Industrial Blues

After spending the 1970s as a rock bassist, hippie percussionist and punk guitarist, Osvaldo Schwartz landed in the 1980s as a new wave multi-instrumentalist musician. In 1983 he founded Officine Schwartz, a band focused on multimedia research and experimentation about the aesthetics and history of industrial civilization. He gave particular importance to the research on noise, using self-built instruments made from scrap materials, dance, 8mm projections, videos, industrial sounds derived from mechanical machines, Futurist graphics. With Officine Schwartz he produced compositions able to create contrasts between sounds and emotions. He was the director, the composer, the author, the multi-instrumentalist and the luthier. Officine Schwartz never wanted to follow a specific musical genre as they thought it was necessary to constantly evolve in order to extend the research. Thus Osvaldo Schwartz attended choral singing courses, learned to play the trumpet and studied the orchestral form to found the marching band known as Banda D’asfalto. In the early 90’s with twenty players of reed horns, brass instruments, accordion, bagpipes, drums and a choir, he created shows and renewed the band Officine Semoventi. He delved into popular musical culture, both local and from Eastern and Northern Europe, invented the instrument called Tubicordo and together with the band he began an ethno-industrial research. At the end of the century the band was reduced but still it retained the same characteristics: Tubicordo, metals, electronics and noise. In 2015 Officine Schwartz celebrated their 30th anniversary with an event entitled From Here to Rust, a documentary, and a massive rhythmic performance. The last trio concert was performed in August 2019. In addition to the commitment with Officine Schwartz, Osvaldo also performed as a musician in The Pirate Ship busker company and in Teatro Sezione Aurea with the choreographer Eugenio De Mello and produced soundtracks for Davide Ferrario’s films. In 2018 he started the project Convertible Blues with the guitarist Marco Valietti and the ever-present stainless Tubicordo. In 2022, his first multi-media work under his own name, Industrial Blues (Rizosfera-NUKFM editions), was released, crowning a fruitful decade of new compositions and avant-garde audiovisual experimentation.

*** FIRST VIDEO ON PAGE: A transmedia hackathon for the 40th anniversary of Officine Schwartz – Hackhaton with OSVALDO SCHWARTZ’s Officine Schwartz and Publishing House Rizosfera, Turin May 17, 2023 – Transmedia narratives: these are the forms that the students of the Transmedia course at the Politecnico used to tell the 40-year history of Officine Schwartz, a prominent reality on the Italian industrial music scene.

On the occasion of the celebrations, the polymedia publisher Rizosfera opened its archive to the course students, making available videos, excerpts, texts and images tracing the career and works of Officine Schwartz. Materials, these, which during the educational workshop were analyzed, collected and processed with the support of Klynt software. Participants were stimulated to reflect on the path of the group founded by Osvaldo Arioldi Schwartz and to propose original perspectives capable of understanding the extraordinary research on sound and the aesthetics of “industrial civilization” carried out from 1983 to the present.

Making the experience possible was the use of the hackathon format, an intensive event in which interdisciplinary working groups work to develop a project, a proposal that is then presented to the organizers at the end of the meeting, with the final announcement of the day’s winner. In the case of the hackathon implemented by the Transmedia course and publisher Rizosfera, the event took place over four hours, involving about eighty students divided into ten working groups.

The theme of the workshop, the combination of industrial music and working-class culture, of which, in the Italian context, the most representative group is Officine Schwartz, both for the originality of the subjects and colors proposed and for the first multimedia experiments that see music, video, dance and theater brought together in a single performance.

“A well-attended event,” commented Domenico Morreale, professor at the Politecnico and organizer of the hackathon, “significant was the commitment of the event’s guest speakers, Osvaldo Arioldi of Officine Schwartz, and Paolo Davoli and Andrea Corsini of Rizosfera, who provided students with their expertise on the topic. The transmedia projects created by the participants, and presented at the conclusion of the event, garnered the general interest of the audience, offering from video interviews to thematic insights on self-made tools. Especially interesting was the explanation of the history of the tubicord, a self-made instrument from an old stove pipe, which was shown and played in the classroom. I would like to thank the students who took up our invitation, the teachers who made the event possible, Elisa Roscelli and Nicola Falomi, and the speakers who brought to the participants’ attention the musical journey of this important Italian artistic reality.”