MILAN KNIZAK

The Sound Art of Milan Knizak

The Sound Art of Milan Knizak

Introduction

He was a member of Fluxus, an international (anti-)artistic community of music, actions, poetry, objects and events. Milan Knížák was director of Fluxus East from the year 1965. He is known for organising and performing the first happenings and concerts in Czechoslovakia: e.g. A Walk around Novy Svet (New World) and the Demonstration for Oneself (both 1964). Milan Knizak contact to Fluxus about in 1965 through the Czech critic Jindrich Chalupecký. Knížák was promoted to “Director Fluxus East” by Maciunas about 1965. In the Eastern bloc there were managed these activities: Fluxus festivals in Vilnius (1966), Prague (1966), Budapest (1969), and Poznan (1977). In October 1966, Knížák organised the first Fluxus concert in Czechoslovakia in Prague. in which he appeared together with Ben Vautier, Jeff Berner, Alison Knowles, Serge Oldenbourg and Dick Higgins. George Maciunas invited Knížák to the USA in 1965, but he had a visa in 1968.

Discussion

Music has been made by means of technology for nearly as long, if not exactly as long, as music has been made. Except for the voice (as well as the effects of clapping, slapping, and snapping), the sounds we agree to designate as musical rely on the use of tools, whether those tools be sticks, synthesizers, banjoes, electric guitars, or flutes carved from the bones of whales. The contemporary question of what kinds of music rank as technologically borne, then, is less a matter of provenance and more a matter of what kinds of sounds—and what types of tools—we choose to class as musically germane.

Addressing that question in the computer age is one of the subjects of Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, a survey of music made from various mangled processes on various mangled gear (radios, turntables, laptops). At the book's core is the swell of "glitch" music that greeted the arrival of computer software as a compositional tool in the 1990s and 2000s—the kind of music made with skipping CDs and hacked digital devices by ambient acts like Oval and numerous sound-artists with timely conceptual aims. Author Caleb Kelly, a lecturer at the Sydney College of Art in Australia, begins his discussion with recent movements spied in music clubs and art galleries during the past few years. But almost immediately, he works to situate our current state within a greater history. "A major twentieth-century shift occurred with the addition of all sound into music," Kelly writes. With that shift in philosophical and aesthetic perspective, it was just a matter of time before sites set on that special byproduct of cracked-media practice: "a point of rupture or a place of chance occurrence, where unique events take place that are ripe for exploitation toward new creative possibilities."

Cracked media predate the rise of computer music by decades. Kelly devotes the first half of his book to early instigators who switched on with the birth of recorded music, citing historical examples from the Italian futurist composer Luigi Russolo to fervent musical thinkers, such as ...