Creativity Quote by Derek Bailey

Bailey’s dismissal lands like a dry chord: clipped, unsentimental, and designed to sting the ear of anyone treating electronics as instant sophistication. Calling it "current" marks it as fashion, not language. Then he narrows the target with "lounge electronics" and "mumbling electronics" - phrases that sound like genres invented by a bored bartender. It’s not just that he dislikes the timbres; he’s rejecting an entire posture: music as ambience, as lifestyle sheen, as tasteful background that flatters the room more than it challenges the listener.

Coming from Derek Bailey, that matters. This is a guitarist who made a career out of refusal - refusing predictable harmony, refusing grooves that reassure, refusing virtuosity as applause bait. His "non-idiomatic" improvisation demanded presence: you can’t half-listen to it and still pretend you’ve experienced it. So "mumbling" is a moral critique as much as an aesthetic one. It implies a lack of articulation, risk, and consequence - sound that hedges, that avoids committing to a statement.

There’s also an implicit defense of friction. Late-20th-century electronic currents often drifted toward soft-focus textures and polite minimalism, music optimized for chill rather than confrontation. Bailey’s jab is less technophobic than anti-complacent: if electronics become a solvent that dissolves edge, decision, and surprise, they’re not expanding the palette - they’re sanding it down.