First we had the Avant-gardists who early last century were responsible for new sounds, structures and paradigms in music. As the name suggests, this broad collection of movements and schools saw their role as one of artistic (and often social) leadership.

By mid-century Experimental music had surfaced as a less hierarchical alternative to the Avant-garde. Cage, the Fluxus movement, the Minimalists, the Situationists, Environmental artists, Pop artists etc. all participated in a meta-movement that saw itself as existing alongside everyday life.

If the early 20^th Century ‘new music’ composers saw themselves as being out in front, and the mid-century experimentalists saw themselves as existing along side everyday life, then where do we posit ourselves today?

Digital technologies like the CD player have made the ‘Glitch’ aesthetic possible, which, according to Kim Cascone ‘was developed in part as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-inter­faces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifically, it is from the "failure" of digital technology that this new work has emerged’. He goes on to say that ‘failure reminds us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them’.

Thus, we live in an era of Failure. Where a glitchy CD (for instance) is not, in the eyes of CD makers and the general public, an experiment or an extended technique, but a failure of that technology. The artist who makes use of this failure comes in from behind, no longer leading or participating in everyday life, making use of whatever falls off the technological bandwagon.