Derek Bailey
Improvisation

Derek Bailey. Or how the sound became liquid. Or like music melting like an immense slice of camembert in the sun, like a Salvador Dalí clock.

As if you took an army of crickets and cicadas and replaced their wings with guitars. The music that the aliens from Alpha Centauri dance to, writhing on their 37 legs. Let's just hope that the demigod Cthulhu doesn't resurrect and wipe us all out, what can I say.

Or take a guitar and lock it in a medieval torture chamber at the mercy of psychopathic maniacs and record its slow agony. Hendrix burning his guitar on stage becomes an innocent big child by comparison. Every drop of sound and agony from the dying guitar is savored and distilled. All of this to reach the swan song. Because the most beautiful sounds, as with its white-feathered cousins, come when the guitar is about to die. The concepts of note, chord, harmony no longer apply. Take them and make a nice bonfire while you torture the guitar. Destroy and burn, sometimes bonfires are beneficial.

Do you remember "The Immortal" by Borges? In that story, the protagonist, a Roman soldier, meets a troglodyte who has drunk from the fountain of eternal life and can barely speak. In the end, they manage to extract a few stumbling words of Greek, from which it is deduced that the poor man knew the Homeric poems. To the question of what he knew about the Odyssey, he replies: -Very little. Less than the poorest rhapsode. A thousand and one hundred years have passed since I invented it.-

The same could be said of this album. Here and there, there are traces that might remind of melodic music and jazz. But they are so distant that it's as if our musician lived as a solitary hermit for a thousand years and practically forgot everything, meanwhile creating his own language with increasingly tenuous ties to Indo-European.

The present album, recorded in Milan in 1975, contains 14 pure state improvisations, each 2-3 minutes long. A mad flamenco of crumpled sheet metal.

Atonal, arrhythmic, amelodic, perhaps a little analgesic too. One of the greatest musical terrorists of all time, a true original. Music surely indigestible and unsettling, but ultimately rewarding.