Project Drawing: Sonic Landscapes

I have taken a lot of inspiration and ideas form Milan Knizak.


Here are some things a have experimented with:


These first two works are direct inspiration from Knizak.
I have drilled holes in this record. (I have also made sounds for this one, coming soon.)

This record has white tape stuck all over it.

I then experimented with cds:

I first burnt a song onto this cd, then scratched it a little bit. I but it into the cd player to play and it worked fine. So I took it out and scratched it a bit more. It still worked fine, you couldn't tell anything was different. So I again took it out and scratched it some more. Then it wouldn't play at all in the cd player. It was either to little or to much, I couldn't get an in between.

After finishing with that cd I got another one and burnet another song onto it. I first but tape onto and played it. The tape didn't make a difference. I then put a square of blue nail polish into the cd. This still didn't make a difference. I have scratched the cd, like I did to the other one, which had the same effect. It played up until a point and wouldn't play at all.

Milan Knizak

Milan Knizak (born April 19, 1940) Czechoslovakia) Knizak is a performance artist, sculptor, musician installation. To name a few.

Milan Knizak talking about his work:

"In 1963-64 I used to play records both too slowly and too fast and thus changed the quality of the music, thereby, creating new compositions. In 1965 I started to destroy records: scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them over and over again (which destroyed the needle and often the record player too) an entirely new music was created - unexpected, nerve-racking and aggressive. Compositions lasting one second or almost infinitely long (as when the needle got stuck in a deep groove and played the same phrase over and over). I developed this system further. I began sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing different parts of records back together, etc. to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds. A glued joint created a rhythmic element separating contrasting melodic phrases... Since music that results from playing ruined gramophone records cannot be transcribed to notes or to another language (or if so, only with great difficulty), the records themselves may be considered as notations at the same time."

Drawing Project One: Sonic Landscapes

"All you can hear is nothing"

For my drawing project I have decided to look at broken sound. What happens/doesn't happen when record, cds etc are broken. 

John Cage said:

"There is no need for sounds to be anything but a sound."

I am going to look into this quote and develop more on this. The idea that the sound doesn't have to have a meaning/narrative to be 'sound.'

Milan Knizak (born April 19, 1940) Czechoslovakia) Knizak is a performance artist, sculptor, musician installation. To name a few.

I am going to look at Knizak works and develop my ideas from his ideas, works such as:

Broken Music Composition, 1979