25 ways to kill a piano

A couple of years ago, one of the angriest comment threads ever on Music Thing concerned a bunch of students in Aberystwyth who bought a piano on Freecycle, put it on a beach, burned it, and said it was art. Today, YouTube is stuffed with people being mean to pianos. Damn, you must have had some bad piano teachers...

Throw it off a cliff, set fire to it
Shoot it with shotguns and an AK47
Knock it over and jump on it
Jens Johansson (who is Yngwie Malmsteen's keyboard player) smashes up an old piano while giggling hysterically
Back a pickup truck into it
Play it with a JCB digger (this one really is the stuff of nightmares)
Drive over it in an enormous truck
Put on a leather coat and fill it with fireworks
Smash it and sample it
Fire it from a trebuchet (or here at Burning Man, where presumably it's performance art)
Throw it down a hill
Burn it and call it art (again)
Pull it off the back of a moving pickup truck
Drag it behind a pickup truck
Chop it with an axe
Hit it with a sldege hammer
Throw it off a building (Warning: Video contains giggling MIT students, where they've been doing it since 1972)
Bash two together
Drop it off a fork lift truck
Drive a car into a piano shop
Blow it up
In the interests of fairness, here's an organ getting smashed by giggling metal fans
Use a burning acoustic guitar to set it alight
Throw stuff at it
Blow up a grand piano with really a lot of TNT

(Idea from Michael, whose new book Sod Abroad will make you chuckle)

Posted by Tom Whitwell.

Comments:

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Mike : 1:47 pm

Jeff DeRose of www.ice-axe.com made a beautiful video of a piano burning in the snow for my toy piano band Twink.

# posted by

Mike : 1:48 pm

Twink kicks ass. Supercute is a great, great album.

# posted by

Dave : 2:53 pm

#6 is doubly horrific, because it's not just any piano, but a potentially valuable Pianola (player piano). Philistines!

# posted by

brian t : 3:46 pm

i was expecting at least one of these to be a dx7 patch

# posted by

Unknown : 6:40 pm

I've had some very pleasing results from torturing a piano. I love how an injured instrument sounds. Why do people have to be such luddites? shucks.

this is nice:
http://www.polymatic.de/data/umzug/poly_upload_brand_1.JPG

# posted by

Analog Suicide : 1:53 am

John Cage once said, "A piano is like money. No one appreciates it except the person who has it in their hands."

# posted by

mrG : 2:21 am

What about that Art of Noise video where they cut through the iron frame of a grand piano with power tools?

# posted by

wheat : 5:13 am

piano destruction was of course very important in the fluxus movement in the 1960ies. here's a great video of sonic youth playing george maciunas' composition "Piano Piece #13 (for Nam June Paik)" from 1962, one of the key pieces of piano destruction music (and obviously by far more that just piano destruction):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=hjbyN-IUUlA

# posted by

ra : 9:48 am

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Juice : 4:27 am

I've always liked this trebuchet fling from northern exposure

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7Se08RZ34A

# posted by

Juice : 4:28 am

Cool..

Bashing two together would be the least destructive..

And a brutal way to do it would be Chainsaw Massacre style

:)

# posted by

Aweng Moral - Basco : 6:20 am