There is a time not measured by any clock, not beholden to any whim of the space-time continuum, a time that knows no dawn, no twilight, that has neither present nor future, neither past nor participle, a nonspatial continuum verging on the hour at which a pub closes in Brigbee-on-Hackles south of London that is known as Floozy Time. This is not floozie as in the eponymous woman of the evening who, unless she's working per diem, goes about her tasks well aware of the passage of time, and bills her clients accordingly. No, Floozy Time is that nonspatial interval of finite duration during which time events of a timely nature occur, but they may as well not. That is to say, the events are of little, or even less than little, consequence. Floozy Time may be deliberate or unintentional, fortuitous or entirely premeditated. The perpetrator may be aware of his or her actions or not at all in on the joke. It exists in virtually every field of endeavor, including the august domain of music composition.

In fact, it thrives there. All those bits of questionable significance and purpose -- the modulations, the repeats, the variations, the dubious forays into modified tonality, the recapitulations, and in many documented cases the whole pieces themselves -- are musical chicanery, compositional sophistry: Floozy Time. It may be different for different people; there is no universal constant -- except to say that Floozy Time exists everywhere, in every musical composition known to Homo saplings. You simply can't escape it. Even good ol' J.S. Bach, whose elegant two and three-part inventions would seem to leave little room for dalliance, slipped in a Floozy Time grace note here, an arpeggio there. And when you get to the patent excesses of some contemporary, say, electroacoustic notemongers, it's hard to find pieces that have any reality outside of Floozy Time.

While Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, and this 185th episode is certainly no exception, would like to believe the music which our research junta carefully screens and critiques each week before deeming it fit for you, our listening audients, we must accept the fact that the percentage of the program taken up by Floozy Time -- and this is the whole show, not just the tuney bits -- often exceeds 80 percent. Why, this very introductory essay has already contributed over ten minutes of Floozy Time, more time than has actually been spent reading it. That's because the mere mention of le flambeau oriange counts double in Floozy Time due to its by now tiresome predictability. Last week's essay, by the way, scored an ignominious 94% in Floozy Time, thanks to its shallow concept and weak ending. But, we can't all be Rod McKuens.

Although it has conceivably always existed, Floozy Time never was an issue until a conceptual consultant gave it its name. And when you think about it, the notion of your obedient essayist being a conceptual consultant is pure Floozy Time.

That last paragraph of insignificance just added 17% to today's Floozy Time. And there's no telling how much will follow in the guise of cutting edge compositional tomfoolery. Only time -- regular and Floozy -- and Kalvos will tell.