Deep down in the dirt floor basement of my heart, I know that what we do here at Buffet of Loathsome is about as capitalist as music scribblin’ gets. Buffet of Loathsome is, after all, about finding the bright slippery nubbins of goodness in an endless steam table of hot garbage—which we only get to do by devouring the whole wretched spectacle. You don’t go to a buffet to dine; you go to gorge, to feel terrible, to be overwhelmed and, ultimately, numbed into stupefied slumber. Sometimes ya boi is so in it, I look around and everything new thing seems already wack. Ain’t nothing new, duh doi. New, as Yan Jun stated in a stellar interview back in ’10, is a lie. “It’s not about possibility, it’s just killing the possibility. Capitalism’s culture is always the same: we are creating a new thing, we are discovering the possibilities of the world, of everything. But this discovery is actually to manage it, to name it, to fix it. After this, no more possibilities. Real possibility means you have to keep something in the unknown, in the mystery, in the chaos.”
So what now? I’m bloated and over it. Toss me another improv record and I’ll shotgun it with an 1/8th” stereo jack, whole thing straight to the dome, no fucks available. Hell, they reproduce so quick, it’ll be a fresh and full in my mitts before I get to the bottom of the first one. It’s the music to listen to when yer listenin to more than one. Boy howdy, another chance to listen to some folks listenin’ to one another. Maybe, stop listenin’ for a sec. People used to complain that playin with Derek Bailey was like playin’ with an algorithm generator; like he wasn’t even in the room with ya. What’s the problem? And what’s the hurry? Yer time and yer hold on it, however insubstantial, is the first thing capitalism wants you to surrender in the name of “making something.”
sorry i missed it is a one hour document of a one hour composition, made on the “living room tour” round about this time last year. Yan Jun on objects in the living room “and in absence.” Ake on violin in the bedroom. Zhu Wenbo on clarinet in the living room and outside. It contains sounds, all at more or less indoor volume. Some seem explicitly musical, some at the edge of obviously musical, and some completely pedestrian and nonchalant. Some seem to have specific things to say, others nothing at all. None of them seem to be directed, in the old school sense, at one another. The listener ain’t King Shit in this world, neither; we’re here and that’s important, but we ain’t at the center. The center shifts and we’re often not invited. It’s both as big as a house and as spread out as roommates nursin’ hangovers. It’s got as little and as much to do with what happens in the composition as what I’m doin’ while it’s playing. It’s communal. It’s welcoming. It’s challenging but friendly. It’s full of unknowns and, five listens in, damn good surprises. Which is to say, I think it’s damned extraordinary, even in a body of work as toe-to-tip bangin’ as Yan Jun’s. Thanks for remindin’ me, at least for an hour, that it’s good to just get the check and leave with yer craw intact and yer gut under control.
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