Bruce Russell, discussing the "aesthetic exchange" of improvisational collaboration in the "improvised sound underground":
"Recordings are submitted to a process of often serial alteration, each laminar layer of accretion and treatment erasing much of what went before, until what is left is a pure melding of personal mana, the attribution of the artists' names, associated together with a piece of work in effect is the content of the artwork"
"The gift of mana, or reputation, in an area of practice where actual financial returns are often negligible, makes the potlatch of collboaration a way to symbolically liquidate the most valuable of commodities: time"