"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)