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Influential English critic David Toop (1949), who had debuted with his mediocre half
of New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments (april 1975 - Obscure, 1975 - Virgin, 1997),
a split LP with Max Eastley,
and the childish
Chol Agogues (april 1977), featuring Toop on all sorts of instruments (from dog whistles to balloons to panpipes to metal-box), percussionist Paul Burwell and Nestor Figueras (on "movement, respiratory and,body-percussions"),
did not establish himself as a major composer
of the avantgarde until he came up with an original way to mix
natural sounds, electronics and acoustic instruments. Instead of the usual,
noisy collage, Toop stuck to Brian Eno's aesthetic.
Thus Buried Dreams (Beyond, 1994), a collaboration with Max Eastley,
sounds like musique concrete for the ambient generation.
As he refined that concept, his music began to resemble
Jon Hassell without the trumpet, i.e. fourth-world
frescoes without a protagonist:
Screen Ceremonies (august 1995 - Wire Editions, 1995), the manifesto of this
ethnic and concrete fusion, Pink Noir (june 1996 - Virgin, 1996), more predictable
and ruined by narration,
Spirit World (Virgin, 1997).
He used real buildings and imaginary buildings as sources of inspiration,
conceiving them as sentient organisms, brains made of concrete and wires:
Museum Of Fruit (Caipirinha, 1999), that contains the 26-minute eco-suite Smell of Human Life,
Hot Pants Idol (Barooni, 1999), a spoken-word piece whose texts are taken from one of his books and set to the music of assorted friends,
37th Floor At Sunset (Sub Rosa, 2000), icy futurism bordering on glitch electronica,
Needle In the Groove (Sulphur, 2000), a collaborative with novelist Jeff Noon,
Black Chamber (Sub Rosa, 2002), a humbler electro-acoustic work structured in gentle jazz-ethnic vignettes.
Collaborations include:
New And Discovered Musical Instruments (Obscure, 1975),
Buried Dreams (Beyond, 1994) and
Doll Creature (Bip-Hop, 2004) with inventor and composer Max Eastley;
the live improvisation Breath-taking (march 2003 - Confront, 2004) with Akio Suzuki;
etc.
Doll Creature (Bip-Hop, 2004), the third collaboration between two
British mavericks (avantgarde composer and critic David Toop,
and inventor and composer Max Eastley),
is a random parade of brief noisy episodes. They mostly sound improvised and
not well thought out. Any amateur can do the same (and probably get more
creative) given such sophisticated machines, and we've heard similar
experiments
hundreds of times before.
We are supposed to marvel at the ghostly interstellar resonances of
Mouthful of Silence, at the watery burbling that turns into
bird-ish chirping in Cyclash Turned Inwards,
at the disjointed metallic cacophony of Three Sand Voices,
at the muted organic vibrations of Moth Cinema,
at the percussive chaos of Dust Of Points,
etc.
Admittedly, the duo occasionally achieves a haunting ambience that justifies
the effort, as in the crackling and rumbling of Metamorphose, or in
the shrill insistent dissonance of Graphite in Prussic, or in
the gentle dripping and droning of Inscription on Skin,
a sort of pre-melodic form of music.
But this is mostly just a childish game of finding an intriguing sound and then
observing it as it twitches under the microscope.
The proceeding gets particularly annoying in the shorter tracks (that simply
display a sound, like it or not, and then drop it without even attempting to
turn it into art) and in the subsonic ones, that pretend to require "deep
listening" when, in fact, there is precious little to listen to.
We are probably supposed to write about the subtle properties of pieces like
Nights and Cardiomancy.
To this ears, those properties are as interesting as Britney
Spears' latest video: they have no substance, just stereotypes (of noisy music
instead of melodic music).
Microscopic science is usually interesting for manufacturers of microscopes
and for people who own one, but rather insignificant for the rest of us.
This album is no exception to the rule.
His compositions include
Siren Space (2002) for tug boats, electronics, text and solo saxophone;
Sound Body (2007) was an entirely digital/electronic work.
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