48. Limescale - Limescale (2003)

Coming a year after Baileys success with Ballads, Limescale comes from a much busier world of ensemble improvisation. Featuring the Octet lineup of Derek Bailey (guitar), Tony Bevan (bass sax), T.H.F. Drenching (dictaphone), Sonic Pleasure (Bricks), and Alex Ward (clarinet). I threw myself into this music impressed by Ballads, and Bailey's individualist 'non-idiomatic' style, and I got an album full of fun and funky playing with a strange and massive variety of unfamiliar timbres, seemingly scrapping for a peek above the parapet.
Unfortunately improv of this ilk has since seemed like less fun, and consists of either over-earnest AMM types prioritizing their own communications over the listening experience of the audience, or has become exactly what Bailey reacted against, becoming a genre with it's own stylistic tropes and sound pallet.
Limescale contains a lunging forward momentum, the group in a true telepathic hive mind situation, Ayleresque squeaks, presumably from the dictaphone, compete against farting bass, whilst Baileys guitar plugs the gaps, and a non rhythmic percussion (bricks?) scutters around the undergrowth, keeping your internal body popper busy. Occasionally things wind down and we hear the ensemble in a duo or solo, only to swirl back up again.


There's something very British surrealist about this music, not serious like too much other arrogant improv, but reaching for emotion and meaning out of an outsider approach, like a Dada Ornette Coleman for the music hall.
Although I came late to Derek Bailey's music, he will be sorely missed, as John Butcher has recently suggested, Bailey's music has died with him, no one can play again in that way without appearing to imitate Bailey, he truly created his own musical language.