Poesia Sonora Dagli Archivi di Arrigo Lora-Totino

Second edition as a single 12″, 200 hand-numbered copies with obituary strip.

Arrigo Lora-Totino (1928-2016) was an artist and poet from Turin, Italy. He is considered one of the key figures in Italian sound poetry. Lora-Totino’s first experiments with poetry stem from the late 1950s-early 1960s, a period in which he also founded his first magazine dedicated to concrete poetry. Lora-Totino is perhaps best known for having curated the classic 7-LP album Futura: Poesia Sonora in 1978, with contributions by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Vladimir Majakovskij, Velemir Chlebnikov, Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters, Gerhard Rühm, Bob Cobbing a.o. Two years later Lora-Totino curated a series of thirteen broadcasts for Italian RAI radio, in which he presented an expert overview of the history of sound poetry. Lora-Totino’s own works have been included in a number of exhibitions dedicated to sound poetry and in the collections of a number of leading art institutes and museums.

In 2024 Jan van Toorn’s Slowscan was about to release a double-LP with previously unpublished material from the Lora-Totino archives, when the pressing plant went bankrupt. Only 57 copies of the intended 200 double albums appeared to have been pressed and printed. 99 LPs were left orphaned. Slowscan has now released those 99 as a single 12″ vinyl edition, with cover art by Arrigo Lora-Totino and a hand numbered obi strip. Beautiful stuff, friendly priced too.