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