Sound is invisible stuff. Those who have expertise in its properties and potentialities also have a tendency to lack a full understanding of the worlds of tactile matter, visible surfaces, the volume of sound. Sound is a thing and no-thing, like air, money, time or love, complex to infinitude as one of the ungraspable phantoms of life. All these metaphors we use to bring into being the property of sound and the sensation of its hearing: a honeyed voice, a rough voice, a piercing scream; the taste of viscosity, a hand passes over splintered wood, a needle punctures the skin. Think of sound – that high sound of hearing and air – pouring into the volume of a space, translucent block of air like colourless jelly flecked and warped with every passing noise event and its trail of decomposing matter, something like a stiff liquid or intangible runny paste through which the body passes without resistance yet it enfolds and penetrates the body with the insistence of abyssal pressure and the clotted emotions of memories as active entities, in flight like birds, insubstantial as papery moths.
David Toop, A Piercing Silence: James Richards, from Inflamed Invisible, originally published in James Richards: To Replace a Minute's Silence With a Minute's Applause, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2015
David Toop & Lawrence English - The Shell That Speaks The Sea - "the affective realm that haunts, rather than describes, experience"
A note from Lawrence English
I first met David Toop some 20 years ago. I think we were in touch shortly before that, but our first meeting took place when I invited him to Australia to perform and to speak as part of REV, a festival held at Brisbane Powerhouse. It was a memorable meeting, I vividly remember his solo performance and the edition A Picturesque View, Ignored, documents an improvised meeting during that time.
Over the years, David and I have shared an interest in both the material and immaterial implications of sound (amongst other things). Moreover we’ve connected many times on matters which lie at the fringes of how we might choose to think about audition, our interests seeking in the affective realm that haunts, rather than describes, experience. The Shell That Speaks The Sea very much resonates from this shared fascination.
I’m not exactly sure when we first mooted this duet, but I sense its initial trace is now more than a decade ago. I tend to live by the motto of ‘right place, right time’ and I believe David likely also subscribes to this methodology. A couple of years ago, David and I reignited the duet conversation and began exchanging materials. As a jumping off point, I explored a series of field recordings that, for me at least, captured something of this affective haunting that I mentioned previously.
One such recording was of a Tawny Frogmouth at Nugum (White Rock) on the lands of the Yugarabul people. The frogmouth is an utterly elusive creature whose voice is like a modulating low frequency oscillator. They are a magical bird, and like the Potoo, have captivated David and I at various points in our lives. The recording seemed to suggest a whole way of approaching sound and, for me at least, it opened an entirely new range of sound worlds which are present in the final version of this recording.
This edition is the product of spontaneous burst of exchanges, buffered by periods of tempered silence. A patient work, charged with unexpected dynamics.
It’s with great pleasure we share this recording with you.
David Toop - Voice, digital electronics, Spanish, electric and lapsteel guitars, bowing, whistling, percussion, flutes.
Lawrence English - Electronics, field recordings, shortwave radio, bass drum, ghost flute, bamboo, stones.
Release, a short experimental film by Latvian artist Ieva Balode, with the music "Human Skin and Stone Steps" by David Toop and dance by Anastasia Lonshakova.
The sound object, represented most dramatically by the romantic symphonies of the nineteenth century, has been fractured and remade into a shifting, open lattice on which new ideas can hang, or through which they can pass and interweave. This is one metaphor. Landscape is another - a conjured place through which the music moves and in which the listener can wander.
David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds