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
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