Throbbing Gristle
October 26th, 2021Noise. Do you consider it music? If not, can it at least be part of music? No? Then does noise have your permission to even exist? Stop shaking your head. Just kidding. Noise doesn’t give a hoot what you think anyway. It’s been around a lot longer than you, flirting with music for over a century now. Among the first to tap its unruly characteristics were two Italian gents named Luigi Russolo and Antonio Russolo, who had close ties to the Italian Futurist movement. Around 1916, they built custom sound boxes called intonarumori that blatted out a ruckus of myriad sounds during concerts that greatly upset the general public. A decade later, Edgar Varese composed very dissonant symphonic works employing an unusually large battery of percussion, sirens and even a lion’s roar (a big rope pulled through a metal tub) that proved far too much for the gentile classical audiences of the day.