Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments (p. viii)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Glitching Digital Audio (p. 6)
• Music and Sound (p. 12)
• The Sonic Turn (p. 19)
• Cracked Playback Technologies (p. 24)
• Manipulated, Cracked, and Broken (p. 32)
• Media Archaeology and Cracked Media (p. 37)
• 1 recording and noise: approaches to cracked media (p. 44)
• Introduction (p. 45)
• 1 The Critique of Recording Technology (p. 46)
• 2 What? I CanÆt Hear You Over That NOISE! (p. 60)
• 2 broken music: the manipulated, modified, and destroyed phonograph (p. 84)
• 1 Broken Music and Early Phonographic Experimentation (p. 84)
• 2 The Crack and Break in Phonographic Sound Production (p. 114)
• 3 Nam June Paik's Broken Tape Loops and Modified Turntables (p. 132)
• 4 Milan Knizak's Broken Music (p. 140)
• 5 Christian Marclay and the Death of Vinyl (p. 150)
• 6 Destroyed Turntables at the End of Gramophonic Culture (p. 184)
• 3 damaged sound: glitching and skipping compact discs in the audio of yasunao tone, nicolas collins, oval, and disc (p. 210)
• 1 The Sound of Glitching CDs (p. 211)
• 2 Yasunao Tone's Wounded Compact Discs (p. 227)
• From Improvisation and Indeterminate Composition to Glitching CDs
• 3 The Unmuted CD Players of Nicolas Collins (p. 245)
• 4 Oval: Pop into Art Music (p. 252)
• 5 Disc and ôRealö CD Damage (p. 275)
• 6 Conclusion (p. 280)
• 4 tactics, shadows, and new media (p. 284)
• 1 The Everyday (p. 285)
• Michel de Certeau's Tactic and Cracked Media
• 2 The Shadows of Technology (p. 295)
• 3 Cracked, Broken, and New (p. 311)
• Notes (p. 322)
• Bibliography (p. 355)
• Index (p. 376)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Kelly (Univ. of Sydney, Australia) explores the evolution of musical performance involving the manipulation, breaking, or destruction of media playback devices (turntables, CD players) or the discs or tapes themselves. According to Kelly, "'cracked media' are the tools of media playback expanded beyond their original function as playback device for prerecorded sound or image." Kelly examines the roots of cracked media in extended instrument techniques (such as playing a violin with the wooden part of the bow) and in chance elements linked with playback devices (records' skipping, "hissing" tape noises). Recently, the author points out, the digital "glitch" (a lost or incorrect binary code) has fueled the cracked-media fire. Kelly includes in his discussion performance artists and composers who have stretched musical boundaries by manipulating both physical objects (scratching LPs, gluing objects on CDs) and the playback method (playing a turntable without a disc), for example, Oval, Yasunao Tone, and Nicolas Collins. Though the book reads like a revamped dissertation and more thorough editing would have helped (one finds redundancies, the organization seems to wander), all in all this is a useful, interesting introduction to this realm of the performance and composition world. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. D. J. Schmalenberger McNally Smith College of Music