Twenty Five Years from Scratch, ed. Michael Parsons, London: London Musician's Collective, 1994.

If relational aesthetics and open source were always commercial, can the musical score provide a way of thinking through different relationships between creativity and code? The return to improvisation in 'livecoding' draws parallels with experimental practices developed by maverick musicians, programmers and educators from Sun Ra, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Scratch Orchestra to Seymour Papert. Simon Yuill argues that these 'distributive practices' are worth extending today*

During a career spent in virtual obscurity, Ghedalia Tazartès whittled away at the coherence of musical identity, moving through modes of articulation as a guttural nomad. Now a box-set collates his multiple voices. Howard Slater raps uvular, in prose and notation

Free improvisation guitarist and theorist Derek Bailey could be described as the Samuel Beckett of post-war music. Bailey moved nohow-onward by means of a continually repeated negation of the familiar, eschewing the idiomatic for the (almost) uncommodifiably new. Ben Watson’s biography of Bailey, published earlier this year, celebrates the life and unfinishable works of an avant garde anti-artist. But, asks Paul Helliwell, do Bailey and Watson throw too much musical baby out with the tonal bathwater? And where does the increasingly venerable practice of free improvisation stand in relation to modernism’s dialectic of the new today?

Sakada Thin Autonomy

19th October 2004, 61-75 Alie Street

Between the long stagnant and vital (full of forms of life) trough of commercial road, the self-mythologising skyline of the money mill beyond Aldgate, the Titanic, Totenschiff, death ship: a container ship of spent labour power looms out, for this night welcoming an evening of para-musical hiatus.