Milan Knizak - Broken Music Composition, 1979

I listened to Milan Knizak's Broken Music Composition. To be completely honest, I do not think the peice was very pleasing to listen to. In fact, I would compare it to nails on a chalk board. You could hear in the background there was soft, pleasant peices of music but it is broken up in many places by what sounds to me like rubber rubbing against itself (hence the nails on the chalkboard comparison). When it is not broken up by the rubbery sound, it is just a scratchy sound which is also pretty unpleasant. All in all, I think the peice is pretty awful sounding.

After looking up some information on the peice, the sound of it is more justified (although it still does not help the fact that it is painful to listen to). The peice was released in 1979 by Milan Knizak. The piece "consists of Knizak's modified LPs being... cut them up and glued unrelated pieces together, pasted pieces of paper on them, scratched them, painted them -- anything to destroy the medium and subvert its original contents to create new sounds. The needle hops, skips, falls into the holes of this Swiss cheese of a record, and eventually self-destructs. As if all that wasn't enough, Knizak also tampers with the playback speed. Nothing is sacred: classical music, religious music, jazz, rock, or pop -- any recorded work is susceptible to be submitted to the torture chamber. The sound quality is often terrible -- and not only because of the mutilated artifacts. The technique used to record the record players must have been primitive. Then again, Knizak was not making nice, comfortable music, so its gritty, lo-fi quality fits the sound terrorist aesthetic perfectly."

I think calling the creation of the peice a music "torture chamber" perfectly describes the peice. I could not have said it any better myself. Now that I know what he was trying to acheive, I am not as baffled as I was before because originally, I thought he was trying to make something that he thought sounded good. To know that the music was purposely mutilated and meant to sound horrible to make a statement, it makes more sense. It still doesnt change my opinion, although now I am curious to see what the record looked like!

Information found here!