‘These eccentric hurdy-gurdy instruments first created in 1913 still sounded musically radical after all these years.’

– Roberta Smith for The New York Times

Our final night – a special off-site event at the Wigmore Hall – opens with a presentation of Luigi Russolo’s infamous intonarumori (noise intoners), in association with the Performa biennial, New York, and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London. This will be the first time these instruments have been seen in this country for over 110 years since 1914 when they set up camp at the London Coliseum on the eve of war.

Russolo’s intonarumori (see below) mark the birth not only of noise music and sound art but of experimental music itself. 


Though most of the original instruments were lost or destroyed in the second world war, composer Luciano Chessa faithfully reconstructed the intonarumori in 2009 for Performa, New York. 

Chessa’s Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners will finally reach these shores at the Wigmore Hall on 17 January 2025 as the culmination of our 10th anniversary programme. Here – at the very same venue where Filippo Tommaso Marinetti first introduced futurism to Britain in a lecture in 1912 – we present a slate of UK and world premieres by Pauline Oliveros, Peter Ablinger, Ellen Fullman, Chris Newman, Jennifer Walshe & Tony Conrad, Pablo Ortiz and Margareth Kammerer.

We will also present two revivals of works that were first performed in 1913 and 1916, respectively, by futurist poet Paolo Buzzi and the instrument’s inventor himself Luigi Russolo, and Jennifer Walshe will perform three myserious Irish Dadaist poems.

In the second half, Ensemble Klang presents OCCAM DELTA XXIII, a world premiere commission from the 92-year-old composer who gave birth to drone music, Éliane Radigue, working in collaboration with composer/musician Carol Robinson.

There are two stories about the genesis of drone. The first is that the concept came to composer Radigue while she was sunbathing on a beach in Nice, watching the planes coming in to land at the nearby airport. The second is that the concept came to composer Éliane Radigue while she was sunbathing on a beach in Nice, playing a game with artist Yves Klein:

‘ÉLIANE RADIGUE — I have a bit of a story about [Yves Klein’s] “Monotone Symphony.” It dates back to 1954. It was a birth for Yves Klein. At that time, I was pregnant with my son. I’m not very tall, but I was very much pregnant. At that time, pregnant women didn’t go swimming during the day — that would have been indecent, carrying things, and all that. We lived very close to the beach in Nice. At night, with the whole crew of us, we’d go swimming. And during that time, Yves was in Spain and other places. He came back that year from Paris, where he went every Monday to visit his mother, Marie Raymond, who was a painter, and his father, Fred Klein, who was a painter as well.

At that time, Mondays were for Marie Raymond’s soirées, and people gathered at her place. That year, Yves met the Lettrists in Paris — François Dufrêne and Raymond Hains. And the game was to verbalize on the apostles of Pentecost using the spoken vocabulary of syllables from the “Ursonate,” by Kurt Schwitters. And so we went to the beach, and Yves, when he returned from Paris, had a lot of intellectual and cultural baggage with him.

Since Nice was something of a cultural desert, Yves was trying to nourish us with these ideas that he’d brought from afar. And we began to speak in nonsense syllables on the beach. Arman said the idea to make a simple tone was mine, but I’m not so sure. The thing I am sure about is that it was my idea to harmonize the voices — to have everyone in their own register. So, we did the first monotone symphony on the beach, in a certain sense. For me, it was a game — nothing more. But Yves found it very interesting and asked me to write it down for him.’

– excerpt from an interview in Purple Magazine, May 2019.