial music did not exist; and certainly the genre took its name from the label that Throbbing Gristle set up, Industrial Records. Monte Cazazza is usually acknowledged as inventing the term "industrial music", and the label used the name in a very specific sense - as a negative comment on the desire for "authenticity" that still dominated music in the seventies. Very few of the groups who were initially called "industrial" liked the term, although from the mid-80s it became a word that bands embraced willingly, to the extent that nowadays even quite tedious rock bands claim to be industrial, and the jazz / classical ensemble, Icebreaker, has even bizarrely been described as an "industrial" group. Rock and jazz groups don't waste much time worrying about the word used to define their genre, so for my purposes I'm happy to include in the "industrial" genre plenty of artists who tried to disown the label.

The groups who were released on Industrial Records (Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, ClockDVA, Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, Monte Cazazza, S.P.K., with the probable exception of The Leather Nun and Elizabeth Welch [3]) combined an interest in transgressive culture with an interest in the potential of noise as music, and it's easy to see how groups like Einst�rzende Neubauten, Whitehouse or Test Dept can be considered to share similar interests.

Dave Henderson's seminal Wild Planet article [4] presented a survey of the (mainly British and European) "industrial" scene as it was recognised in 1983, but with artists as diverse as Steve Reich, Mark Shreeve, AMM and Laibach cited it was clear even then that the borders of industrial music couldn't be clearly defined. Since then, the music has fragmented, most notably into a division between experimental and dance/rock-oriented artists (or uncommercial and commercial). The popular "industrial" musicians, such as Front 242 or Ministry, draw on the elements of early industrial music most amenable to the rock and techno arenas (sometimes this just means aggression and paranoia); the others have explored industrial music's relationships with ritual music, musique concrete, academic electronic music, improvisation and pure noise. In recent times, through the popularity of ambient music, several artists involved in this more "experimental" tradition have achieved more popular recognition than before.

It's tempting to see the fragmentation of industrial music into popular and "underground" areas as just a recognition of the relative accessibility of different musical styles, but this would be extremely misleading. As with jazz and rock, it's another example of "a music of revolt transformed into a repetitive commodity ... A continuation of the same effort, always resumed and renewed, to alienate a liberatory will in order to produce a market" [5]. As industrial music's history and prehistory will make clear, industrial music originally articulated ideas of subversion that go significantly beyond the saleable "rebellion" that the rock commodity offers. It was inevitable that the market would adopt only the superficial aggression and stylisms.

It's clear that the label, "industrial music", is of no use in pigeonholing music, but it still serves as a useful pointer to a web of musical and personal relationships, a common pool of interests and ideas which every industrial sub-genre has some connection with. The uncommercial industrial tradition has frequently been labelled "post-industrial"; in contrast, this article attempts to identify "pre-industrial" music. However, as will become obvious, there are few meaningful boundaries between industrial music and its ancestors.

Writing in Alternative Press, Michael Mahan attempted to define industrial music as "an artistic reflection of the de-humanisation of our people and the inexorable pollution of our planet by our factory-based socio-economic state" [6]. This is too simplistic; if industrial music were simply anti-factory music then it would encompass any number of reactionary Luddites. Mahan at least managed to identify some of the genre's important musical precursors, citing Edgard Var�se, Karlheinz Stockhausen, David Vorhaus, Frank Zappa and Klaus Schulze as some probable ancestors. Jon Savage has elsewhere identified five areas that characterised industrial music [7]: access to information, shock tactics, organisational autonomy, extra-musical elements, and use of synthesizers and anti-music. By examining each in turn, it will soon become obvious exactly what place industrial music has in the twentieth century cultural tradition.


[Endnotes]
Re/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook (Re/Search, 1983)
TG Chronology in Re/Search #4/5 "William Burroughs / Throbbing Gristle / Brion Gysin" (Re/Search, 1982)
Welsh's Stormy Weather, from Derek Jarman's film The Tempest, was an Industrial Records single.
Published in Sounds, May 7 1983.
Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali (Manchester University Press, 1985)
Welcome to the Machine, by Michael Mahan, in Alternative Press #66 (January 1994).
Introduction to Re/Search #6/7, op.cit.
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[Part 1]

1) ACCESS TO INFORMATION -

"Today there is no reality, or everything is real and everything is unreal. Today the object no longer refers to the real or to information. Both are already the result of a selection, a montage, a taking of views ... Thus the control problem is not one of surveillance, propaganda or paranoia. It is one of subjective influence, consent and extension to all possible spheres of life" ~Graeme Revell (S.P.K.) [1]

Industrial music was fundamentally a music of ideas. For all its musical power and innovation, the early industrial groups were much happier talking about non-musical issues than about musical ones, a direct result of the fact that few if any of them had any real musical background or knowledge. The Industrial Culture Handbook is packed with contributors' book lists; titles listed by Genesis P-Orridge include books by Aleister Crowley, William Burroughs, Philip Dick, Adolf Hitler, the Marquis de Sade and Tristan Tzara; SPK's Graeme Revell shows a more "intellectual" background with titles by Michel Foucault, Samuel Beckett, Jacques Attali and Pierre Proudhon. Of those who list records, Boyd Rice shows his obsession with 50s and 60s kitsch; Z'ev turns out to be a fan of Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan and Otis Redding; only Rhythm & Noise admit to any knowledge of the avant-garde music tradition, citing the likes of Todd Dockstader, Gordon Mumma, Michel Redolfi and Iannis Xenakis [2].

Of all the "major" industrial groups, Throbbing Gristle were the most directly concerned with access to information, having accepted what had been obvious since the early sixties, that an increasing area of the world lives in an information society, and that military and economic strength are no longer the only important forms of power. Gristle's frontman, Genesis P-Orridge (born Neil Megson) took the view that control of information was now the most important form of power. This is on the not unreasonable grounds that if the average person does not believe (or is unaware) that a possibility exists, they are clearly not free to choose such a possibility. Although such a conclusion was a commonplace to the post-modern philosophers and political theorists, it was an unusually sophisticated concern for a musical artist. As Orridge has said: "The idea: to heal and reintegrate the human character. To set off psychic detonations that negate Control ... To exchange and liberate information ... We need to search for methods to break the preconceptions, modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us, within our constructed behaviour patterns, so vulnerable to Control" [3].

Other industrial groups, particularly Cabaret Voltaire and S.P.K. espoused similar views. Genesis P-Orridge went on after the break-up of Throbbing Gristle to make the dissemination of information and the attack on information-based methods of control the focus of his work, through the group Psychic TV and the Temple ov Psychick Youth organisation. The general approach was simply to publicise the existence of transgressive literature on the grounds that the social definition of "taboo" or "transgressive" was just another method of control, of persuading people not to examine certain choices. Even for groups who weren't particularly interested in informing people about this sort of information (and ultimately this probably applies to the majority of industrial groups), the awareness of it clearly influenced their music.

The literary counterculture, dating back through the Beatniks via Surrealism and mavericks such as Celine or de Sade is a major tradition that informed many of the industrial groups even if they weren't part of it. Experimental literature had peaked in the 60s, and the importance of the industrial groups' awareness of it was primarily their role as disseminators and popularisers. Obvious examples of this include Industrial Records' issue of a record of William Burroughs cut-ups, Nothing Here Now But The Recordings.

Although their importance in publicising such literature, and other "unconventional" information, is undeniable, industrial music made no real contribution to the ideas of the counterculture. Genesis P-Orridge's writings mostly consist of borrowings from Burroughs, Crowley, and Leary, although the connections he has made between the cut-up technique, magick, and deconditioning are original.

[Endnotes]
The Post-Industrial Strategy, Graeme Revell, in Re/Search #6/7, op.cit.
Re/Search #6/7, op.cit.
Behavioral Cut-Ups and Magick, Genesis P.Orridge, in Rapid Eye #2 (Annihilation Press, 1992)

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2. [SHOCK TACTICS]

"They are men possessed, outcasts, maniacs, and all for love of their work. They turn to the public as if asking its help, placing before it the materials to diagnose their sickness" - press commentary on Zurich Dada [1]

The main source of industrial music's ideas may have been the radical literary tradition, but a great debt was also owed to the avant-garde performance art tradition, dating back at least as far as Futurism at the turn of the century. Here was a tradition from which industrial music drew not just rhetoric but also the tactics and methods.

Performance art as a means of provocation undoubtedly goes back as long as there were people who resented their culture and thought to change matters by creating shock and confusion. As an alternative to purer forms of song, dance and theatre it's history can be traced back through Renaissance spectacle, and mediaeval passion plays to tribal ritual. In the nineteenth century, music hall performance came the closest to the mixed media spectacles that would resurface in performance art. Histories of twentieth century performance art often start with the twenty-three year old Alfred Jarry's proto-surrealist performance of Ubu Roi in Paris in 1896 [2]. Jarry's absurdist theatre provoked an uproar that would be echoed throughout the century's history of performance art. Filippo Marinetti, whose Futurist Manifesto was to be published in 1909, took up the provocationist baton in his own play Roi Bombance, written in 1905, and the desire to provoke played a major part in first the Italian Futurist movement, then successively in Dada and Surrealism.

The politics may have superficially differed, but the basic thrust of these movements has many similarities to the later activities of COUM Transmissions, Whitehouse and others. All three artistic movements (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism) shared a disgust and contempt for the social common ground of the day. Their response varied. Futurism opposed tradition with an enthusiasm for dynamism, for technology, and for patriotic militarism, all of which ensured that fascist politicians would later attempt to claim the Futurist cultural heritage as their own (unlike more recent flag-burners, whose anger has been directed at their own society, the Futurists' flag-burnings of 1914 in Milan were of a foreign country's flag - Austria's).

Their positive view of "progress" has few echoes among the early industrial musicians; even Kraftwerk, whose clinical embrace of the coming information age proved such a fertile resource for industrial music's exponents, leavened their technophilia with a sense of irony (at its clearest on their paean to the atomic age, Radioactivity). However, as the electronic beat tendency in industrial music drew on emerging synthipoppers like the Human League and eventually fed in to the cyber-culture of the late 80s and early 90s, the Futurists' uncritical fetishisation of technology and artifice re-emerged. Marinetti's celebration of the industrial revolution has a lot in common with the ill-digested cyber-fandom of some recent musicians. Certainly, the electronic pop of the late seventies New Romantics (such as Ultravox) betrays a lack of humour that the Futurists would never have shared, but it has the same uncritical adoration of technology. In general, industrial music drew upon a much more cynical view of science's contribution to history.

The similarities between Dada and industrial culture are less ambiguous. Dada's anger was as much inspired by the First World War as by a more general revulsion against the general banality of society. Their reaction also had a lot in common with industrial art; it was an attempt to find an aesthetic where most of the audience only found ugliness. For Dada this consisted of primitivist, abstract painting, and at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, performances including seemingly nonsensical sound-poetry. Industrial music also adopted the primitive, abstract approach, and like Dada, rejected conventional musical structures in favour of chaos and noise.

From Richard Huelsenbeck's Dadaist Manifesto, written in Germany in 1918: "Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataracts of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time." [3]

Industrial music was very much of its time; you can hear the shattered dreams of the '60s in Throbbing Gristle's music, you can hear the defeatism and boredom that accompanied the decay of the welfare state. As in Huelsenbeck's prescription for "the highest art", this music (whether deliberately or not is irrelevant) addressed the important questions of the day; social alienation, media illusions perceived as reality, and the impossibility of morality in a culture where the traditional arbiters of morality were losing their power.

The anti-art tradition that Dada embodied continued in various forms throughout the century. Its first successor was the Surrealist movement, which included artists inspired by their direct contact with Dadaists like Tristan Tzara, and it also owed a considerable debt to the absurdist French art tradition embodied in the work of Jarry, Raymond Roussel and Guillaume Apollinaire. The break between Surrealism and Dada has been presented as a clash of personalities between Andre Breton and Tzara, but some argue that it represented the replacement of a movement that had valued disorder, anarchy and confusion with one that, paradoxically, attempted to rationalise its irrationality.

The Surrealist search for an escape from socially imposed reality certainly influenced some later industrial musicians; Nurse With Wound paid homage to the absurdist and hyper-realist tradition in much of their music, and more recently, composer Randy Greif has specifically said that he attempts to create a genuinely surrealist music (the Surrealists themselves took their figurehead Breton's dislike ofmusic to heart, concentrating on visual art and literature). Others, particularly European groups like D.D.A.A. and P16D4 also show clear traces of surrealism in the way they treat musical collage as an opportunity for humorous juxtaposition.

The Surrealist attempt to put the unconscious on display could be seen as part of a yearning for authenticity through primitivism that has been a major element in twentieth century art. As discussed below, its influence on performance art is one of the more important elements of the industrial music heritage, but several industrial musicians incorporated it more directly. As well as the "surrealist" elements in industrial music, "primitivist" attitudes appear in the work of groups like Zero Kama, Lustmørd, Coil, Crash Worship and Zone (who share an interest in the occult, spirituality, ritualism). Organum's David Jackman, who has passed through the industrial fringes, is even more clearly interested in music's ability to evoke primal spiritual responses, creating drone-based, barely tonal music that owes a lot to non-Western ritual music.

If Surrealism lacked Dada's provocationist tactics, later movements did not. Fluxus developed in the first few years of the Sixties in America, and combined the prank-events beloved of Dada with a specifically anti-bourgeois political ideology. They acknowledged their heritage; in 1962 Nam June Paik organised an event Neo-Dada in der Musik in Dusseldorf, for example. Some of the artists associated with Fluxus, particularly Terry Riley and LaMonte Young would later go on to develop music that, via popularisers like Brian Eno, would ultimately influence many industrial musicians, but Fluxus itself had little direct influence.

However, Fluxus was only one element in a resurgence of performance art in sixties New York. Allan Kaprow's Happenings (from 1959 onwards) were some of the earliest and best remembered events, but they sprung from an ongoing history of performance that stretched back to the New York Dadaists (notably Picabia and Duchamp). In 1936, the Bauhaus's Xanti Schawinsky joined the three-year old Black Mountain College in North Carolina, introducing a performance element into the curriculum that would engage Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg and many others en route to the Happenings.

The growth of interest in performance art in America was paralleled by the activities of various artists at the same time in Europe. Amongst them, Joseph Beuys (a Fluxus protagonist) and Hermann Nitsch achieved particular notoriety and are particularly relevant to the heritage of industrial music. Beuys' work frequently involved the creation of very personal, meditative situations, isolating himself from humanity for days on end, or sharing an art space with only a dead or living animal. His interest in ritual as a way of recovering art's transformative function is much more personal than Nitsch, whose Orgies Mysteries Theatre performances took the form of reenactments of Dionysian rituals, social celebrations involving loud music and the disembowelment of animal carcasses.

Many other artists have entered similar taboo areas. Chris Burden's performances have involved him cutting himself and being shot in the arm [4]; Stelarc and Fakir Musafar hang themselves from hooks carefully inserted into their flesh; Marina Abramovic allowed her audience to cut her clothes and skin with razor blades [5]. The aim is to recover art's shamanic, ritual elements, to break psychological taboos and enter genuinely altered states. Genesis P-Orridge, later of Throbbing Gristle, was an escapee from this performance art tradition, first in The Exploding Galaxy, then via the experimental commune Trans Media Exploration in 1969 [6], on to COUM Transmissions with fellow performer Cosey Fanni Tutti. COUM's performances centered on sex and ritual, culminating in the notorious Prostitution exhibition at the I.C.A. in 1976, which brought Throbbing Gristle to public attention (although Throbbing Gristle had been first used as title for a COUM performance two years previously). [7]

Throbbing Gristle were probably the only industrial group to evolve directly out of a performance art context, but the live art of the sixties and seventies developed several new ideas that later fed into the work of various industrial groups. Cabaret Voltaire's early performances sometimes included showings of surrealist films as the "support act". Percussionist Z'ev's performances have been compared to shamanic exorcisms, and proto-industrial group The Residents owe much of their live costume drama tothe Dada / Bauhaus tradition [8]. Most notably, Test Dept, which began life as a music group very rapidly connected with avant-garde theatre; some of their spectacular performances are documented on the A Good Night Out and Gododdin albums. In 1992, they staged an event in Glasgow entitled The Second Coming, in a huge disused locomotive works; this involved three narrators, several dancers, several percussionists and other musicians, and a host of extras, such as flag-bearers and welders. Its large-scale non-narrative approach to performance owes a great deal to the work of people like Robert Wilson in the seventies, although its preoccupations are quite different.

However, Test Dept were unusual among industrial musicians in that their disgust for the society they found themselves in led them to a politics of protest that directly embraced the ideas of the left; solidarity being the major one, leading the band through a series of concerts opposing the Conservative assault on the trade union movement, supporting the striking miners' unions, ambulance workers, printworkers, and anti-poll tax campaigners. They remained sophisticated enough never to match their strong political feeling with simplistic and unequivocal support for any of the parties of the left, but nonetheless, their allegiances had little in common with most other industrial groups, who distrusted all conventional politics, of whatever wing. Groups like Throbbing Gristle, S.P.K. and Cabaret Voltaire all saw society as a whole to be too corrupt for conventional politics to be worth bothering with.

In Gristle's case, their music and lyrics appeared to present an amoral face full of nothing but revulsion; their songs catalogued the horror of the modern world without attempting to pass comment. Inevitably, their interest in mass murderers, Nazism, and similar topics led to accusations by some that T.G. were more than interested, they were attracted to such ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the surface amorality disguised a deep moralism. It was their hatred of pretence, hypocrisy, oppression and authoritarianism that led to their violent rebellion.

Following the break-up of T.G., this hidden morality made itself most clearly felt through Genesis POrridge's group, Psychic TV (Peter Christopherson, also ex-Gristle, soon left to join John Balance in Coil), and its associated "anti"-organisation, the Temple ov Psychick Youth. Ostensibly an attempt touse the framework of a "cult" to decondition people's minds from social indoctrination, rather than to brainwash them, T.O.P.Y. never succeeded in getting beyond its own paradoxes. While it was on the onehand encouraging its members to think for themselves, to question and reject received ideas, it nonetheless insisted on set methods of achieving this de-conditioned salvation (e.g. ritual sex magick), suggested standards of behaviour for members to live up to (members who failed to toe the line were in some cases effectively ex-communicated), and, most importantly, relied on a hierarchical organisation that never succeeded in being in any way democratic or transparent. Its achievements (primarily thesense of community amongst like-minded misfits) were compromised by the fact that its initiators never freed themselves from their situation as role models and, if they ever understood the lessons of anarchist and liberationist political theory, never applied them in practice.

Whitehouse's William Bennett appeared to decide that the moral amorality of Throbbing Gristle was doomed to failure, and his group stuck to its guns with unrelenting challenges to listenability and unrelentingly tasteless lyrics about Nazism, serial killers, rape and similar topics. According to one person who worked with William Bennett, Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton, Bennett is "only interested in upsetting people ... His ethic was 'Everybody who buys my records is basically a cunt'" [9]. However, Whitehouse's Stefan Jaworzyn has acknowledged Whitehouse's extra-musical influences: "I've always considered Whitehouse to be more like performance art ... in that Whitehouse is outside of rock, experimental music or whatever." [10] In this respect, Whitehouse continue a long tradition of attempting to outrage and assault the audience; there have certainly been other performance artists who have physically attacked their audience in the past. Notably, this contrasts strongly with the tradition of self-abusive performance that Throbbing Gristle were heir to.

Whitehouse's own inability to articulate their motives has left them open to misinterpretation and opposition. Are they satirists, like Brett Easton Ellis? Whatever the case may be, the attempt to maintain such an extreme vision shows real single-mindedness. Whether or not this culmination of the Dadaist tradition leads onwards is open to doubt. One writer, Hakim Bey, is particularly critical: "We support artists who use terrifying material in some 'higher cause' - who use loving / sexual material of any kind, however shocking or illegal - who use their anger and disgust and their true desires to lurch towards self-realisation and beauty and adventure. 'Social Nihilism', yes - but not the dead nihilism of gnostic self-disgust. Even if it's violent and abrasive, anyone with a vestigial third eye can see the differences between revolutionary pro-life art and reactionary pro-death art". [11]

Endnotes //

1. Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter (Thames and Hudson 1965) // 2. Performance Art, Rose Lee Goldberg (Thames and Hudson 1979) // 3. Dada: Art and Anti-Art, op. cit.4. Art in the Dark, Thomas McEvilley, in // 4. Apocalypse Culture, 2nd edn, ed. Adam Parfrey (Feral House, 1990) // 5. Performance Art, op. cit. // 6. Rapid Eye #1, Simon Dwyer (R.E. Publishing, 1989) // 7. Time to Tell CD booklet, Cosey Fanni Tutti (Conspiracy International, 1993) // 8. The Eyes Scream: A History of the Residents, video (Palace, 1991); Meet the Residents, Ian Shirley (SAF, 1993) // 9. Interview in Audion #28 (1994) // 10. Interview in Music From The Empty Quarter #6 (1992). // 11. T.A.Z., Hakim Bey (Autonomedia, 1991)