Milan Knizak
It's Not Quite That Inventive (Sixty Years with Broken Music)
The album, featuring Milan Knížák, Petr Ferenc and Opening Performance Orchestra, includes Knížák's 1973 private recording Broken Music, released as a multiple of forty copies by Armin Hundertmark in 1983 on Edition Hundertmark, and a live version of Broken Rebroken, performed in January 2020 at the Museum of Czech Music in Prague by Milan Knížák, Petr Ferenc (aka Phaerentz) and Opening Performance Orchestra. The album comes with a comprehensive booklet that includes an interview with Milan Kníž…
Another State of Stagnation / Piano Pieces (1991-2021)
"My piano compositions are a mixture of musical reminiscences and a confession of my love for disharmonic chords on the one hand, and lascivious melodies on the other. As in the case of almost all my pieces, I wrote them 'dry', at a desk, without using any musical instruments. I only worked with memory and a little bit of imagination. The compositions often come across as randomly taken out of a pot, which contains a blend of fragments of works of a variety of periods, styles and creators." --Mi…
Aktual University
Milan Knízak canonical text Aktual University, dating from 1967, contains ten short lectures outlining the university's character -- On Conflict, On Dreams, On Revolutions, On Love, On Belief, On Art, etc. These lectures were to serve as inspirational schemes for lectures, seminars and discussions held at an ideal university. In the first piece, Aktual University, Milan Knízak reads his own text, with Opening Performance Orchestra providing the musical accompaniment. It was performed live in Oct…
Broken Music
**Much needed small repress avaiilable** Milan Knizak 1979's masterpiece never re-released before. Presented as a gatefold with the original design. Before everyone else - Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, eRikm, Martin Tétreault, Otomo Yoshihide - there was Milan Knizak. In 1964, Milan Knizak, a member of Fluxus from behind the Iron Curtain, sat down on a sidewalk near the Charles Bridge in Prague, laid down a paper carpet right into the street, and starts tearing pages out of books and burning t…
String Quartets
Violin was Milan Knizak's first instrument. He has composed hundred of works of this ilk; the first one DHK, 45 years ago. Next to his destroyed works, Milan took notations of different composers, cut them and put them together (with his own score) into a collage, expressing his feelings and his apprehension of music.Fama Q is a string quartet founded in 2005 in Prague. Its members, being also orchestral musicians with the Prague Philharmonia, were always devoted to chamber and string quartet mu…
Broken Re/Broken
Milan Knizak and Opening Performance Orchestra revisit Knizak's 1979 Broken Music (SR 400LP) in Berlin, 2014. "In 2008-9 we transferred the original recording from vinyl records into digital form. As we did so, we weren't interested in the precise, clean fidelity offered by the digital world, which fundamentally causes the fine structure of natural sound to be lost. Instead we were seeking the opposite: the world of errors and distortion, which remains hidden when digital audio is manipulated to…