Ghost Dancing

David Toop


Millions of steel Pachinko balls colliding in a Tokyo arcade. The disturbing hum of the human nervous system in the sound vacumm of an anechoic chamber. Field recordings of nature amplified into an unholy choir. Barking dogs edited into a perverse version of 'Jingle Bells'.

Attempting to listen to this galaxy of sound almost destroyed David Toop's desire to listen to anything. A difficult situation when your primary interests are writing about and playing music. Fortunately Toop overcame this inertia to write his fourth book, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory.

'When sound artists and improvisers focus on details that once would have seemed just a tiny part of a bigger whole, I believe they are entering the microscopic in order to counter a wider sense of fragmentation: too many signals making too much noise.'

"For a while it became a real problem for me. I wondered how I was going to carry on writing about music," says Toop from his home in London. "Now I'm much more ruthless, I don't listen to anything unless it's really good."

Haunted Weather is a different sort of travelogue, a strange journey through a subterranean world of sound that takes in the author's dreams, memories, and experiences. This dizzying array of ideas spanning the use of sound across the arts is initially a dense, impenetrable domain. But Toop's luminescent prose makes the trip worthwhile, drawing connections between movements separated by both geography and history.

That wide-angle lens approach to a vast, amorphous body of sound-related art is filtered through Toop's experiences performing at experimental music festivals in locations as diverse as Glasgow, Mexico City, and Tokyo. Immersion in this world puts the writer in a unique position to commentate on the ideas he encounters.

"I kind of have two careers which are interconnected," explains Toop. "There's a constant reciprocal feedback between one activity and the other. I'm constantly in contact with musicians so that feeds the writing, and thinking about and being exposed to so much music gives me new ideas for ways of making music."

Toop came to experimental music through the free improvisation movement of the early 1970s. Growing frustrated with the ever-changing line up of his band, he worked on two magazines, Musics and Collusion. The paucity of income from these endeavours spurred him to begin writing a book about the hip-hop phenomenon in 1983. At the time hip-hop was viewed by many as a fading phenomenon.

"People said to me, 'Why are you writing about a music that's kind of finished?' But by 1985 hip-hop had really taken off. I didn't know that was going to happen, I just thought it was a really good story of how something develops and evolves."

Rap Attack uncovered the hidden roots of hip-hop in earlier African American music styles such as soul and R&B. Toop's assiduous interviewing of all the main contributors rendered his book the last word on the subject, and with its success came offers of work.

A deep knowledge of hip-hop gave Toop an advantage in the fashion hungry but late coming English music press. After becoming music columnist for lifestyle bible The Face, he also began contributing to titles such as Elle and Vogue, and broadsheet newspapers including The Times.

But, Toop says, journalism took over his life. "I was getting very frustrated because I had this totally alien background in free improv experimental music. There was a lot of pressure on me to write in a more conservative way about more straightforward subjects. After a while I just got tired of it."

His second book in 1995, Ocean of Sound, provided a handy escape from the journalistic treadmill. Refining an impressionistic, nonlinear style of writing, Toop drew from conversation, the blurred spectre of memory, vivid travel diary entries, and his omniscient musicology. This raft of ideas defined the pulse behind the nebulous ambient music scene of the 1990s.

"The breakthrough for me was the idea of writing something as the thought came up," he explains. "I'd write a short passage about something, and if an idea came up related to that, I could drop it in, like samples into a piece of music. From that point I felt absolutely liberated. It became much looser and more poetic, more to do with making connections sideways."

Ocean of Sound plunged into a submerged world of music that was just breaching the surface of popular culture. Although bracketed with commercial club music, many contemporary ambient artists (such as Aphex Twin) were resolutely experimental, both in concept and method. Where avant-garde music had previously been stunted by technological limitations, this was no longer the case. And after the cultural scorched earth of the eighties, there was a renewed interest in things contemporary.

"Suddenly there was a more open, younger, bigger audience, and there were a lot of crossovers happening between certain sorts of music that had been marginal up till then. I found that very exciting. That was partly a selfish thing in the sense that I as a musician hadn't really had an audience for some years. It was a very difficult time during the eighties for anybody involved in experimental music."

Toop the dormant musician took advantage of the prevailing mood, and has released five solo albums and many collaborative efforts since Ocean of Sound was published. He has also compiled a double CD to accompany Haunted Weather, featuring acts such as Scanner, Autechre and Toop.

"This whole period has been really interesting," he admits. "There's been a huge explosion of interest and activity in music and soundwork, suddenly a validation of sound art. That has been really gratifying. It makes you realise how much more complex the development of art or culture is than the stories we read in the magazines, hear on the radio, and see on television."

But Toop is careful to point out that he's never wanted to evangelise to others about music, saying he hopes what interests him is of interest to others. "I try and be very clear that it's my subjective view, and I'm simply making a case for these ideas and this particular emphasis."

Now his fourteen-year old daughter Juliette is absorbing these ideas, as she reads Rap Attack to learn the history of the hip-hop she's listening to. "It's funny," laughs Toop. "Most parents go through this whole crisis about their kids listening to Eminem, and I'm one of the people who wrote about him."

Gavin Bertram.