There's a certain strain of argument being touted in which the extremities (global as well as musical) are where it's all happening--from freeform improv to Jap-core noise, from NZ drone-scapes to quirked out neo-Krautrock to Skullflower-style fuzzadelia. Apart from the insufferable cooler-than-thou attitude that often seems intrinsic to this stance, my aesthetic objection to all these initiatives is their tendency to end up as pure abstraction. And pure abstraction isn't really that interesting. You can't do anything with it, or to it--apart from just lie back and take it (in).

"A scribble effacing all lines" is how Deleuze & Guattari put in A Thousand Plateaux, talking of the tendency of avant-garde artists to reterritorialise around "the child, the mad, noise"--the aesthetic equivalent to such "fascist or suicidal" lifestyle choices as heroin addiction, terrorism or joining a cult. Musically, the quest for chaos can easily end up as a black hole of undifferentiated, maelstromic miasma--as vast as the cosmos maybe, but in the absence of any figure-ground perspective, it's effectively as claustrophobic as a cubby-hole.

I subscribe to the D&G/Manuel Delanda line that the most interesting work happens "on the edge of chaos". I'm interested in abstraction where it works as a component of a groove ('ardkore, darkside, techstep) or an element within an architectonics of audio-space (Chain Reaction). It's the thresholds, the intermediary zones, that are really magical -- melody bleeding into noise, songcraft struggling with psychedelics (My Bloody Valentine, Husker Du); distortion + raunch (Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic", Royal Trux's Cats and Dogs); the Bataillean excess and surplus-to-requirements extravagance working within and against the funktional minimalism (Prince, swingbeat); space + groove + timbre (Can, Neu!, Miles Davis, Seventies dub). Punk to funk, the ethos is the same: "restriction is the mother of all invention" (Holger Czukay). Extremism? Well, on what scale are we measuring here? Very little out-rock, avant-jazz, left-field electronica, etc. being perpetrated today really ranks with, let alone exceeds, the outer limits probed by the Sixties freeform brigades, electro-acousticians, and so forth. There's also the question of ego: so much out-rock or avant-improv seems to partake of the Expressionistic Fallacy (e.g. Caspar Brotzmann's scrofulously self-preening theatre of pain). This interferes with the listener's ability to derive machinic use-value from it. You just have to sit there and gasp in awe. It's about marveling at the Artist's depth and intensity of feeling, rather than using the music to trigger sensations and intensities in yourself. The impersonal, "objective" approach to constructing rhythmic engines or kinaesthetic audio-sculptures can create just as powerful feelings in the listener as the "subjective" school of Romantic outpouring creativity. The idea that the former is mere artisanship whereas the latter is true Art is, like, half a century out of date, at least. This is the age of the engineer-poet, the imagineer.

Although drum & bass can make some preposterous claims about its experimentalist reach, the truth is that its radicalism is always constrained with a quite rigid set of parameters: at any given season, certain kinds of bass-sound, certain kinds of breaks, and a specific tempo, are required by DJ's and dancers; invention takes place within and against those constraints. The resulting friction creates sparks. In hardcore dance scenes, constraints are a strength, not a liability. At the very least, these parameters are no less likely to produce strikingly listenable and intensity-productive results than the total absence of constraints. Extremism can be as fruitless as any musical stance; simply embarking with an experimental mindset does not guarantee results. Leaving the rhetoric of extremity for those still interested in playing the cool game (the fun wears off about a decade or so, lemme warn ya; there's always something more marginal and listener-unfriendly than whatever outer limit you set up shop upon) is a tremendous release. I can now confess that the song-oriented Faust IV is my favourite of their albums rather than the hipper Faust Tapes, that I prefer the boogie-fied crossover stab Clear Spot to Trout Mask Replica, that the almost-funky Strange Celestial Roads is my fave Sun Ra, that the Sly-and-Jimi influenced Seventies Miles pleasures me more than Ayler or AMM screeching to the converted. I can consign those Merzbow CD's to that cupboard marked "possibly someday, probably never".