I found an interesting book about improvisation in Early Music (Medieval, Renaissance and sometimes Baroque), Early Music being a current diversion of mine. The cover reminded me weirdly of how David Lynch films used to be marketed, or at least one of them: Lost Highway.

… which is actually very important. I’m looking for stranger things.

I like Early music for a variety of reasons, but the main one seems to involve its lack of ‘narrative’ drive. There are sounds, but not so much sounds heading anywhere specific. More sounds opening out, melting into other related sounds. I could get into something about what gets called Jazz here, and then back into what gets called Early music, and if I had time I’d mention African music in Early Music – which of course I can hear as clearly as I can in Kind of Blue … but that blurring I leave for psychotherapy sessions. I don’t really know yet how to write what happens in those.

My interest in some of the bands I used to love, for example The Cure, has diminished in proportion to how many times I have heard them play very similar versions of their songs. They seem stuck . They repeat things. I prefer the recordings because those ‘live versions’ although often idiosyncratic, loose so much as the people playing them age. I love the strangeness of young Robert Smith. He’s too familiar for me, now.

Miles Davis kept being strange. He couldn’t play the same thing twice.

The line of a narrative, the thrust of a story, is a certain way of remembering something. Passing on history. It’s also a way of remaining stuck. Listen to some Thomas Tallis.

Buy things because of what they suggest.

I hope I didn’t get to the point,.