David Toop is a musician/composer, writer, and curator, born near London in 1949. He studied fine art and graphic design in the late 1960s, then in 1971-2 participated as guitarist and flautist in the first improvisation workshops led by jazz drummer John Stevens. Having played improvised music since the beginning of the 1970s with musicians such as Paul Burwell, Steve Beresford, Max Eastley, Hugh Davies, Terry Day, Peter Cusack, Sally Potter and Lol Coxhill, he also recorded shamanistic ceremonies in Amazonas, presented programmes for BBC Radio 3 and appeared on Top Of The Pops with the Flying Lizards. He worked with musicians including Brian Eno, John Zorn, Prince Far I, Jon Hassell, Derek Bailey, Talvin Singh, Akio Suzuki, Haco, Evan Parker, Max Eastley, Scanner, Ivor Cutler, Haruomi Hosono, Jin Hi Kim and Bill Laswell, and collaborated with artists from many other disciplines, including theatre director/actor Steven Berkoff, Japanese Butoh dancer Mitsutaka Ishii, sound poet Bob Cobbing, visual artist John Latham, filmmaker Jae-eun Choi, director Pierre Audi, author Jeff Noon, and artists such as John Latham, Rie Nakajima and Chelpa Ferro.
Photo Bryan Spencer
As a critic and columnist he has written for many publications, including The Wire, The Face, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Arena, Vogue, Spin, GQ, Bookforum, Urb, Black Book, The New York Times and The Village Voice.
The Lowest Form Of Music - Photo: Fabio Lugaro
LAFMS London Weekend @ Beaconsfield, 22nd-24th October 2010
In its first edition published in 1984, Rap Attack documented the origins of hip-hop and its genesis in New York City's South Bronx. Many old-school hip-hop and electro pioneers, producers and entrepreneurs were interviewed at length, including Afrika Bambaata, Grandmaster Flash, Arthur Baker, Paul Winley and Bobby Robinson. Now with rap a multi-million dollar business and more important than ever in the culture, this new third edition of the rap classic examines the music's crisis of identity, following the fatal shootings of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious BIG, gangsta rap overload and the resultant upsurge of nostalgia of old-school hip-hop and its now legendary DJs, MCs, grafitti artists, breakdancers, beats and breaks.LAFMS London Weekend @ Beaconsfield, 22nd-24th October 2010
The 49 Americans @ Cafe Oto, London, 4th June 2013. Photo Fabio Lugaro
In 1995 he published Ocean of Sound, described as a "poetic survey of contemporary musical life from Debussy through Ambient, Techno, and drum 'n' bass.". Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Lee Perry, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Brian Wilson are interviewed in this extraordinary work of sonic history that travels from the rainforests of amazonas to virtual Las Vegas, from David Lynch's dream house, high in the Hollywood hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo. This book was included in the Observer Music Monthly’s 50 Greatest Music Books Ever.
institute of modern art fortitude valley australia 2013. Photo Bryan Spencer
The 49 Americans @ Cafe Oto, London, 4th June 2013. Photo Fabio Lugaro
Konzert im Studio Beginner am 06.04.1979
Steve Beresford/Peter Cusack/David Toop/Terry Day.
Photo Schaljupp
Since 1995 he has released numerous solo albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Pink Noir and Black Chamber. The recent Sound Body, was released in 2006 on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label. Since 2004 he has worked in a number of improvising ensembles, including a trio with Rhodri Davies and Lee Patterson, and he continues to perform solo concerts and collaborations with musicians such as Phil Durrant, Aleks Kolkowski, John Butcher, Jennifer Allum, Daichi Yoshikawa, Sharon Gal, Elaine Mitchener and Rie Nakajima. He also directs an improvisation ensemble – Unknown Devices – at London College of Communication. The group has collaborated with the London Sinfonietta and the Royal College of Music and has performed at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The Barbican, Royal Festival Hall and South London Gallery.
Photo Festival Novas Frequencias
Since the 70s, he has also been a significant presence on the British experimental and improvised music scene, collaborating with Max Eastley, Brian Eno, Scanner, and others. In 2001, David curated the sound art exhibition Sonic Boom, and the following year, a 2-CD collection entitled Not Necessarily Enough English Music: A Collection of Experimental Music from Great Britain, 1960-1977.
Prepared Esquire 1973
In 1998 he composed the soundtrack for Acqua Matrix, the outdoor spectacular that closed every night of Lisbon Expo '98. Siren Space, his composition for tug boat horns, electronics and the solo saxophone of Lol Coxhill, was performed on the River Thames for the Thames Festival in 2002, and his composition, Black Chamber, was used in the acclaimed Complicite theatre production of The Elephant Vanishes. Exhibitions he has curated include Sonic Boom, the UK's largest ever exhibition of sound art, at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 2000; Playing John Cage for Arnolfini Bristol, in 2005, sound curator for Radical Fashion (an exhibition of work by designers including Issey Miyake, Junya Watanabe and Martin Margiela, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001-02, and featuring music by Björk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kim Cascone, and others) and Blow Up at Flat Time House, London. In 2013 he was curating consultant for Sound Matters, a Crafts Council touring exhibition.
Photo Festival Novas Frequencias
His sound works have been exhibited in Beijing’s Zhongshan Park, Tokyo ICC Gallery, Stourhead Garden, Flat Time House, Belfast Botanical Gardens, the Armitt Museum and the National Gallery, London. His most recent book -Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener – was published by Bloomsbury in summer 2010. His chamber opera, Star-shaped Biscuit, composed under the auspices of a Jerwood Foundation/Adeburgh Music fellowship, was performed at Snape Maltings in September 2012.
David Toop & Scanner. Photo David Neate
Photo Festival Novas Frequencias
What do you remember about your first instrument?
My first instrument was an acoustic steel-string guitar, quite small with a very high action which made it difficult to play. The colour was yellowish and inlaid into the wood by the soundhole was a marquetry design. There was something magical about that image – an animal, maybe, and a moon (hard to remember exactly) – but the most magical aspect of the guitar was the way it was given. I had wanted a guitar because of rock ‘n’ roll, hearing Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly and wanting to be like them. My mother’s half-sister, Jean, came back from America with a lot of 78rpm records of rock ‘n’ roll, R&B and jazz, which I used to play when we visited her and I could be alone in the front room, away from the adults. This must have been 1957-58 maybe. I was about 8 or 9 years old. The guitar could have been a birthday present but I remember coming downstairs into the living room and finding an extraordinary tableau waiting for me. My parents had constructed a kind of tepee, probably out of a blanket and sticks, and my sister, Angela, was sitting in front of it, wearing a feather in a headband and holding the guitar. Of course I loved Westerns. They were a big thing on television at that time – Rawhide, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke – but when the feared and hated so-called Indians broke into a scene with their Otherness, I identified with them. I know I was fascinated by Native American culture and when I was a bit older I started to read whatever I could find and also draw scenes that I imagined.
How this gift-giving scenario came about is a mystery to me. My parents were not particularly imaginative or cultured people, nor were they emotionally demonstrative. The incident was highly unusual, so it glows in my childhood as a beacon of something unknown, outside normality. What it did, I can speculate retrospectively, was to make a link between anthropology and sound in a formative period of my young life. It also raised a question of how a deep experience might be stimulated by the setting of its presentation.
Rain in the Face. Circa 1971.
I was never given music lessons so a few years passed before the guitar became anything other than an object that occasionally made sound. In 1961 the first tune I learned to play was Jerry Lordan’s “Apache”, learned from a record by The Shadows. This was no coincidence. The boom in Westerns in cinema and television generated a lot of music, particularly twangy guitar instrumentals, but it echoed that first encounter and reinforced the feeling within me that music was not only exotic but profoundly transformative.
Why do you need music?
I was terribly shy and introverted as a child, gifted with words and highly creative but often unable to learn easily and usually uncomfortable and fearful socially. The effect of music was to move across divisions of thought, feeling, the physical body, ideas, environment, other people. I understood this early on, though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it. Music allowed me to be a person in the world, rather than a retiring, scared boy who was all intensity and no expression.
In a sense that’s still true. For all the writing and talking I do, the activity I value most is making music, that is to say, physically working with sound. That is what brings me a bit closer to being a whole person.
So, what's your relationship with the prepared guitar?
In the early 1970s I was listening to a lot of global musics and making simple instruments like bamboo flutes. I’d been given access to the BBC Sound Archives and came across recordings in which the sound of acoustic instruments – drums, xylophones, flutes, thumb pianos, trumpets and voice disguisers – had been altered in various ways, maybe by attaching bottle tops that rattled or spider egg sac membranes that buzzed. I was using two distortion pedals at the time so there seemed to be an equivalence in those two methods of distortion. At the same time I had come across Javanese gamelan and John Cage’s prepared piano pieces, notably Prelude For Meditation. The thought occurred to me that I might be able to do something similar to the guitar, finding a way to prepare the strings to make it sound more like tuned gongs or bells. I tried crocodile clips and they worked really well. They were cheap, they could be attached to the strings in a stable way, you could move them easily and they turned the guitar into a sort of gamelan, albeit one you could only play slowly but I was happy with that.
In 1974 I edited and co-published a little book called New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments and included the prepared guitar as one of my instruments. At the time I was playing with drummer Paul Burwell in a duo called Rain In the Face (actually the name of a Native American Lakota warchief who fought against Custer, so there’s that identification again). Chris Cutler saw us perform at the Architectural Association in London and invited us to play at one of Henry Cow’s Explorer’s Club nights at the London School of Economics. I played prepared guitar and Fred Frith started using the technique. When his first solo album came out on Virgin there was a close-up of the guitar prepared with crocodile clips and from that moment an army of guitar preparers was born. Fred has always been very generous and open about the fact that he got the idea from me. In fact Keith Rowe was using crocodile clips on the guitar with AMM before I did it. I went to a lot of AMM gigs from 1966 onwards but they always played in the dark so I could never see what he was doing – I just loved the music and never thought about the technique.
Who did what first doesn’t matter a great deal unless there are big sums of money involved (and obviously in this case there weren’t). It was part of a more general interrogation of instrumental possibilities at the time, like the development of woodwind multiphonics by Bartolozzi and Robert Dick, the kind of kits that improvising drummers were building or the use of contact microphones, springs and domestic objects by Hugh Davies, but at a personal level it came back to this original epiphany of anthropology and sound. In a way it’s nice to see so many guitarists preparing instruments now, but like so-called extended techniques, it can be a bit of a cliché. I still play prepared guitar. A long time ago I realised that most of my techniques were established soon after I started out; it’s the way in which they are used that changes them (if at all).
Which work of your own are you most proud of?
I don’t know that I’m proud of any of my work. I’m proud of one or two things I’ve done in my personal life (though also ashamed of many others) but work is different, never quite good enough, never quite what it was intended to be. That’s a positive, in my opinion. It’s impossible to sit back and feel a sense of pride; only an opening out into further potentiality. Without that, better to give up. Maybe I feel proud of the overall body of work, that I’ve been able to stick with it for over 45 years and develop it into something that seems meaningful to certain people but even then it feels like there’s a lot more to be done.
What's the role of theory in music, in your opinion?
It’s not so much theory that’s important as a thing in itself but discourse. When musicians say they dislike writers or they don’t like to talk about music, only play, it makes me laugh. Music exists at many different levels within the self and running through societies. We can’t even talk about it clearly because we have few ways to speak directly about sound or listening, nor do we have an integrated way to conceive of the experience in a unified way. Still we think of the body, the mind, emotions, intellect and feeling, the self and groups, all as distinct entities, even though music clearly needs to cross those boundaries to produce its effects.
The notion of how music can or should be comes about through practice – making practice and listening practice – and through reflection. This reflection is part of a personal aesthetic and politics, a way of deciding what matters and what doesn’t – and it engages all states of being. When I write I am trying to bring out onto the ‘page’ a summation of these engagements with sound, trying to ‘speak’ for all levels of the experience and struggling with words, with language, in order to do so. In some way I need to do this as a compulsion, a constant desire to better understand what is happening when we make or hear music but I also believe that music exists in a context, that a discourse surrounds music, flows out of music. Just because practitioners or audiences are silent doesn’t mean this discourse doesn’t exist. At a simple level, a lot of the music I play and enjoy is considered difficult. For a lot of people who are curious but also repelled, it needs questions, challenges, some historical understanding maybe, in order to unpick what’s going on.
In my own practice the writing and the actions inform and transform each other. I know, for example, that what I do when I work with sound helps me to understand what others do. I’m writing this in Bristol having just experienced an exhibition by Cevdet Erek. When I met up with Cevdet five months ago we communicated very quickly, very easily, even though what we do is not at all similar, and as I walk into the exhibition I understand what he’s working with, the forces, the ideas. Being a practitioner, working with your hands (or whatever equivalent of the hands is relevant) is critical.
Define one image you're still looking for?
‘Image’ and ‘look’ are not the best terms. I hope for a fluidity that all the technologies resist or prevent. I work towards something but don’t know exactly what it is. As I get closer it moves further away. I hope to be in-between, to make a sound – like a mark on paper – that feels absolutely right. I’d like to be able to listen as an extra-human, not as a human being in other words. I’d like to be able to speak and write about sound without using the language of spatial dimension. I’d like to be able to lose the distinction between performer and audience.
Where are your secret roots? What are your influences?
I don’t know if any of my roots are secret any more. I’ve talked or written about most of them. One of my biggest influences was a LP by Bo Diddley, given to me by brother-in-law, Gordon, in the early 1960s. The guitar on the back cover was styled like a rocket ship, very futuristic, and I made a copy of that in my woodwork class at school. I also loved the way he played, sometimes like a drummer, often using heavy tremolo from the amp, but also in a very clipped way, so that arpeggios, for example, felt strangely cut off. It made me feel like the solid body electric guitar was a device rather than an instrument.
I don’t really like to talk in terms of influences. We absorb, often without knowing it. In my first band when I was about 15 years old, a blues band, I was playing guitar with a bottleneck and went crazy with it. We were playing “Road Runner” by Bo Diddley. One of the other school kids in the hall came up afterwards and asked what I was doing, like he was shocked. That was a big moment for me, like a breakthrough. In a way you could say I was influenced into doing that by some of the crazier blues things I’d heard but I don’t think it was entirely that. It was more a case of breaking through inhibition and suppression (with a glass bottleneck, so symbolically quite violent!) and on the other side finding a whole new world of possibilities.
At that time art, film and literature were just as important to me as music. Really, I wanted to be a film maker when I was 18. It just didn’t work out that way. But I was affected by a lot of artists – Kline, Latham, Tinguely, Burra, Duchamp, Oldenberg, Tapies, Jim Dine, Warhol – along with films such as Onibaba and Throne of Blood and writers like William Burroughs. I was listening to soul music at the time as well, learning about time, expression, weight, balance, precision and those vicissitudes of life that I had yet to experience.
The people I collaborated with and learned from in those formative years – Paul Burwell, Marie Yates, John Latham, John Stevens, Carlyle Reedy, Bob Cobbing and all the others – they are my ‘influences’; that continues to be the case, learning from those I work with, from students I encounter, from colleagues and friends, from people I write about.
What are the challenges and benefits of today's digital music scene?
To me, there’s no digital scene. There are digital platforms, there’s a growing world that is partly digital. All of that is changing us in ways we can’t predict, can’t even know about. It’s too close. Those of us who had utopian feelings in the early 90s have been given a sharp slap in the face as we’ve seen entire areas of activity decimated. So there’s the urgency of adaptation that is perpetual. On the plus side I can do things that I dreamed about in 1971. On the severe minus side there’s the feeling of ‘why bother?’ – you know, why bother to put something out when it disappears into the vortex of a billion online voices. I don’t know how to deal with that one yet.
What quality do you admire most in a musician?
It depends on the situation. Sometimes it’s good to work with very gentle musicians, sometimes it’s good to work with musicians who are disruptive. Sometimes it’s good to work with close listeners but sometimes it’s good to work with musicians who don’t seem to listen at all. I would say a quality of sound is extremely important but then I find my own quality of sound unsatisfactory a lot of the time. Generosity, I suppose, and a questioning spirit. Somebody I can stand to be around.
In terms of listening to musicians, the musicians I like are so diverse in their qualities that it’s impossible to generalise about what I admire. Is there a unifying quality, I wonder? I doubt it. The other night I was listening to a gospel saxophonist – Vernard Johnson. I’m not at all religious but he has a fantastic raucous tone, a real intensity and fervour in what he does. I was also watching a Youtube clip of Tetsuya Umeda, which is sort of the opposite – the performance is very fragmented and dispersed with no apparent emotion or reference beyond the idea of setting processes in motion. What they both have is concentration. Maybe that’s it.
A valuable advice that someone has gifted to you in the past?
A very paternal policeman told me not to leave my precious things around to be stolen, after I’d been robbed of a very rare guitar – a Fender Esquire. John Stevens, who was a mentor to me, told me it was better to be grafting (i.e. working at something even if you didn’t like it) rather than being at home, broke and anxious. A lot of advice is non-verbal. When you’re in love with somebody and the relationship goes wrong then you get more advice than you can deal with, most of it unwelcome at the time but useful in the long term.
What's your fetish device in the sound chain?
A Wem Rush Pep Box that I’ve had since around 1970. It was designed by a man called Pepe Rush. I’ve since written an essay about him and his distortion pedal. It’s very extreme and if I’m using pedal steel guitar I can work with the magnetic field. Combined with other pedals it can be mayhem. The Beatles used it on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Other than that it wasn’t particularly popular and I can understand why.
What do you dream about?
Anxiety and loss mostly, these days.
What’s your latest project about?
Playing and thinking, I guess. I’m writing a book on free improvisation; trying to find new formats in which to present music, performance, ideas; working on collaborations; lecturing a lot on a wide variety of subjects, just trying to do things differently and stop doing things in the way that I have for the past 15 years. I particularly like a performance format I co-organise with Rie Nakajima. It’s called Sculpture. All of the participants choose a duration between 5 and 15 minutes. The whole event is continuous. Anybody can exceed their chosen time but they have to accept that the next person will start on time and so overlap with them. We’re coming up to doing the third one. I like the format. That’s the frontier for me now. Sometimes I hear bits of music or sound work that I like but if it’s in the same old setting then it doesn’t stick but if it really challenges the space or the flow of events or the perception of what this activity can be then I’m interested.
David Toop (4 March 2014)
Bibliography
Decomposition as Music Process
– October 31, 1972
Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop (1984) – republished with additional chapters as
DISCOGRAPHY
CURATED ALBUMS
1996 Ocean of Sound
1996 Crooning on Venus
1997 Guitars on Mars
2000 Sonic Boom. The Art of Sounds
2001 Not Necessarily Enough English Music: A Collection of Experimental Music from Great Britain
2000 Sonic Boom. The Art of Sounds
2001 Not Necessarily Enough English Music: A Collection of Experimental Music from Great Britain
2004 Haunted Weather : Music, Silence, and Memory
2010 I Never Promised You A Rose Garden - A Portrait [DVD] Guy-Marc Hinant (Director), Dominique Lohle (Director) |
EXHIBITIONS
The Body Event: Language is a Flawed Medium, David Toop and John Latham, sound work, documentation, books, Pro qm, Berlin (3-18 September 2010).
Cloud Studies no. 2, sound/video work made for TAPS: Improvisations with Paul Burwell, DVD and exhibition, Matt’s Gallery at Dilston Grove (17-19 September, 2010).
FLAT TIME/sounding scores and Bi/s/onics Pieces scores exhibited in Sunday Sound Waves session 4, Soundfjord at GALERIE8, London, August 2011
Artist Placement Group exhibition, Raven Row, 2012.
FLAT TIME/sounding (Liturgy of the Uncountable), audio work commissioned for exhibition online in SOUNDWORKS, ICA, 19.6.12 – 16.9.12.
Died Away Upon the Ear (intallation, sound and catalogue essay) exhibited in Sublime Transaction exhibition, Armitt Museum and Library, Ambleside, 2012-2013
More David Toop in Prepared Guitar Blog
Frith - Toop Alligators