An Exercise In Good Taste? 

           In the modern art of high-brow sonics
            prepared machines meet crafted wood
            in a fine-artistic ungodly embrace
           of toungues and tines and bowed whistles,
    splayed like stripped nerves in their search of the outlandish weird.


         But what their strange minstrels forget
        are familiar limits; they do not transcend.
        They assume they are already there.
          They could take six small sine waves,
             the simplest of sounds,
    and weave them and throw them and twist them through time,
     and add in six more, and then twelve more again,
           so that when they are done
        an ethereal flute, yet breathlessly real,
flickers like lightning in nebulous fade through a rumble of elegant thunder.
        The thunder folds back like a mist off the sea.
        The sea is melodic, harmonic and mystic;
     the wavering depths, the enchantment of sirens,
          the wonder of whales and the spin of the spray
             are caught in their essence in one single sound.
                     But they aren't.


           These minstrels tinker with abstracted parts
              of what they can find in a moment.
             This fractured sense of timelessness
              may open the mind, for a moment;
                but it rings hollow,
                  drops a clangour,
             like a poltergeist in a clock shop.