Time & Perspective Quote by Evan Parker

There is a quiet institutional rebellion baked into Evan Parker's phrasing: the old justification for meticulous cataloging sounded humane, even democratic - an archive as welcome mat for newcomers. But Parker exposes the catch with one blunt pivot: "but I think..". The credibility of the argument collapses not because the goal is wrong, but because the timeline is. Ten or fifteen years is an eternity in improvised music, where scenes mutate, labels fold, and the audience refreshes in faster, messier cycles than any catalog can anticipate.

Parker is also poking at a familiar cultural alibi: we say we're preserving things "for the next generation" when we're really trying to soothe our anxiety about ephemerality. In free improvisation especially, the mythos is built on presence - on the unrepeatable gig, the chemistry of a room, the sound that exists once and then disappears. A catalog freezes that flux into product, into a stable identity the music itself often resists. So his skepticism isn't anti-archive; it's anti-fantasy, a refusal to pretend that documentation can substitute for community, curiosity, or lived transmission.

Context matters: Parker comes from a tradition that has been both under-documented and over-mythologized, reliant on small presses, tape trading, specialist labels, and later the churn of reissues. His line reads like an artist watching the culture industry promise permanence while operating on delay - always arriving after the moment has already moved on. The subtext: access isn't just storage; it's time, attention, and the infrastructure to keep listening now.