Opening Performance Orchestra, Blixa Bargeld, Luciano Chessa, Fred Möpert – The Noise Of Art

Sub Rosa
Premiering seven compositions, this Noise of Art CD by the Opening Performance Orchestra, a Czech avant-garde and noise group from Prague who milk their “no melody, no rhythm, no harmony” ethos completely, documents the long-lost sound of Futurism which arguably, along with the Zürich Dadaists, was the source of all noise-worship to come.

I’m liking the way these noise boxes are offset by screeching violin or theremin, their detuned presence pulling at the grainy kinetics below, cutting into that academic dryness these historical re-enactments often suffer from. I can just imagine the early twentieth century audience’s reaction to this shock of the new, as “Trio No. 3″’s tonal mirages jutter like an eternally plummeting thing, and even today this hasn’t lost any of its confrontational bite as the dissidence sandpapers away all sonic sentimentality.

It’s a sound you need to be properly submersed in, so whack the volume up and let its caustic flavours carcass. Luciano Chessa’s steely cranks on “Příliš Hlučná Samota” concentrate the goods into fragmentary bursts of ratcheting snare, its cranking shadows humming an amputated chorus intersected by bowed cutting discs, a primitive mechanisation full of tasty reverberation and tiny jewel-like gleams. “Trio No. 2″’s lovely bassy fan-wheel drags as the violin rub adds hallucinogenic accents to those psycho-esque repeats.

Blixa Bargeld is perfect here, a contemporary spokesman that puts Luigi Russolo’s revolution straight into your mind’s eye, breathes life into the contemptuous curl of his 1913 words. Excerpts of Russolo’s L’arte Dei Rumori (Art Of Noise) manifesto are narrated between the chaffing nose-dives and atonal rubs of his mechanical boxed creations — intonarumori — that (literally) grate against all that bourgeois classical meowing and suave hum of the past. “The soft and limpid purity of sound intent upon caressing the ear”, describes Blixa, with a dismissive “pahh!” An earful of this is certainly the antidote to all that. Starkly modern and tectonically brutal (one could say stripped bare for your delectation), these compositions, though mostly acoustic, are real room-clearers, making for a perfect companion piece to last year’s Nurse with Wound remix of that New Blockaders LP Changez Les Blockeurs.

Fred Möpert‘s “Neue Horizonte” adds theremin to the mix, clingfilming the action as the German poetry cherries the dronal dustiness, then Blixa  gets his hands dirty composing a fourteen-minute journey of pure intonarumori on “The Mantovani Machine, Part 3”. The gyrating gestation of machine verbs curdling and conjoining, the silence between them hanging like a captive sky to the next instalment, the action finally flattening out to the briefest of rubs.

But the best must be the twenty-minute finale that is the “Futurist Soirée”. Those scatterings of piano are bloody lovely, puncturing the dirgey grind as excerpts from the Futurist manifestos (split between three narrators) eat into the fray. All those hungry fricatives mosquito(ing) a molotov of Erik Satie-roasted accents and see-sawing squeal and percussively peppered black notes that dilate in Igor Stravinsky-like pirouettes and whirring intensity. A tasty storm of Gregorian mirages that abruptly terminates without applause.

If you’re serious about your noise appreciation, then this is an absolute must.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-