In the second installment of his music column, Ben Watson wages a war of social being against the hip priests of consensus reality

In this month's music column Demetra Kotouza plucks rebetiko, music of the dangerous classes in Greece, from the stifling assumptions of its detractors and defenders

What happens when musicians smash the metronome of developmental time and the prison-house of language?, asks Howard Slater in this month's Mute Music Column

On the way to a full silence the mark of language

brands the body with a reminder of the time

 

- Delphine

When film soundtracks take the form of an iPod on shuffle or a non-stop brass crescendo, do they make alienating cinema more human or alienated lives more cinematic? This month's Mute Music Columnist Nina Power risks removing her earmuffs 

In this month's Mute Music Column, Pil and Galia Kollectiv look at Bruce Springsteen in the context of class disintegration and place him firmly in the decadent tradition of Balzac and Huysmans – Á Rebours to Run?

... his great work is a constant elegy on the irretrievable decay of good society; his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction...

Punks collecting things other than safety pins and STDs? Jon Bywater looks at the tendency among Punk enthusiasts to compile catalogues and measure their contents in this month's Mute Music Column

The 'compositional improvising' of jazz, from big band to free to AACM, is, in its shared precarity, 'tellingly inarticulate' - writes Howard Slater in this month's Mute Music Column

Throwing handfuls

of pebbles on

the hollow tree

sprinkling of tones

thuds of sunder

coastal cymbals

Kicking off our collectively composed music column, Ben Watson explodes the integrity of cookie-cutter modern music, dynamites the shameless posturing of other critics (Po-Mo or otherwise) and makes those who listen to Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram without an open copy of Negative Dialectics in their lap look like utter, utter fools