Luciano Chessa + Oona Verse

Luciano Chessa is an Italian Dada/Futurist composer, conductor, audiovisual and performance artist.

Chessa’s performance will be a special one-off organ concert at Pyramid Club using a beautiful old foot pump pipe organ (courtesy of Erika Grant) alongside piano, guitar, voice and electronics.

Oona Verse is one of Bek Coogan’s many alter egos … back shed kiwi Dada from Palmerston North!

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Luciano Chessa studied organ with renowned Italian master Andrea Macinanti at Bologna’s Conservatory and with organist and composer Pellegrino Santucci. Throughout the years, Chessa has performed on organs among the finest in Italy, the United States, and Australia, including two of Italy’s best Tamburini: the Grande Organo in the Sala Bossi, and Grande Organo in the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi, as well as the magnificent 7466 pipes Aeolian-Skinner in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. For his recent performance on the largest pipe organ in the Southern Hemisphere, Melbourne’s Town Hall Grand Organ, over 2,000 tickets were booked!

Chessa’s compositions include an opera merging experimental theatre with reality TV which required the cast to fast for 55 hours. In 2014 he presented three events at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition 'Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe’. Chessa’s work has appeared in Artforum, Flash Art, Art in America, Frieze, Marie Claire and Vogue Italia. He has been interviewed by the BBC, and has been the subject of two documentaries.

Luciano Chessa is also a music historian specialising in 20th-century Italian and 21st-century American repertoire. He is the author of Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult (2012), the first monograph dedicated to Russolo and his Art of Noise. In 2009, his Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by the New York Times as one of the best events in the arts; it continues to tour internationally. With this project he collaborated with the likes of Mike Patton, Lee Ranaldo, Ellen Fullman, Blixa Bargeld, Joan La Barbara, among others.

(Photo by Jamie Lyons)