Charge Of The Italian Futurist Motorcycle Battalion

Complete Record: This channel is not monetized. If you like what you see here and would like to help me continue sharing cool stuff on my channel, please consider making a donation via Venmo @Pea-Hicks. This is a noisy percussion piece I created while I was studying music at UCLA in the early 90s. At the time I was using an Ensoniq EPS sampler along with my Amiga computer running Bars & Pipes Pro sequencing software. In February 2000, this piece was presented at the MATA concert series for up-and-coming composers in NYC (http://matafestival.org/). It kicked off the festival as a sort of fanfare, played back loudly over the PA system. Philip Glass was the executive producer of this series, and was in attendance at the concert in which my piece was played. Glass was and is a musical hero of mine, so it meant alot to me to have him sitting in the audience to hear one of *my* pieces for a change! As a side note, after the concert, I had to rush off to WFMU to be interviewed on a radio show about an unrelated project, and found out later that the MATA after party was at Glass' house just a couple blocks away from the venue! So, yeah, I was kicking myself for missing that...! Here's the pretentious program notes from that concert: Charge Of The Italian Futurist Motorcycle Battalion (1993) is one of a series of etudes written to explore the sonic & musical possibilities of digitally sampled household objects. In this case, an Arvin 1320 space heater was struck, scraped, and plucked with a variety of mallets and kitchen utensils to obtain as many different raw sounds as possible for the piece. All of the sounds were sampled, and some were digitally distorted to varying degrees. The piece itself was composed in two stages- the raw material was first improvised into a sequencer, and then this material was heavily edited and shaped into the final piece. There were no specific structural or musical influences on the piece as it was being composed, but I realized after it was finished that many elements made reference to the music of the Balinese gamelan gong kebyar, which I was then studying at UCLA. The title of the piece is meant primarily to acknowledge its conceptual and aesthetic lineage, but it can also be seen as a programmatic piece or tone poem of sorts.