Nine Songs: clipping.

BILL: This is actually something I truly love. On some days, this could be in my top favorite pieces of music of all time. I’ve spent more time listening to Derek Bailey than probably any other musician in my life, possibly maybe Cecil Taylor, but mostly Derek Bailey.

And reading his book [Improvisation: It’s Nature and Practice] and listening to him has informed so much of how and why I make music. I don't know if you know much about him?

BEST FIT: Very little.

BILL: Well, he's an improvising guitar player, and one of the most important figures in the free improvisation movement. He was originally a jazz player, but he threw that out the window and said, ‘You know, I never want to play the same thing twice. I don't want to play outside of an idiom. I don't want to play regular rhythms. I will never play a fifth! [laughs]. He pushes for this whole new music.”

And he's kind of compulsive. Back in the day, he’d just be walking around his apartment in Sheffield, playing all the time. And he would write ‘letters’ to people by putting a tape player on the table and talking into it while he was playing, because he never put his guitar down.

People have compiled taped letters they received from him that are a mixture of him playing, then talking into the microphone like, ‘How's your mother? How are you doing?”, then some more guitar, then “Arghhh Maragret Thatcher’s on the TV!!.

But what he also used to do was - in the ‘90s, there was a pirate radio station that played drum and bass that he would tune into, and he would play along with the drum and bass. And he became really, really into it for a while. He did an interview where he talked about it, but those tapes could never come out because they didn't know how to even ask for the rights, how to track down what DJ was playing etc.

That said, I think I figured out what the track featured in this piece was, it’s called “War in 94” by Bad Man. A super old jungle track. I tracked it down by figuring out two of the samples and then working backwards…

He passed away more than 10 years ago, and these tapes were just sort of unearthed… I guess they could be released because they figured no one was going to sue at this point. And I love that this album sounds like a transmission; tuning into something you can barely hear that you don't really understand, and you don't know the origin of.

I think that informs a lot of how we want this album to feel - making your art on top of some other art, creating this weird cross-cultural conversation. I mean, Derek at this point is this cranky old jazz guy who's becoming super interested in what young Black Londoners are making, but he doesn't even know that that's what it is. It just came through magically on his radio.”

Derek’s full of that sense of wonder and mystery, and it mirrors the way I heard electronic music for the first time, in high school.

I can't tell you what it used to feel like to hear Aphex Twin in 96 and have absolutely no idea how any of the sounds were made. I couldn't even picture it in my head. There's an old Conan O'Brien joke about a guy playing air instruments, but he's never seen real instruments, so for a guitar solo he’s just pretending to pull levers. And that's how it was for me. Is this guy pulling levels? Chains above his head? I had no idea. And that was magical.

JONATHAN: At the time, there was such cheekiness amongst those guys. They would lie in interviews about everything all the time. Like, ‘Oh, Bogdan Rosinski made this record while homeless in Tokyo, pulling computers out of the trash’. There was this romanticism, this mystique and … Fuck you-ness to all of that stuff.

BEST FIT: I swear I saw one of those guys featured on Tomorrow’s World when I was a kid.

BILL: “That was an era where we thought the future of music was people with expertise who knew stuff that the public didn't. And now AI music is the opposite. AI music says: ‘Music is hard, isn't it? Wouldn't it be better if you didn't have to make any of it?’ That's the way they're selling it to us. That's our anti AI position.