HERE COMES EVERYTHING
guest "Musica Globalista" post for Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired.com
September 2, 2011

by Simon Reynolds


This is the last in this summer’s series of guest blogs from me c/o Beyond the Beyond. But before I hand over to Geeta Dayal, I’d like to say ‘big up’ to my host Bruce and close out with something of an epic: a sprawling almost-essay looking at Retromaniacal-parallels in a realm of music that’s outside my customary remit–contemporary classical composition.

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Last week I stumbled across a piece by New York magazine’s classical music critic Justin Davidson, a critique of what he termed “a new New York School” of composers whose eclecticism and border-crossing echoes the downtown movement of the 1970s. The article is actually several months old (but in this atemporal world, who cares?) and reading it I was immediately struck by the convergences with Retromania’s concerns.

http://nymag.com/arts/classicaldance/classical/reviews/new-composers-davidson-review-2011-3/

The piece’s subtitle is: “An omnivorous generation of composers could use something to rage against”. Davidson vividly and not unappreciatively describes the music made by a new breed of “composer-performers who go merrily Dumpster-diving in styles of the past and of distant parts… These composers in their thirties worry less about categories, narrative, and originality than about atmosphere, energy, and sound. .. they churn out somber symphonies, wry pop songs, laptop meditations, filigreed chamber works, endearing études, and occasional film scores. This cornucopia of new music seems perpetually promising. It bristles with allusions and brims with ambition—yet it somehow feels stifled by all that freedom.”

One of the composers focused on in the piece is Tyondai Braxton, whose 45-minute suite Central Market is “a high-voltage score for orchestra supplemented by amplified and effects-enriched kazoos, electronically tricked-out voices, piano, a pair of synthesizers, and six electric guitars… The music pounds through a sequence of musical landscapes with the manic intensity of a movie foot chase. Insistent syncopations, deliberate sonic overloads, whistled melodies, music-box tinklings, jaunty motifs that repeat and trip over themselves—Braxton grinds these ingredients together with the exuberance of a sorcerer on speed. The piece is euphoric, crazy, and irresistible.”

Sounds eminently resistible to me, to be honest! Regardless of whether you enjoy the work or not, “Central Market” appears from Davidson’s account to fit the profile of what I’ve termed “hyperstasis”: a syndrome that affect music at all levels from the individual works, to the style/oeuvre of specific artist, to entire genres/scenes/fields of sonic endeavour. The hallmark of hyperstasis is restless energy and a fluid but ultimately facile transition between styles/modes/moods – facile because related to digiculture’s facilitation of long-valorised-in-music-criticism techniques of hybridization, mix-and-blend, versatility, stylistic range, etc. In hyperstasis, creativity rends itself apart in a paroxysm of optionality, it’s wracked by a sort of frenzied indecisiveness, a fervour of non-commitment.

Davidson makes the digiculture connection himself, talking about how composers like Tyondai Braxton ”use computers as compositional tools and alchemizers of sound” and observing that “for the YouTube generation, technology… grants entrance to a virtually infinite thrift store of influences.
A century ago, Bartók had to haul his gramophone through the mud of Moravia to learn about folk music. Now a curious kid in Brooklyn can track down an Azerbaijani song in seconds. Today’s styles need not be born of deep experience; they form out of collisions that bypass history and geography. No combination is too weird.”

“Nonsectarianism” is Davidson’s term for what popular/semipopular/barely-popular music critics like myself would probably call impurism. Being a sectarian and a purist is invariably regarded as a negative, for reasons I explored a decade ago in an essay called “Pure Fusion: Multiculture Versus Monoculture” (which you can find in the Bring the Noise collection recently put out in America by Soft Skull). But it is way too easy to equate “nonsectarian” and “impurist” with musical virtue. As Davidson astutely notes of the new New York composers, their “freewheeling mash-ups aspire to hip nonsectarianism, but the results can prove shockingly tame.”

Worse still, with the musical past’s archives splayed open, there is a constant temptation to regress: “Their range of choices oppressively wide, several composers have taken comfort from the past, masking retrenchment with style and panache.”

By the time Davidson is writing about “well-crafted but oddly familiar works [that] display the virtues of facility, versatility, and curiosity, but… also showcase a group that seems disoriented by its own open-mindedness”, or noting that “rules can be a crutch or a cage, but they can also act as stimulant… Despite their gifts and alertness to the moment, [these] composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal. What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints”, I’m imaginary-high-fiving the dude.

Tyondai Braxton is better known as former member of Battles, a fact that leapt out at me because I’d only just got around to reading the Battles cover story in The Wire from several issues back. Here too I was struck by the band’s post-everything omnivorousness and the way both their aesthetics and their ethos echoed progressive rock and jazz fusion. Writer Daniel Spicer points to the way Battles draw on “elements as disparate as Tropicalia, soca, Techno and synthpop”. I feel queasy already.

One of Battles, Ian Williams, observes that “if you think about the music that was available to experimental people and cool hippies in the 70s, it was probably classical music, jazz, and rock, right? And Prog came out of that. With the internet, everybody’s exposed to World Music now, and a much wider wealth of influence that come from everywhere. The library that people are exposed to is much bigger now.”

I enjoyed the previous Battles album Mirrored, but on the new, Tyondai-less Gloss Drop, the results of all these inputs leans to the ludic(rous), the kind of chops-heavy comedy prog purveyed by Primus.
What Davidson, Spicer, Williams, are all talking about is the notion expressed at the start of Gang Gang Dance’s recent Eye Contact album: “I can hear everything. It’s everything time.”

But–as the fusion and prog analogies show–it’s actually been everything time for rather a long while the only difference is that it’s cheaper (virtually costless, thanks to file-sharing) and easier (thanks to digiculture) to access that Everything.

What is significantly different now is the factor of atemporality. Earlier phases of hybridity and eclecticism tended to have an orientation to the present: prog had its classical-music recursions and folk flavours, but for the most part Seventies progressive minded musicians were doing their fusing with stuff that was current or from very recent and usually black music.

So Led Zeppelin got inspired by The Meters and James Brown, while The Police drew on contemporaneous reggae/ (Intriguingly both Led Zep’s James Brown pastiche ‘The Crunge’ and “early Police” crop up as comparison points for Battles in the Wire piece). Fusion aka jazz-rock aka jazz-funk was entirely about jazz responding to contemporary black dance styles or Latin/world influences, and also engaging with the latest technology (synths with Weather Report, Herbie Hancock etc).

Much the same applies to postpunk and early Eighties art-pop: Talking Heads responded to current or relatively recent recordings by Parliament-Funkadelic and Fela Kuti; New Order were inspired by Italo-disco and the club tracks emanating from New York, and so forth.

These kinds of real-time transfers of ideas occurred at all levels of pop music, in fact, not just the self-consciously arty, progressive-minded sector: a band of such lowly ambition as Foghat imitated Larry Graham’s slap-bass techniques on “Slow Ride”!

What gradually developed, with the passage of time, was the onset of atemporality: more and more elements in a new band’s make-up cease to relate to the present genrescape and instead involve rummaging through the archives.

This started to take effect even before the Internet took off, on account of crate-digging, esotericism and obscurantism, and the burgeoning reissue industry. A band like Tortoise was an archetype of mid-Nineties, just-pre-Internet nu-fusion: they had current influences (some hip hop, some math-rock) but also dub, Ry Cooder, Morricone, marimba-pulses via Steve Reich, etc. A vigorous brew at first, soon to droop into a sort of Spyro Gyra for Wire readers.

What is different about music now is that open-minded, curious musicians are responding to and fusing with influences from all across music history and all across the globe. This ought to provide them with a palette of infinite possibilities. And for those who are very creatively strong, who have a filter, having such a superfluity of launching pads and diving boards works out well.

But most artists aren’t strong enough to withstand such an influx.

What is so interesting about Davidson’s piece on new classical is that it shows how the possibilities and problems of post-broadband music-making are manifesting all across the musical spectrum. I suspect similar forces are at work – sometimes vitalizing, mostly vitiating – in metal, but I wouldn’t know. It is definitely happening with dance music especially with the area I’ve kept an ear trained on, i.e. the post-dubstep zone.

Here the exact same hyperstatic symptoms that Davidson diagnoses in modern composition can be seen leading to a similar predicament: a diverting but directionless impasse. A seeming heterogeneity that conceals a fundamental homogeneity (traceable back, ultimately, to the nature of digital sound and its structuration protocols.) Paradoxically, it is the more insular, technologically-retarded scenes (footwork in Chicago now, hardcore rave in the early 90s) that produce a better outcome: a seeming homogeneity that masks genuine hetereogenity and forward-tilted strangeness.

The other thing worth saying about these nu-fusion or “superhybrid” styles/scenes is that their very rhetoric and philosophical repertoire has a pronounced “retro” air. These ideas and ideals have been around for what feels like forever! “New New School” nods to 1970s downtown New York in the Seventies , the post-Fluxus fluxed-upness and post-Cage uncagedness of minimalism, performance artists, and such edge-of-punk / outskirts of No Wave figures as Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Arthur Russell.

Justin Davidson’s piece seems to have garnered a slew of annoyed and outright hostile responses from the modern composition community. One of the more measured responses, “The New Challenges of New Thinking”, appeared in Zeitschichten.

http://www.zeitschichten.com/2011/05/07/new-challenges/

Peter Gilbert précis-ed the anti-Davidson stance: “He is called out as being an old school modernist, entrenched in a decrepit idea—that making something new requires rejecting the formerly new”, with commentators dismissing Davidson’s verdict of “a neither-here-nor-there absence of motivational direction” as mired in subjectivity. (Cue a twinge of déjà vu/writerly solidarity in me!).

Gilbert situates the conflict–and the annoyance–in terms of a generational shift. “The thirty-somethings of today… are the second generation of the everything’s-okay, no-style-can-hold-us ethos. For us this thinking is more normal than revolutionary, though we don’t take it for granted—I think we still own our omnivorous tastes with (probably unnecessary) pride…. the core ideal of nonsectarianism has almost complete ascendency now.”

Gilbert astutely notes that the musical radicals of the past who broke down aesthetic barriers created a world where there are in fact no barriers: “the power of their vision led to the open-minded future they wanted and subsequently (unintentionally) denied their students the opportunity to similarly respond”… As a result, the last ardent rigor… has dissolved into transition”.

But (as Retromania argues) the trouble with this state of endless “transition” is that it looks a lot like the way fashion operates. Or indeed how high finance operates. Where no value is immune from being abruptly and utterly devalued.

What this means is that the principles and practices of “flux and mutability” have long ago shed their former subversive and utopian charge. Worse than that: they have become inverted, to the point where if anything they suggest the static and dystopian. Because in some fundamental and profoundly perturbing way, “flux” and “mutability” are actually isomorphic with the economy, characterized as it is by precariousness and the imposition of “flexible” work patterns.

This idea seems to lurk underneath Gilbert’s concluding remarks, where he writes about how “there is something different about this world where everything goes. We, the thirty-somethings, seem to largely be ardent believers of the new order and we readily shoot down dissent, but, as with anything relatively new, there are aspects and consequences of the changes in culture that we can’t yet fully anticipate or understand.”

All that’s solid melts into air, innit.

XENOMANIA: NOTHING IS FOREIGN IN AN INTERNET AGE
MTV Iggy, November 29, 2011

by Simon Reynolds


Imagine the media as a hydraulic system: broadband has dramatically expanded the pipes and channels through which cultural data, including music, passes. The result has been a monstrous increase in the volume and range of music that the average listener can access. Before file-sharing, a music fan’s ability to explore the wide world of sound was restricted: the cost of buying records inhibited one’s willingness to risk checking out unfamiliar sounds.
All those Analogue Era deterrents and blockages have now been swept aside by the torrential every-which-way data flows of Web 2.0. The Internet is a gigantic archive, a collectively assembled and chaotic audio-video library that contains every form of popular (and unpopular) culture imaginable. Thanks to “whole album” blogs and YouTube, there is no financial disincentive to trying out stuff, and precious little exertion required beyond  the expenditure of one’s time and attention.
Infinite choice + infinitesimal cost = nomadic eclecticism as the default mode for today’s music fan.

My book Retromania is primarily concerned with digital technology’s effect on our sense of time: because the entire past of pop music is splayed out as this instant-access archive, older styles of music feel as “present” as contemporary music, and this has the knock-on effect of encouraging music-makers to mix-and-match influences from all across the historical spectrum.
But the Internet’s effect on space has been just as profound. A new generation of listeners and musicians is emerging whose consciousness is post-geographical as well as post-historical. There’s a thirst for fresh musical stimuli that slips easily past geographical borders and cultural boundaries.
At once satisfied and stoked by album-sharing blogs, deposits of esoteric and outlandish treasure on YouTube, and a new breed of pan-global crate-digger label, this appetite for the alien could be called xenomania, a play on the term “xenophobia” and its less well-known sister-word “xenophilia.”

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Xenomania and retromania are both forms of exoticism. The difference is that xenomania is about geographical remoteness, whereas retromania is about distance in time (as in L.P. Hartley’s famous maxim, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”).  Sometimes the two fascinations converge: while one contingent of Western hipsters are feverishly tracking contemporary sounds from far-flung corners of the globe, another bunch are investigating the musical pasts of all these non-Western countries.

The first kind of globe-trotting xenomania comes out of dance culture, in the form of early-adopter beat-geeks who compete to find exciting new rhythms from all over the world. I say “new” but often the dance subcultures in question have actually been in existence for decades, it’s just that Western deejays and producers have only just discovered them. The first of these “global ghetto grooves” to become trendy was carioca funk, which was spawned in slums of Brazil. Next came kwaito house (South Africa), which was soon followed by kuduro (Angola), cumbia (originally from Central America but spreading in mutated forms through Peru, Chile and Argentina), coupé-décalé (Ivory Coast), and more. Recently there’s been a smatter of hipster chatter about the Egyptian dance music that gets played at Cairo street weddings.

There’s also bubblin’, an example of a related but slightly different phenomenon: a musical hybrid that hatched in the West but in the bosom of an immigrant community. The story goes that bubblin’ sprang into existence when immigrants from the Dutch Antilles to the Netherlands responded with unexpected fervor to a Den Haag deejay who accidentally accelerated a dancehall track (or in some accounts, a reggaeton track) by playing it at 45 bpm. Bubblin’ has subsequently gone on to spawn another hybrid dance sound called moombahton whose genesis is even more tangled and confusingly post-geographical.

Whether they’re spawned in European cities or the ghettos of the Southern Hemisphere, what all these exotic dance genres share is impurity: they are bastard and creole children based in the soundclash of folk forms with Western styles like hip hop, house, and techno. Ethnic vibes (traditional instrumental textures such as accordions, unusual polyrhythms) mesh with American/European staples like the booming 808 bassline or the house synth-vamp. Rowdy chanted MC vocals influenced by gangsta rap and dancehall are offset by cheesily tuneful choruses invariably given the cheap gloss of AutoTune.
Inspired by the circa-2005 fad for carioca funk, the writer Matthew Ingram coined the playful term “shanty house” to pinpoint both the common sonic traits these styles share and how they are rooted in social conditions that are sadly similar all over the world.
Made quick and cheap using pirated software, laced with unlicensed samples from mainstream pop songs, this is party-hard music for ruffneck youth from the urban areas that nobody wants to go (“favelas,” they call them in Brazil, which is roughly equivalent to “projects” in America, “estates” in the U.K., and “garrisons” in Jamaica). Despite growing up amidst poverty, when these kids go out to dance they dress “rich.” Style-wise they’re fluent in the international language of bling: gold jewelry, flashy man-made fabrics, name-brand sneakers.
Often there’s a link between this music and gangs: the lyrics tend to celebrate the fast-money lifestyle of criminality, when they’re not addressing perennial topics like the female rump and the urgent necessity of shaking it. The Angolan version of shanty house, “kuduro” actually translates as “hard ass”, although whether that means “tight buttocks” or “tough guy” I’ve yet been unable to establish.

All these global ghetto sounds have much in common with the bass-heavy street beats of America (local hip hop offshoots such as hyphy, footwork, Baltimore breaks, jerk, bounce), the U.K. (grime, bassline, funky, donk) and the Caribbean (dancehall, soca, reggaeton). And all face condescension and sometimes repression in their native context: feared by the political and cultural establishments for their underclass uncouthness and links to a shady nightlife underworld, they are typically scorned by more liberal-minded progressives and sophisticates too, who regard the music as cheap trash and object to the aggression, sexism, and hyper-materialism of the lyrics.
Divorced from the local context and its class antagonisms, it’s these very qualities of gritty menace and rude-boy raucousness that appeal to Western hipsters. That and the jagged inventiveness of the beats, which are often wilder and weirder than the self-consciously arty experimentalists of left-field dance music. The earliest of the early-adopting beat-geeks were deejays like Diplo (M.I.A.’s producer partner early on and someone wont to boast about how his quest for rare beats took him to Latin American urban danger-zones where no other “gringo” dared go) and DJ/Rupture (responsible for globe-roaming mix-CDs like Gold Teeth Thief and the blogs Mudd Up and Dutty Artz).  Lately they’ve been joined by figures like Mosca, who emerged from the U.K.’s dubstep scene but as a deejay draws for super-obscure styles like Guadeloupe’s gwoka.

Recently the interest in non-Western sounds has moved beyond pure dance forms to include plaintively melodic music that is roughly equivalent to mainstream pop, perhaps even the local equivalents of Celine Dion for all anyone really knows. The Seattle-based label Sublime Frequencies has released a series of CDs documenting the ultra-sweet pop fare of countries like Java, Sumatra, Algeria, Burma, Palestine, Thailand and Niger. Some, like Radio Myanmar, were taped directly off the radio, while  others draw from cassettes picked up in street markets.
In nearby Portland, the Sublime Frequencies concept was taken to the next level by Chris Kirkley and his label Sahelsounds. His two Music From Saharan Cellphones compilations (initially distributed for free on the internet but set to be issued in vinyl form through a crowd-funding scheme) gather up songs by artists from Nigeria, Algeria, Niger, Morocco, Mali, Ivory Coast, and the Sahel region of Mauritania that circulate promiscuously throughout North Africa when cellphone users transfer and trade them in MP3 form.


As Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson noted, part of the appeal of Saharan Cellphones in particular and nu-exotica in general is that the music seems “rare.” Unlike most Western pop and unpop, where even the most obscure artist is exhaustively documented and annotated by fans on the web, the performers on the Saharan Cellphone comps remain shrouded in mystique, with some artists and songs only partially identified. So it “feels” like a throwback to the analogue era, even though the way the music is distributed (both in its original Saharan context and in the trend-chasing blog world) is totally digital.
For the exotic beat-freaks and the global street pop enthusiasts alike, something of the thrill of the hunt has been restored, it’s just that the safari now takes you through the deeper recesses of YouTube or the hinterlands of the web, rather than to an out-of-the-way record store or a street market in some dodgy neighborhood.

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 Other explorers are heading not just far afield, but far back into the past as well. In recent years there has been a surge in the number of reissue labels and music blogs that specialize in ethnological field recordings and in non-Western music from the Sixties and Seventies (i.e. prior to the original “world music” phenomenon of the eighties that led to major labels signing artists like King Sunny Ade and Youssou N’Dour).

This retro-exotica boom often draws on field recordings of tribal chants and gamelan orchestras that back in the day were released in the West by ethnomusicology specialist labels like Ocora, Nonesuch Explorer, Folkways, and UNESCO Collection. But increasingly people are digging much deeper. Witness the rise of a new breed of A&R archaeologist who ventures abroad to scoop up the battered vinyl and worn cassettes of music only ever released in its native land. Whenever possible these are then licensed for Western “reissue” (strictly speaking, that should be “issue,” since it was never available outside its homeland in the first place).
Prime movers in this ethno-retro field include labels like Finders Keepers, Honest Jon’s, Cherrystones, Secret Stash, Now Again, Soundway Records, Strut, Dust-To-Digital, and blogs like Awesome Tapes from Africa, Brain Goreng, Holy Warbles, Sea Never Dry, Ghost Capital, and Anywhere Else But Here Today. These labels and blogs pursue every imaginable kind of vintage exotica, from field recordings made with hand-held microphones by roving anthropologists in the Fifties and Sixties, to pop and showbiz (every nation seems to have a domestic equivalent to what Americans call schlock or schmaltz, what the Germans call schlager) to hipper sounds (everything from Indonesian hard rock to Turkish psychedelia to South African disco).

Because the music was usually recorded quickly in a rudimentary studio, because it’s a strictly analogue affair with none of the digital gloss and computer trickery of global-ghetto-groove styles like kuduro, these older styles of non-Western music seem “purer.” But when you look into them more closely, it turns out that is just an illusion caused by the passage of time.
Most of the stuff that gets reissued by the crate-digger labels is not traditional folk music handed down generation to generation. More often than not, it’s an already-hybrid style contaminated by Western pop: many of the troupes collected on the celebrated Ethiopiques series were heavily influenced by the flamboyant frenzy of James Brown’s Seventies funk, while the Indonesian hard rock and progressive rock bands on Now Again’s marvelous Those Shocking, Shaking Days compilation followed the template laid down by their British and American arena-touring models as closely as possible.
Indeed the pro-Western regime running Indonesia actively promoted the spread of rock music in parallel with their solicitation of investment from Western companies. As with the rap and rave inspired global-ghetto styles, there can sometimes be an unsettling sense that the attraction of this music is that it provides a distorted mirror image of Western pop: in other words, a slightly askew, exotic-but-ultimately-familiar version of things we already love.

As this decade unfolds, xenomania and omnivorous cosmopolitanism will spread and intensify – and tracking the impact on Western hipster music-making is going to be really intriguing.
We’ve already heard flickers of it in the music of Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer and The Dirty Projectors. On 2010’s brilliant A Sufi and A Killer, Gonjasufi samples 1960s rembetiko, a Greek style of low-down music that often gets compared to the blues and that dates back to the end of the 19^th Century.

Battles’s less-brilliant but always interesting Gloss Drop slickly fuses everything from techno to Tropicalia, synthpop to soca. The band’s Ian Williams recently observed to The Wire magazine that “With the internet, everybody’s exposed to World Music now, and a much wider wealth of influence that come from everywhere. The library that people are exposed to is much bigger now.”
Of course the phenomenon of musicians looking outside the West for inspiration is not particularly new. Rock stars like Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and David Byrne embraced rhythms, melodies and instrumental textures from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America; Gabriel was involved in the founding of the U.K. world music festival W.O.M.A.D, while Byrne launched his own record label, Luaka Bop, as an outlet for music from South America and other worldy zones. For his debut solo album Duck Rock, Malcolm McLaren traipsed around the world in search of earthy roots-music antidotes to glossed-up, synthetic Eighties pop, in the process making bizarre collages of Soweto guitar pop, Bronx scratching ‘n’ rapping, and Appalachian square-dancing.

The trumpeter Jon Hassell coined the concept of 4^th World Music, the merger of Western hi-tech and ethnic music. He also influenced the landmark Brian Eno & David Byrne project My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, with its sampled voices from Folkways-style field recordings and Arabic pop. Ryuichi Sakomoto’s own version of 4^th World was “Neo-Geo,” a cosmopolitan pastiche of panglobal flavors.
But Hassell, Sakomoto, Byrne and Eno were in many ways simply reiterating and developing 1970s notions of a “One World Music” as pursued by artists like Miles Davis, Don Cherry, Traffic, and Can. All that’s really different now is that the Internet makes it so much easier to “travel” far and wide in your listening, while digital technology means it is easy to harvest found sound off the web and to incorporate it seamlessly into your own music.

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 “I can hear everything,” proclaims a voice at the start of Eye Contact, the latest album by ethnodelic New York outfit Gang Gang Dance. “It’s everything time.” “But just because you can hear everything, it doesn’t mean you should try to. There are definite downsides to all this net-enabled hyper-eclecticism.

For listeners, the temptation is to pig out at the world’s greatest buffet, to heap your plate with a little of everything, savoring nothing in depth, overloading the palate with clashing cuisines and ultimately leaving you with indigestion.

For musicians, attempting to assimilate inputs of such diverse provenance can lead to the audio equivalent of fusion cuisine gone wrong: a cacophony of incompatible taste profiles. Intriguingly, New York magazine’s classical music critic Justin Davidson has observed this syndrome at work in the world of up-and-coming young composers. “A century ago, Bartók had to haul his gramophone through the mud of Moravia to learn about folk music. Now a curious kid in Brooklyn can track down an Azerbaijani song in seconds. Today’s styles need not be born of deep experience; they form out of collisions that bypass history and geography.” There is a faddishness to the chase for exotic beats and ethnic obscurities that is exacerbated by the high-turnover cycles of the bloggified music scene.

However, the impulse to seek out the alien sounds that already exist on the planet (that may indeed have existed for decades) but are effectively new to you could be a displacement of the future-hunger, the quest for the unknown, that used to be the motor driving the vanguard sectors of Western pop.
If our own rock and pop traditions seem stagnant and stalled, their forward motion obstructed by the sheer accumulation of glorious history, it could be that one way to escape the dead end is to step sideways. Get yourself outside the Western narrative altogether and explore all the elsewheres now accessible like never before.

TALES OF TOOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS: an intellectual profile of David Toop
director's cut version, The Wire, March 2012

by Simon Reynolds

The names Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari barely feature in David Toop’s writing, and then only late in the day (a few mentions in 2004’s Haunted Weather). But in many ways the philosopher duo’s concepts and coinages—deterritorialisation, “lines of flight”, nomadology, the rhizome—are the perfect way into Toop’s remarkable body of thought, as manifested across several decades of music-making, music criticism, and music-curation.  D&G and DT are shaped by the multiple, interrelated radicalisms of the Sixties, from the anti-psychiatry movement to psychedelia (music figures prominently in D&G’s A Thousand Plateaus), from anarchism and androgyny to Eastern philosophy and mysticism.  What you could term the “cultural libido” of these three men is very close: they’re turned on by the same things.

Flux and mutability are the utopian keywords of a materialist-idealism wherein forms, structures, genres,  emotional/psychological rigidities, all dissolve in the flows of desire, energy and sensation. The non-fascist life, D&G propose, involves a perpetual unmaking of the mind and softening of the character-armour. Territorialisation, which in music equates with what Toop deplores as “taste tribalism” (purism, genre-patriotism, etc) is war psychology: fortified, locked into defensive-aggressive modes.

Exoticism is a strategy of deterritorialising, a line of flight outside the familiar life-world into otherness.  As part of The Wire’s Adventures in Sound and Musicseries, Toop talked recently on Resonance FM about his lifelong fascination for “a kind of distant music” in terms of deconditioning: a 1960s buzz concept put into practice by figures such as R.D. Laing and David Cooper (both involved, like Guattari, in the anti-psychiatry movement). In Toop’s case, it’s aesthetics and taste that undergo a willed dismantling.  Similar impulses impelled the trans-disciplinary work Toop tried to explore at art college in the 1960s: “multi media, projections and sound– radically adapting existing instruments or inventing new ones – rather than stay[ing] within limits of what’s available”.

In parallel with the instrument-building that informed his 1974 booklet  New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments and debut album of the same name, Toop made several radio programs in the early Seventies for the BBC series Crossthreads. These were woven out of field recordings--Korean Confucuian music, aboriginal Australian mortuary ceremonies, Inuit eskimo vocal games—presented without contextualization or indeed any voice-over commentary whatsoever bar a few enigmatic sentences.   Granted access to the BBC’s archives (“to me it was paradise”),  Toop spirited the 10 inch discs home and taped them for private delectation.   This personal collection of fabulously esoteric exotica became a “wellspring”, something he’d return to whenever his capacity for musical awe dried up.   

Xenomania was not uncommon among that breed of hungry Seventies souls who would become post-punk prime movers.  Blixa Bargeld trawled the “Obscurities Departments” of Berlin record shops;  This Heat listened to Nonesuch Explorer LPs of Balinese gamelan;

No Wavers Arto Lindsay and Mark Cunningham tripped out to tribal trance music from Africa.  

Toop went further, though, starting his own label Quartz in 1977 and releasing LPs of sacred flute music from New Guinea . He went literally further, journeying to the Venezuelan Amazonian jungle to record the Yanomami tribe’s  shamanic rituals.  This too was released on Quartz alongside improvisation LPs made by outfits in which Toop played. One of these albums, Whirled Music punned on what was then just an arcane term in ethnomusicology circles, not the record industry marketing buzzword it became in the Eighties.

Toop and Whirled collaborators like Steve Beresford and Paul Burwell were key catalysts in the 1975 formation of London Musicians Collective and its magazine Musics.  The plural discreetly announces a guiding ethic of deterritorialism:  totalizing conceptions of “what music is, what it’s for” are rejected in favour of discrete practices and histories.   LMC founded itself on the principle of non-exclusion: its meetings were open to all, and accordingly rather fractious affairs. The same applied to Musics, a “squabblezine” full of angry correspondence from readers,  “open letters” from the writers to critics at other publications, and ideological  disputes within the editorial team that were ventilated publicly.  

The Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of rhizomatic (derived from rhizomes, laterally connected plants like ferns and bamboo) fits the LMC milieu’s endlessly shifting line-ups and temporary alliances.  Interviewed in Melody Maker as a member of Flying Lizards, Toop celebrated “the flexibility and unpredictability of improvisation” over “the hierarchical writing set-ups and the eternal marriages of groups." When I spoke to him for Rip It Up and Start Again, Toop pinpointed the influence of R.D. Laing’s critique of the nuclear family as an emotional hothouse breeding neurosis and mental illness. “The whole idea of the band as a family had to be destroyed.”   Once again this paralleled Deleuze & Guattari’s anti-Oedipal politics and opposition to “arborescent” hierarchies (top-down, tree-like command structures like the state, patriarchy, the super-ego).  All this in turn intersected with hot Sixties concepts like polymorphous perversity and play-power.

As a player, Toop was certainly putting it about a bit in those days. Along with Flying Lizards, he participated in a plethora of duos and ensembles drawn from the LMC pool, including Rain in the Face, 49 Americans, General Strike, and Alterations. For the latter, he contributed sounds generated using animal decoys, fire buckets, water, various flutes, whistles, plucked and bowed strings, music box, as well as electric guitar and bass. Some kind of pinnacle was Circadian Rhythms, an octet convened for a single July 1978 performance that lasted  thirteen hours, with Toop’s unusual sound-palette for once out-done by Annabel Nicolson’s charcoal, sparks, branches, twigs, fire, pine needles, draughts, and smoke. The concert was originally intended to run for an entire day but ran into what Toop described as “a wall of exhaustion and an overwhelming feeling that there was nothing more to add... There were too many distractions and too many players."

The always-schismatic Musics fell apart a few years later, and not long after Toop quit the LMC, where he’d fallen into the de facto and unenviable role of organizer. “That’s the trouble with collectivism, it’s too exhausting”, he told me.  During the Eighties, “sick of playing in bands, sick of playing with human beings,” he embraced the solitary empowerment of music technology.  However the LMC’s all-gates-open ethos did reflower in evolved form with the magazine Collusion, an unofficial successor to Musics, co-founded by Toop, his then- girlfriend Sue Stewart,  Peter Cusack, and Steve Beresford. The latter described the editorial philosophy to me as “trying to make more connections” and treating “the music we were involved in” (i.e. improv-meets-postpunk DIY) as just “another relevant genre” among many others, which included everything from Bollywood soundtracks and tango to Western Swing and calypso.  

Celebrated by Richard Cook at the time as “a magazine of connections and interzones”, Collusion’s post-everything eclecticism anticipated the omnivorousness of  our bloggy present.  What’s really prophetic about the magazine isn’t just its globe-roaming diversity but the way it unshackled itself from release schedules and embraced the emergent “atemporality” of music fandom enabled by the rise of reissue labels and the discographical efforts of specialists.  Toop himself talks of a “Mojo-like aspect” to Collusion.  Contemporary sounds are present, as with the Steven Harvey’s celebrated survey of New York’s post-disco underground. But most of the content concerned the past. Unlike Mojo, the magazine’s retrospective gaze isn’t confined to rock history, though. Indeed, rock barely features at all in Collusion’s six issues, apart from an article on heavy metal that treats the scene ethnographically: just another (sub)culture with rituals to decode. 

Many of Toop’s later preoccupations  are already present:  a piece on Les Baxter-style exotica, another featuring the phrase “the mediumship of the listener” that 25 years later resurfaces as  the subtitle of Sinister Resonance. After Collusion’s demise, Toop continued this after-rock pluralism as a working journalist, notably in a monthly column for The Face: most forms of black pop, Eighties club sounds, and world-y sounds were covered, but electric guitar music, whether marginal or mainstream, was cold-shouldered.

Toop’s first proper book was The Rap Attack (1985), a richly researched but relatively straightforward hip hop history. Ocean of Sound, published ten years later, implements deterritorialisation at the level of the text itself.  As he wrote for more magazines and newspapers,  Toop found himself increasingly constrained by the strictures of mainstream journalism: clear argument, intro/conclusion, and so forth.  As Ocean of Sound was to be a meditation on music’s “alternately disorientating and inspiring openness”, the  first thing to do, he recalled later, “was to abandon linear chronology, that boring and false sense of logical progression through which one development follows its precursor as if culture was designed in advance by an art historian.” In its place, a musicated writing (leitmotifs, samples) and “making connection sideways”: a  rhizomatization of the text, in other words.  Ocean of Sound doesn't proceed by argument but by through filaments of observations, anecdotes, quotations and insights.  Inferences and implications spread out in ever-widening ripples. Even individual sentences often unfurl as a chain of supplementary clauses (freefloating ideas, imagistic metaphors) that gradually recede into the horizon.  

“It’s a way I have that expresses the way my mind works,” is how Toop described it. “Constantly branching off in different directions”. That image suggests dendrites in the brain and dream logic, but it also anticipates the hyperlinks of the net, whose criss-crossing lines defy the limits of space and time. What had been realized at Collusion at the level of editorial policy (genre pluralism, atemporality, the global village) now inhabits the individual writer’s style of thought.   

There is a proto-blog aspect to Ocean of Sound.  Alan Kirby argues that digiculture involves a distinctive form of textuality characterized by “onwardness and endlessness”. The blog format encourages meander and fragmentary comment; inconclusive arguments resumed or revised in subsequent posts; the stringing together of barely-related thoughts and observations, illustrated by audio or video.  And Toop has talked of consciously aiming with Ocean and subsequent books for a “hypertextual approach” that makes “overlay and displacement into a coherent, compelling (non) narrative.”

If the methodology seems ahead of its time, so are many of Ocean’s insights, such as the thought (more leitmotif than thesis) that “music—fluid, quick... outreaching... immersive and intangible...  has anticipated the aether talk of the information ocean”.  Rereading recently the written-in-1994 observation that “music floats around in the aether of the WorldWide Web, waiting to be downloaded, hoping to talk to somebody”, I did a double-take: mildly surprised that sound-files were getting shared so early, but really startled by the understated pathos of “hoping to talk to somebody”. It seemed a prophetic intimation of the isolation and anomie that the Internet purportedly eradicates yet really and merely rearranges.  

A year after publication, Ocean of Sound became a compilation as well as a book. The selection mirrored the time-and-space vaulting logic of the text, sliding from King Tubby to Herbie Hancock,  the Vancouver Soundscape to Howler Monkeys, the tracks mixed without gaps, so that their outer edges brushed. Although individuals had privately compiled crazily eclectic mix-tapes, as far as  know this is the first compilation of its kind to be commercially released.  

Other Toop-curated collections for Virgin followed: some (Crooning on Venus, Guitars On Mars) more deterritorialized than others (Booming on Pluto tracked the electro diaspora, Sugar and Poison celebrated R&B slow jams as psychedelic erotica). There was a wild moment at Virgin in the mid-Nineties, when a sector of the company, overseen by Simon Hopkins, flashbacked to the label’s pre-punk spirit of experimental eccentricity (Faust, Gong, Lol Coxhill, et al). Alongside Toop’s Ocean of Sound series were equally all-over-the-map surveys by Kevin Martin of “isolationism”, “electric jazz” and dub’s viral influence, plus single-artist CDs from Paul Schutze, Techno Animal, and DT himself.

Spirit World, one of Toop’s two Virgin albums, betrayed some contemporary influence from drum-and-bass but sounded like jungle made by someone who’d actually been inside one, absorbing sense-impressions of its perpetual roil of growth and decomposition.  Spirit World and its predecessor Pink Noir previewed the preoccupations of Exotica, the sort-of-follow-up to Ocean of Sound.  Deterritorialisation of the text is taken even further here: fact and fiction, memoir and fantasy, coexist and blur, with sections that vaguely recall Conrad and Ballard and a hilarious dialogue with canine movie-star Lassie about recordings of animal-and-bird sounds.

Lassie alludes wryly and slyly to the notion of “the armchair traveler”. What emerges as a subtext of Exotica is the idea of the collection--a public or private archive of recordings, texts, images—as a decontextualisation machine.   When a collection achieves a certain density and duration, the proximity of things of far-flung provenance allows for the remapping of cultural fields: strange connections cutting across time and space and genre become almost unavoidable. Ownership and location of cultural forms gets displaced from its proper setting. The Internet-- a vast collective collection, a non-space of absolute proximity between everything-- is just the nth-degree fruition of tendencies inherent to the archive.

As the subtitle Fabricated Soundscapes in A Real World hints, exotica involves misrecognition and falsification:  Les Baxter’s layering of “layered dislocated fantasy on dislocated fantasy”, the cosmopolitan confections of   Hosono, Sakomoto, Van Dyke Parks.  The book points also to a deeper impossibility at the heart of the exoticising impulse.  “Exotic” is not an intrinsic property of the object but entirely relational.  In its native context, the Northern Dahomey funeral ceremony played by Toop on Resonance FM last year is not alien or disorienting; it is homely, music tethered to a socially cohesive occasion,  and a coherent cosmology. In its original setting, it’s probably as conservative as an Anglican church service. The very musical attributes whose embrace makes us brave, exploratory, risk-taking, for its proper audience signify  obedience and conformism. My favourite example of this paradox is Ofra Haza, briefly almost-famous in the West after being sampled by Coldcut on their remix of Eric B & Rakim’s “Paid In Full”. But Haza turned out to be an MOR superstar in her native Yemen, the equivalent of Barbara Streisand. 

There’s another paradox to “rootless cosmopolitanism”: its dependence on cultural forms that evolved over a long period in rooted, inwardly-focused cultures.  Like marsupials in Australia, the more cut-off the culture, the more alien is the music. Case in point: the Yanomami, who had barely experienced any  contact with the outside world when Toop recorded them in the Seventies  But the syndrome can be seen in popular music too, from hip hop’s emergence from the South Bronx (which Toop attributed partly to “the ghettoisation that took place in American cities.... that lack of mixing and fluidity”) to the relative insularity of Chicago’s footwork scene. Within the bourgeois-bohemians context of art-pop, “taste tribalism” is considered regressive; curiosity and the open-mind are virtues. But tribes, ethnological or subcultural, are not cosmopolitan: from food to music, they are governed by a defined and inflexible set of attractions and aversions.  Closure is strength, and exposure to the outside (anthropological, economic, media) is generally cataclysmic.

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“At home he feels like a tourist/He fills his head with culture/He gives himself an ulcer”—Gang of Four, 1979

One rationale for this piece is that musically-speaking, it’s a Toop-y time. What I’ve taken to calling the Zones of Alteration (after the blog Altered Zones, RIP) is a post-geographical network of artists who make porous the membranes between genres. Oceanic and cosmic imagery abounds in the Zones, both echoing and extending the aspirations of earlier phases in which Toop was active:  ambient and space music in the 70s, post-rave  electronica in the 90s.  Exotica as a concept is prevalent and relevant like it’s not been since the mid-90s:   a blog-world cult for vintage ethnological recordings and environmental soundscapes is matched by releases from new artists with titles like Cambodian Field Recordings or Pacific Fog Dreams.  One of my favourite denizens of the Zones, Dolphins Into The Future, a/k/a Lieven Martens, makes fictitious field recordings and litters his work with references to cetaceans and Polynesia.  He cites Ocean of Sound as a major influence. Exotica shows us how the various exoticisms (Orientalism, Pacific-ism, Africa-as-heart-of-darkness-ism) were the other side of imperialism, a response to the “glut of new stimuli” (spices, fabrics, curiosities, et al) pouring into the colonial homelands.  Equally it’s clear that today’s xenomania is entwined with globalization and the distance-abolishing effects of the Internet.

In truth, though, the idea for this essay came to me in a flash, as a fully-formed sentence: We Are All David Toop Now. Unpacked, what that slogan says is that any kid with a broadband connection can access the sort of of dizzying diversity of listening experience that took Toop a lifetime of obsessive dedication to accumulate. One drawback of reading Ocean of Sound and Exotica when they originally came out in the Nineties was the discographies at the back: how on earth to get hold of all this often out-of- print esoterica?  Today almost of it is online, as blog-shared albums, or excerpted on YouTube.

The nagging question that followed the initial thought-flash was whether all this knowledge and “experience” has anything like the same value when it’s achieved effortlessly. On Resonance FM, playing the precious ethno-treasure he taped from the BBC archive or hunted down in record shops, Toop recalled those Seventies days  when he spent so much time writing to people in distant leads beseeching them to send him LPs.  At the extreme his hunger for “unknown worlds”  took him to the Amazon.  Few of us would ever go that (literally) far. But when “discovery” is completely divorced from a sense of quest, isn’t it depleted of much of its libidinal energy? 

There’s another drawback to the Internet as portal to myriad elsewheres and elsewhens. Because analogue-world collecting involved physical exertion and travel, distance and delay structured music-consumption according to a rhythm of hunt and capture, ingestion and digestion.  Those vital gaps are insidiously filled in by the Internet, whose  always-there plenitude incites restlessness, the audio equivalent of checklist tourism.   Before file-sharing, the only people who experienced this kind of frenetic overload (of choice and sheer volume) were the rich and those who got sent shitloads of freebies, i.e. critics and deejays. Now this unearned “wealth” has become the generalized condition of music fandom.  Toop, in his work, has wisdom to offer concerning this predicament.

After several years penning a monthly column for The Wire, in December 1997 Toop handed in “a letter of public resignation”: the culmination of a mounting “indifference to contemporary music” and the fatiguing chore of finding things to say about it. Only old Takemitsu soundtracks and memory-rush ambushes (hearing the O-Jays in Pizza Express) provided solace during this chronic state of sonic anhedonia. “I’m outta here, if not forever, then for a long lie down in a metaphorical dark room lacking in music transmission technology.” 1997 seemed like a pretty exciting time to me, musically, in the pop mainstream as much as the margins, so at the time I was puzzled by the column. Yet I recognised from my own experience the  occupational hazards of the critic obliged to process too much “pretty good” music in too short a time.  Rereading it recently, I was struck by its courage and candor, coming from someone who made much of their living writing about music.

The crisis seems to have lasted a while: in an Invisible Jukebox from March 2003, Toop discussed the attraction of Japanese musical minimalism as a reprieve from  an “overload of information”.  “A  lot of people feel there’s too much stuff out there, too much music.... I feel it myself, I love silence, but music as a whole I don’t like anymore....  I don’t like listening to it on the radio, seeing music on television. I don’t like having it on in the house...  That love of music as a generalized experience, I’ve come to the end of that.” A few years later, recalling the dry spell, he talked about how “it became a real problem for me. I wondered how I was going to carry on writing about music. Now I’m much more ruthless. I don’t listen to anything unless it’s really good.” But then how do you determine what’s “really good” without checking out lots of contenders? Every first-time play competes with something else’s second or third listen. Two aquatic metaphors go to war here: surfing versus immersion.

Overall, the ocean as a resource of utopian metaphor is looking kinda tarnished these days, from over-fishing desertifying the seas to the Pacific Trash Vortex, that gyre of plastic litter.  The ocean even suffers from noise pollution: gas drilling, cable-laying, freighter propellers, and military tests have turned it into a deafening nightclub, in which sea mammals are unable to communicate and their equilibrium is shattered.  If the ocean-of-sound prefigured the ocean-of-data, it’s hard not to see parallels with the Internet: not the clean, smoothly functioning expanse for communication that the obsolete term “cyberspace” once evoked but a crowded, cluttered “junkspace” (Rem Koolhaas), a place where we didn’t transcend ourselves but inevitably brought along all our petty crap. 

Haunted Weather, the third volume in a loose trilogy that started with Ocean of Sound, seems like it’s anticipating the hauntology discourse of recent years.  Actually, this 2004 book surveys of an array of sound art and environmental music practices, at time resembling the travelogue of Toop and his peers on a global circuit of festivals and exhibitions.  The title has a discernibly ominous tinge, though, mirrored in the text by  flickers of anxiety about digital technology’s dematerialization and disembodiment of sound and an overall sense of  overload: “how to maintain poise in a world gone crazy with... informational delirium”, “the hysterical onslaught of information, mediation and consumerism”, “data pipes spurting  information of massively variable content [in]  unprecedented, oceanic volumes...”.  Aqua-utopian imagery shifts decisively to the darkside, and the source of the switch is traceable to that late Nineties moment when flood-became-drought: “In the past, trying to listen to everything has almost destroyed my desire to listen to anything.”  Cultivating a Japanese dry garden at the back of his London house becomes a form of therapy, its seclusion and focus returning him to analogue time and earthy materiality.  The sounds of birds passing through help Toop find ““a way back into music after a period in which my feelings about sound seemed to be deadened.”

Although Haunted Weather is generally optimistic about laptoptronica sour notes are sounded concering  digi-tech too. “I love this aspect of digital composition,” Toop writes in reference to the myriad options that empower the solo artist. “And at the same time regret it.” Digital audio workstations “can take away the space, or the air, from music production”.  During one compositional process, he impulsively throws open the window to “let a random chunk of the world outside” into the work.  Reflecting on the illusory wealth of having at his disposal “six different computer software programs” and numerous plug-ins, Toop echoes Brian Eno and Holger Czukay when he argues that “omission is a virtue. Without limitations there is only confusion, vulgarity, the loss of meaning. I can’t truly live by it but I bear it in mind.”’

By 2010’s Sinister Resonance, there’s a shift towards a wholly negative conception of sound as uncanny and threatening: no longer protean but formless, not so much wombing as “enveloping, intrusive”. What’s striking about the book is the near-complete avoidance of music in favour of representations of listening in literature and painting.  The sonic affect previously provided by music can seemingly now only be achieved through other art forms, and as a negative intensity: the inverted-bliss of the disturbing noise, the pregnant silence. In interviews, Toop spoke of sound in terms of  “uncertainty” and ambiguity of location, “extreme psychic states,” “dread and fear”. He recalled primordial experiences with sound as a small child, imagining hearing intruders in the house or in his room.  Xenophilia flips into xenophobia, fear of the stranger. The exotic (in Greek, literally “from the outside”) becomes invasive. 

“I wanted to state another case for sound, to move the discourse slightly away from utopian conceptions,” Toop declared in one interview. Certainly we’re long way from the Nineties, when flows-of-sound and flows-of-data were celebrated by such as Sadie Plant and DJ Spooky in an libidinized jargon of  mutation and motility that derived largely from Deleuze & Guattari.  Others favored metaphors derived not from fluid mechanics but virology.  Kevin Martin, a/k/a The Bug, titled his Virgin compilations Macro Dub Infection. This exaltation of the virus in certain circles (see also the Plant-associated CCRU) always amused me:  I’d wonder if these folk modified their views when they came down with stinking colds or lost a hard drive’s contents.  Viruses, biological and computing alike, are nothing if not deterritorialising agents. But then as the critic Judith Williamson points out, many “flows” are “deeply pernicious”: the flightiness of capital in a globally integrated market, traffic in narcotics and weapons, the spread of diseases and non-indigenous species. Like a strong immune system, boundaries and border patrols can be necessary protections.

So many debates, in politics, economic, and culture, revolve around the ambivalent status of “flow” / “flux” / “flexibility”. In the 90s, a decade that echoed the 60s, we viewed these qualities and tendencies as inherently progressive.  Eno, in a 1992 magazine essay on perfume quoted in Ocean of Sound, celebrated our “increasingly un-centered, un-moored” lives, in which values were provisional, subject to constant revision.  The sociologist-philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls this “liquid modernity”, a postmodern/post-Internet update of Marx’s “all that’s solid melts into air”.  As social norms weaken, as migration for work becomes more common, as individuals adjust to the possibility of mid-life career changes, existence takes on an ad hoc quality. Character itself becomes fluid. Bauman sees the possibilities as well as downsides of this existential instability. But in recent years, academia has been rife with buzzwords like “precarity”.  “Flexibility” has increasingly negative connotations, suggestive of the “flexible work patterns” imposed on a labour force vulnerable to outsourcing and the alarming fluctuations of global capitalism.  It also  suggests management consultancy speak: the ideological slipperiness of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has been traced by some to his profession, which entailed an endless chameleonic adjustment to his clients’s needs, a perpetual modification of thinking “in a world that’s constantly changing.”

Perhaps the very idea of change itself has lost its utopian lustre. “The versatility of the space of flows” could describe the anarcho-utopian procedures of the 1970s LMC, or the electronic milieu of the 90s with its remixological back-and-forth. But it’s actually Manuel Castells’s description of the lightning-fast movements of capital within the “informational city” that connects the world’s financial districts.  In “solid modernity” (the era of Fordism and strong unions),  stability and permanence were seen as obstructing the free-flow of energy and desire. But in postmodernity’s  liquid flux, the solid, and its close conceptual cousin solidarity, start to seem like essential bulwarks, a vital “drag” on the mercurial tendencies of hyper-capitalism.  This applies at the level of the state, the family (children flourish in conditions of structure and routine), and the individual psyche.  It’s possible that in the near-future, as we’re buffeted hither-and-thither by data and fashion, psychological characteristics such as rigour and rigidity will lose their pejorative connotation.  The ability to make your mind up, to not see all the sides of everything, might become prized like it was in the olden days.  Certainly it’s true that any long-term collective project requires a degree of territorialisation: in gardens where we feel secure, things come to fruition. 

Although a fellow-traveler with the Nineties technotopians, Toop has always been attuned to ambivalence and reversibility.  In Ocean of Sound, he writes about a "sensation of non-specific dread that many people now feel when they think about life, the world, the future", but argues this is the other side of the coin to “a sensation of non-specific bliss.” In one of his most recent writings, he achieves a perfect poise of neutrality. It’s the foreword for Jean-Yves Leloup’s Digital Magma, a book that offers a Toopian reading of electronic dance culture in terms of “flux and network.”. Right there in the title there’s a geological pun that implicitly contrasts the molten flows of digital music with the solidity and stasis of rock.  But think about it: magma is uninhabitable, you can’t build anything on it, its liquidity liquidates all it touches.

In his foreword, Toop presents the effects of electricity on music in the 20^th and 21^st Centuries as an alternating current flipping back and forth between liberation and control.  Energy, flowing from fossil fuels or hydroelectric dams, passes through cables and airwaves and wirelessly into the info-sphere;  the current and the culture are a single force, “all flooded through” the “fields of economy, the symbolic and memory”. But every positive reference (astronauts gazing down at Earth) is counterbalanced by a negative (intercontinental ballistic missiles).  Then the final flourish: “With digital audio, the objects of music begin to disappear into an aether of intangible properties, a mist that enshrouds and disintegrates established structures with no regard for their traditions or values. Like the dizzying rise and fall of a financial system based on intangible commodities these new conditions plunge us into instability and uncertainty yet as cultural formations they also possess great potential for value and meaning”. The sentence trails off tentatively, an obligatory expression of faint hope  upstaged by the awesome, awful drama of recent cataclysm: currencies and assets in freefall, value voided, millions of live stalled still in limbo.

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 “One must take care not to deterritorialize too quickly”-- Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. 1980

“To be everywhere is to be nowhere”—Seneca, circa 64 AD.

Where now for David Toop? The subject of his book-in-progress is improvisation.  I can only speculate, but it seems that a circle is being completed: returning Toop to where he started, if not as a fan of music then as a practitioner-conceptualist.  Back to music that exists outside mediation, entirely in the moment of its creation; music that in its truest form is never recorded, archived, distributed.  Music inseparable from the bodies of its composer-performers, from their presence in a shared present.  Concrete yet cosmic; ephemeral and eternal. 

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a version of this article was delivered at the Off the Page festival in Whitstable, February 2012

bonus material at the Wire website - a Toopographical portal to  various related articles by Toop and others (and also me) plus a radio dialogue with music between Toop and Derek Walmsley . (There was a second instalment of this, Music From the Lost Worlds II, broadcast by Resonance FM in December, but it doesn't appear to be online yet).

also check out Toop's essay - "Sounding the Object: a Timebase Archive" which concerns "a proposition for a hypothetical environment in which intangible multi-sensory events can be experienced as if in a museum. This museum of the imagination displays various sounding devices and listening events, all of which are footnoted by ancillary theoretical, conceptual and anecdotal material from the author’s sound work practice and research between 1971 and the present.". And also mentions Toop's concept of "biosonics"