Time & Perspective Quote by Bill Laswell

Records, in Bill Laswell's framing, are less monuments than paperwork: proof you showed up, did the labor, delivered the goods. Calling albums "receipts" is a deliberately unromantic metaphor, and that’s the point. It knocks the halo off the record-object - the collectible, the legacy marker, the thing that gets ranked, reissued, and fetishized - and drags it back to process. The real story isn’t the artifact; it’s the ongoing practice that produced it.

Laswell’s intent reads like a quiet rebuke to a culture that treats documentation as destiny. In music, especially in scenes shaped by improvisation, remix, and collaboration, the finished product can feel like a snapshot taken mid-motion. His line insists that the snapshot is not the life. "Moments of achievement" acknowledges pride without surrendering to it; achievement is real, but it’s temporary, and it’s never the last word.

The subtext is also about power: who benefits when records become the primary unit of value. Labels, platforms, critics, and awards all prefer neat objects they can market and measure. Musicians, meanwhile, live in time - rehearsals, gigs, experiments, failed takes, new lineups. Laswell, whose career stretches across jazz, dub, punk, ambient, and beyond, has always treated music as a continuum of collisions rather than a staircase of definitive statements.

The closing clause - time goes on, people keep playing - lands like a grounding chord. It refuses nostalgia and refuses anxiety about permanence. The work continues; the music doesn’t need permission from history to be alive.