How the deliberate cracking and breaking of playback media has produced experimental music and sound by artists and musicians ranging from Nam June Paik and Christian Marclay to Yasunao Tone and Oval.
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Caleb Kelly's Cracked Media is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical writing on the role of sound in the history of modern and postmodern art. It convincingly extends Douglas Kahn's monumental Noise Water Meat by focusing on a powerful strain of contemporary sonic art: the creative misuse of audio playback technologies."--Christoph Cox, co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music
Caleb Kelly is a lecturer at the Sydney College of Art, the University of Sydney, Australia.
"For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990's, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction."--Atau Tanaka, Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle
(Atau Tanaka )About the Author
From the mid-twentieth century into the twenty-first, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked, and broke audio media technologies to produce novel sounds and performances. Artists and musicians, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, Yasunao Tone, and Oval, pulled apart both playback devices (phonographs and compact disc players) and the recorded media (vinyl records and compact discs) to create an extended sound palette. In Cracked Media, Caleb Kelly explores how the deliberate utilization of the normally undesirable (a crack, a break) has become the site of productive creation. Cracked media, Kelly writes, slides across disciplines, through music, sound, and noise. Cracked media encompasses everything from Cage's silences and indeterminacies, to Paik's often humorous tape works, to the cold and clean sounds of digital glitch in the work of Tone and Oval. Kelly offers a detailed historical account of these practices, arguing that they can be read as precursors to contemporary new media. Kelly looks at the nature of recording technology and the music industry in relation to the crack and the break, and discusses the various manifestations of noise, concluding that neither theories of recording nor theories of noise offer an adequate framework for understanding cracked media. Connecting the historical avant-garde to modern-day turntablism, and predigital destructive techniques to the digital ticks, pops, and clicks of the glitch, Kelly proposes new media theorizations of cracked media that focus on materiality and the everyday.
"For those of us who witnessed and accompanied the advent of the laptop music scene in the late 1990s, this book situates the movement within broader contexts of sound exploration in the 20th century. While theories of the everyday have been applied to music listening, they have not been used to discuss music creation. Kelly shows how the mechanisms of consumer music culture led to new directions in artistic creation. What we see is how the creative act in the age of mechanical reproduction becomes a music of cracked reproduction, and ultimately an art of manual mechanical deconstruction." Atau Tanaka , Artist, Director of Culture Lab Newcastle
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Almost as compelling as crack.,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Hardcover)
A fascinating account of practices of cracked media, giving an astounding number of examples that document this movement and trace its genealogy back in time through various avant-garde artistic practices. Kelly convincingly links a lot of disparate practices under this term; my only question would be whether in fact there might be a major omission in the form of musique concrete which would seem to fit in the category. The book is perhaps more of interest for its accounts of artistic /musical practice rather than its forays into the theoretical realm when it tries to think through some of the issues arising from them, as well as about the nature of music vs sound art, sound vs noise, but this is not the major focus of the book anyway really so little matter. Anyone who has ever thought that the Madonna CD playing in the supermarket sounded much better when it started skipping, or who loves the sound of the run out groove at the end of a 33rpm or the satisfying kthunk hsss hsss as the stylus drops on to a platter of vinyl has to read this.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting treatise,
By
This review is from: Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Hardcover)
One feature of avantguarde music since its inception early in the 20th century has been the 'misuse' of instruments and the incorporation of 'non-instruments' to create music.
Anyone tackling this vast subject will have to focus on some aspects while ignoring others. Mr. Kelly's take is the use and abuse of recording and playback media, such as the CD, tape and vinyl records. We get details of the works of artists like Nam June Paik, Yasuano Tone and Oval. I found the book to contain many interesting observations and actually felt insprired to try some techniques myself. The book was less convincing in its attempt to try to find some common denominator for all the different artists. That is probably impossible given the timespan the book covers and the many different approaches described; in any event the use of French philosophers like Michel Certeau unfortunately leads to verbose drivel. That quibble however shouldn't take away from what is a really informative and at times inspring work.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
