Derek Bailey
Carpal Tunnel
(hear it)

I am greatly intrigued by the idea of the "audio liner notes" - Derek Bailey tells you what is up with the album in the first track, as the first track, while playing the first track.

That hip Hop music I keep hearing about these days is where audio liner notes thrive. The rapper will in the course of a track explain who she is (including hometown, parents, friends, teachers), where she has recorded the album, collaborators, sometimes even discussing peculiarities of the track, such as featured instruments or rythmic peccadilloes.

This is a very different Derek Bailey album. The music is by necessity strained, rare. I think it is my favorite. I enjoy hearing him discovering a new idiom after a lifetime of idiomatic "idiom-free" music.

I believe he was deluding himself calling his music nonidiomatic. It's a common problem with improvisers - by limited-human necessity they can never be free of genre or threads of consistency, but yet they claim to be. They embrace the justification of being principled, even falsely so, because in practice they make food that tastes like garbage, sick-making drugs, and cars with square wheels.

I'm on something of a Derek Bailey kick right now. I used to be a little afraid of putting too many difficult-to-resolve sounds into my brain, and I still basically believe that overindulgence in the fringe frayed my mind in the late nineties. I'm still okay, for the time being, but I will monitor my behavior for signs of disarray.

bb, 6 Aug 08