Metal Machine Music is one of the most radical and controversial artistic gestures in all of rock history. A double album of nearly an hour of pure noise: layers of overdriven guitars, electrical feedback, and distortion with no recognizable melodic structures or rhythms. Reed presented it as classical music; his label RCA withdrew it from catalogs within weeks.
Reed's intentions in creating the album were never entirely clear: was it a deliberate sabotage of his recording contract? A genuine artistic statement about noise as musical form? An elaborate joke? Probably all of those at once. What is certain is that Metal Machine Music anticipated industrial music and experimental noise by twenty years.
Decades later, the album has been reappraised as a work of avant-garde art and has influenced generations of experimental musicians. The Zeitkratzer Orchestra performed it in full live in 2007. What in 1975 seemed like artistic suicide is today a historical landmark of sonic experimentation.