Danger Music! Music Designed To Cause Pain

Dick Higgins, performing Danger Music #2 (1962).
Danger Music is literally music or performances designed to put the listener and audiences in danger of physical harm. Don't just think ear-splitting volumes, in performances of "danger music", the danger can easily come from objects being thrown into the audience. To such an extent that often scheduled performances have to be cancelled, or some pieces simply can never be performed. And so some pieces of music only exist as concepts. Danger Music is an avant-garde form of experimental music that has it's roots in the middle of the 20th century, and is often associated with Fluxus the Neo-Dada art movement. It has become since associated with a number of key artists and performers, most notably artist Dick Higgins who produced a series of works in the early 1960s called Danger Music. Being avant garde in nature, pieces are often made up of text instructions for the performer to follow. These instructions may require the performer to physically harm themselves or instruct them to attempt to harm the audience.  

For example Japanese composer, Takehisa Kosugi’s piece Music For A Revolution which instructed the performer to, "Scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later". A composition still awaiting its world première. 
Works such as this are also sometimes referred to as anti-music because they seem to rebel against the concept of music itself. 
Some pieces are virtually impossible to perform, and as such remain conceptual and philosophically symbolic pieces. The South Korean artist, Nam June Paik's composition Danger Music For Dick Higgins instructs people to listen and imagine "creeping into the vagina of a living whale". Dick Higgins created a composition for Paik, in 1962, as part of his Danger Music series called Danger Music #9 (for Nam June Paik): "Volunteer to have your spine removed". American composer Phil Corner's "One antipersonnel-type CBU bomb will be thrown into the audience", has never been witnessed despite an attempt to schedule a performance. However he did throw a rifle into the audience during a performance of his Prelude From Four Suits. 

All Danger Music isn't conceptual however, some performance do occur and many do contain musical compositions of sorts. Robert Ashley's Wolfman includes voices screaming into microphones with feedback at extremely high levels. One of Dick Higgins most well known pieces Danger Music #17: "Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! Scream! " can be found being performed on YouTube. In Los Angeles in 1968 there was a concert, in which the final piece was entitled Jet Engine! The audience were lead outside, to a field where there was indeed a jet engine bolted to scaffolding. Eventually after some effort, the composer managed to fit it up. Much to the shock of the audience. In his book Tinman: A Life Explored (2008), David Cope describes the scene he witnessed, "The unthinkable finally occurred. With a loud burp and a ghastly explosion of light, the jet engine roared to life. There is no way to describe what happened next. The sound was not only ear splitting and all encompassing, but it had a physical presence of its own - you could feel it vibrating your organs, your teeth, and the ends of your hair."
However the band that infamously took the concept of Danger Music to its ultimate level of danger and destruction has to be the Japanoise band Hanatrash (ハナタラシ). A band that regularly employed machetes, molotov cocktails, and circular saws in their live performances.  Some of the band's most infamous shows included frontman Yamantaka Eye cutting a dead cat in half with a machete, strapping a circular saw to his back and almost cutting his leg off. They were famous for getting the audience to sign waivers, before they would perform. They would regularly trash venues, causing huge amounts of damage.

The show that they are most renowned for though is their "bulldozer show". In August 1985, at a performance, frontman Eye drove a back-hoe bulldozer through the back wall of the venue, and proceeded to destroy the venue.
Hanatrash's infamous "bulldozer show" (1985).
The aftermath of the infamous Hanatrash "bulldozer show".
The Gerogerigegege: The Weirdest Band On The Planet? - The most outrageous Japanoise band in the world. Complete avant-garde insanity with no boundaries.
Throbbing Gristle: Three chords? You Can Start A Band With No Chords! - Provocative pioneers of industrial noise music, formed from Hull based art collective COUM Transmissions.
The story goes that the show at a venue called Superloft in Nerima, Tokyo was eventually stopped due to Eye preparing to throw a lit molotov cocktail onto the stage. The damages that the performance cost were approximately ¥600,000 (approximately $9,000 US) in repairs. It wasn't long after surprisingly that Hanatrash were banned from performing at venues unless they stopped the "danger" element of their stage act. But this Dadaist act of artistic destruction has gone down in the annals of performance art history. Thus making Hanatrash the undisputed kings of Danger Music.
The Dial-A-Poem Poets - A New York City poetry project started in 1968, by poet John Giorno. It used the telephone system, to spread poetry recorded by poets and artists. 
The Wreckers Of Western Civilisation: COUM Transmissions - The subversive avant-garde art collective, founded in Hull, that became Throbbing Gristle the industrial music pioneers.