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

The late Derek Bailey's musical 'career' was founded on years of wage labour as a guitarist in dancehalls and nightclubs. An idea which aspirants to today's fully professional-entrepreneurial cultural sector would find barely comprehensible, suggests Matthew Hyland. For what other than individual elevation above wage-worker status defines the 'creative' life that these subvention-seekers clamour for so shrilly?

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

Will the ‘hive mind’ of social networking replace classical forms of knowledge production? Comparing Web 2.0 and small-scale, self-run cultural platforms, Olga Goriunova maintains the possibility for originality in both contexts, while identifying how the same old commercial and institutional pressures still operate

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?