Blogger Adam Harper has just published his paper, given at the Sonic Radicalism symposium held at the University of East London on 23 May, on notions of musical radicalism beyond the norm, where innovation might be detected in practices and details outside normal frameworks of musical ‘innovation’. Harper:

One of the most significant and even epoch-defining debates going on in underground music criticism right now is of course that of ‘the new’ in music.  Some commentators – spearheaded by Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher – claim that the production of music with a radical identity and some degree of sufficient novelty has slowed, usually in favour of a revision of musics of the past. Others, such as myself, would argue that the new is present in contemporary music, but that it’s subtle or intensive, or, when framed according to the aesthetic standards of the past, misunderstood or even invisible. Infinite Music argues for such a more relativistic understanding of musical novelty, pertaining at any scale from the infinitesimal to the infinite, and constrained only by our capacity to detect meaningful change within the listening imagination.