In the early 1950s, John Cage showed how pre-recorded tape could be cut up and recombined to form new compositions with Williams Mix, a piece he laboured on for many months with fellow musicians Earle Brown and David Tudor.
By writing into or manipulating the grooves of the record, new compositions could be imagined. He pointed out that, while the phonograph had been designed to initially record and later play back sound, it could also be used as a creative instrument that would allow a composer to directly realise their musical ideas without the need for additional musicians or orchestra. In the 1920s, the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote about the ‘potentialities of the phonograph’. While I’m interested in the Cage of 4’33”, here I use his tape composition Williams Mix (1951-1953) as a connecting point between the experimental art music world of the 1950s and the ‘alternative’ hip hop world of the 2010s, as Williams Mix becomes ‘Williams Mix’, a track on the second album by the Los Angeles-based group clipping. As an example of this, I want to connect some of the dots between the worlds of John Cage and a branch of hip hop occasionally referred to as ‘noise hop’. There’s a lot, too, that crosses between these worlds and that blurs the boundaries. These also have their experimental aspects and it is important that we remember that the world of popular and vernacular culture is one of experimentation even as it is one of commercialism and commodification. In thinking about the histories and traditions of broken music, I want to consider, on the one hand, those associated with the art world and what often gets named in that world as experimental or avantgarde and, on the other, the histories and traditions associated with popular and vernacular music. It deliberately undoes perfection through a set of compositional processes that emphasise fracture, fragmentation and malfunction and view these not as problems but as creative possibilities. Broken music can be understood as an aesthetic or experimental process that brings the hidden out into the open, showing or even unstitching the stitches. This practice has gone by many names one of my favourites is ‘broken music’, as used by the Czech performance artist Milan Knižák in the 1970s. Many artists interested in sound, by contrast, have been just as interested in exploring the noise that surrounds such processes, amplifying the glitches, distortions and mechanical chaos that form the cacophonous flipside to the quest for perfect high fidelity. Milner’s work-an account of sound recording technology-takes its title from a line used in early-1980s promotions for the compact disc and offers a reminder that developers of sound recording and production tools have generally sought to hide unwanted noise in their drive for perfection. Technology is often understood as a process of improving or perfecting things, as summed up in books such as Robert Friedel’s A Culture of Improvement and Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever.
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