Milan Knížák | Broken Music

 

Milan Knížák 

Broken Music 

Cologne, Germany: Galerie and Edition Hundertmark, 1983 

30 x 30 x 1.5 cm

Edition of 40 signed and numbered copies

A melted 7" record and a 60 minute cassette by the Czech Fluxus artist best known for his use of altered vinyl records. The works are accompanied by a series of texts and housed in a cardboard box. The above copy is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. 

Broken Music is available from the publisher, here, for 580 Euro. 

"In 1963–64 I started playing records either at slow speed or at high speed and, in so doing changing the quality of the music, creating my own other music. 

In 1965 I began destroying records: scratching them, puncturing them, breaking them. Playing them – which ruined the needles and sometimes the whole record player – created a whole new type of music, one that was surprising, jarring, aggressive and funny. Songs could last for just a brief moment or, if the needle got stuck in a deep scratch, practically forever, the same passage playing over and over.  

I developed this method even further. I started gluing records together, painting them, burning them, cutting and pasting parts of different records together and so on, in order to achieve the greatest variety of sounds. Later I began working in the same way with complete scores. I deleted some notes, keys and other symbols, or entire bars (in this way dictating the rhythm), redrew the notes and keys, changed the tempo, and the like. I also changed the sequence of the bars, played compositions in reverse, turned whole rows upside down, pasted together the most diverse parts of various scores, and so on.  

I also used collections of popular songs or other pieces as scores for orchestral compositions. Each instrument or section or group plays one song. The resulting sound, where everyone keeps the tempo, intonation and length of the particular piece that they are playing, creates a new symphony. 

And of course there were other similar approaches, combinations and offshoots. Since music created from playing destroyed records cannot be written down in notes or in other language (or only with great difficulty), the records themselves can also be considered as the notation." 

-Milan Knížák