No thanks to David Toop for making me wade through a page of dense verbiage about the new Fenn O’Berg album (Soundcheck, The Wire 313) in search of a steer as to whether or not it’s worth acquiring, only to give me the metaphorical finger with the lofty payoff “I am not about to expend a lot of silly adjectives on a track-by-track description, like some halfwit blogger.” Well, excuse me but I like silly adjectives; why else would I subscribe to The Wire? Plus, I was under the impression that it was the reviewer’s responsibility to make some effort to describe the music under review in terms that might resonate with potentially interested parties. Toop’s abdication of that responsibility on the grounds that “if you want to find out what something sounds like you can do so easily enough” beggars belief. I could buy the album, I guess, but by that logic I would need to buy every album listed in the pages of The Wire each month; isn’t that where reviews come in? Anyway, I look forward to seeing future Toop reviews in the form of empty white space where considered value judgements used to reside, with, of course, his reviewer’s fee returned uncashed.

I’d like to address a couple of the points made by David Keenan in his section of the Unofficial Channels feature in The Wire 297. Firstly, Keenan is way off beam in his assertion that downloading music “gives primacy to the platform through which it is received.” On the contrary, downloading inevitably focuses the listener’s attention on the music itself, rather than the attendant paraphernalia fetishised by Keenan.

Secondly, it’s a bit rich of Keenan to claim that CD-R and cassette culture “keeps music social” when the distribution of these artefacts is so limited and, arguably, elitist. I would have loved to own Christina Carter’s exquisite Masque Femine album, for example, but with a total edition of a mere 80 copies my chances of acquiring one were always going to be slim. How, then, to hear this spectral masterpiece? Nothing else to be done: download the monster, then listen to it in the dark, on headphones, where the fact that it’s coming to me as a sound file on my iPod rather than as a CD-R becomes supremely irrelevant.

Keenan accuses technology of having an “isolating influence,” a frankly absurd contention given that current filesharing protocols allow music to be shared between like-minded individuals more effectively than ever before. One fine example, and a notable omission from your feature, is the Dimeadozen website, a goldmine of commercially unavailable live recordings from every genre and era imaginable. Because the site uses a “share ratio” as part of its technology, its members are incentivised to make their recordings available as much as possible, thereby exerting precisely the kind of communitarian influence that is absent from the “guerrilla media” Keenan advocates.

As someone who enjoys the music of both Stockhausen and Cecil Taylor, a position which Tony Herrington would presumably find untenable, I’d like to respond to his Masthead in The Wire 295. In one sense, of course, Herrington is right – improvised music provides a feast for the mind, body and soul that the likes of Stockhausen are largely powerless to deliver. But one could, in truth, say the same thing about composed music from any era. Besides which, Stockhausen’s music has its own individual appeal, based on the premise (hammered home in every single pre-concert talk by him that I ever attended) that the most important thing was for the audience to pay attention. If improvisation is about letting yourself be invigorated and carried away by the music, Stockhausen is about alertness and active listening as the gateway to a rich and complex personal cosmology. And whatever the merits of the German’s “feral children” might be, it is more relevant and interesting at this point to mention Anthony Braxton, who draws on influences from both jazz and Stockhausen to form a body of work that is both philosophically coherent and utterly exhilarating.

One other thing. Edwin Pouncey uses the old journalist’s standby “allegedly” in writing about Varg Vikernes’ crimes (Soundcheck, The Wire 295), even though, as he goes on to point out, Vikernes was sent to prison. In other words, Vikernes was found guilty, so in the eyes of the law he committed the crimes; there’s no “allegedly” about it.