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"Context is half the work", artist John Latham once wrote, and as the terrifying noise of an amplified electric saw ripping through books demonstrated to me long before I had come across this epigram, to give 50 per cent or more over to context is to open music out into an immersive environment, a theatre of chaos and complexity. Counterbalancing moves to rationalise music into finite, controllable sequences of numbers (whether digital, Pytbagorean, Qabalistic or the serialism of Milton Babbitt and Pierre Boulez), a large proportion of music made during the past hundred years has implicitly or violently rejected absolutes: the absolutes of political or religious dogma; the expedient absolutes of copyright; the beginning and end of a piece; the distinction between composer and performer, performer and audience, music and surroundings; the rejection of absolute boundaries and standards with which one piece of music can be judged against another.

— Ocean of Sound by David Toop (Page 254 - 255)

From the mid-1960s into the disillusioned 1970s, little instruments and non-instruments (transistor radios, contact microphones amplifying tiny sounds or surface noises extracted from tables, beards, cheese graters, etc) became symbols of the drive to democratize music, to allow access to unskilled players (including children), draw sound from instruments rather than subjugate them to systems, open the music up to chance events and create a sense of collectively organized community as an attempted break from hard professionalism, particularly, the star system that afflicted both jazz groups and classical performers.

— Ocean of Sound by David Toop (Page 135)

Floating, amorphous, oceanic crooning (or crooning with attitude) seems to mirror the feeling of non-specific dread that many people now feel when they think about life, the world, the future; yet it expresses a feeling of bliss. The bliss is non-specific, also, covering a spectrum which ranges from stress management at one end to spiritual ecstasy at the other. So disquiet hovers in balance with the act of escapism or liberation.

— Ocean of Sound by David Toop (Page 91)