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"

 

Excess All Areas, or The Catastrophe... And What Comes After (The Wire, 2011)

EXCESS ALL AREAS

or

The Catastrophe... And What Comes After

The Wire magazine, June 2011

By Simon Reynolds

Sometimes, when I consider the immense transformations wrought upon music and fandom by the digital revolution, the word ‘catastrophe’ springs irresistibly to mind.

Oh for sure, there have been numerous upsides. Obscure music made readily obtainable. Esoteric knowledge opened to all. An eruption of quality music writing by non-professionals, much of it too eccentric, or theoretical, or personal, or fragmentary to be tolerated by most magazines. Getting lost in the memory maze of YouTube. New channels of communication and connection, virtual but lively communities of enthused like-minds and stroppy contrarians.

For the moment, though, I want to accentuate the negative. Let’s take a pleasure maimed, if not quite killed off completely. Shopping for secondhand vinyl: I can’t be alone in too often chancing on an intriguing record and then being halted just shy of purchase by the thought: “Hmmm, I can probably find this on the Internet for free... save myself $15... do I really need another record cluttering up the house?” Digiculture has here damaged a multifaceted set of pleasures: the thrill of the hunt, the risk of taking a punt, the tactile delight of ownership.

Curiously, revealingly, my crate-digging lust is shifting to another analogue-era object of desire: the vintage music magazine. Now and then on a blog you’ll come across a download link to a zipped file of scanned pages from an obscure fanzine or periodical, but for the most part these yellowing bundles of ink and paper have yet to undergo the fate of dematerialisation/dissemination that’s befallen almost the entirety of recorded music. Part of the sudden allure of old magazines is, I’m sure, that they retain a scarcity value that records have forfeited (at least in terms of pure sonic information: the physical records obviously retain potent fetish appeal in terms of packaging, the period flavour of the design and the label, etc).

But there is also a more elevated aspect to the attraction. Packed with uncommon knowledge, these vintage magazines provide the kind of information that’s hard to find on the internet owing to the particular way its archiving system is structured. Online, you can uncover a vast amount about an artist in terms of diachronic trajectory (discography, biographical arc). Much harder to reconstruct is the synchronic context: what was going on at the precise moment in time of a record’s release, whether in terms of the genre in which the group operated, the general state of music culture, or the political and social backdrop. A musty, yellowing 1970s copy of NME or Melody Maker, Creem or Let It Rock, is a precious capsule of circumstantial evidence: reviews and features about contemporaneous groups, but also record company adverts and the graphic design and typography, which ooze period vibe. You can’t fully understand the impact of glam rock without a sense of how drab and style-less regular rock groups looked then, of how visually depleted the whole media environment was. Likewise, the stark angular minimalism of post-punk groups and record covers derived its salient edge from juxtaposition with scruffy Old Wave and Stiff-style pub rock. A time-slice of history, stubbornly analogue, the vintage music magazine in some sense resists the decontextualising vortex that is netculture, that endless end of history that never stops churning.

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Catastrophe is a melodramatic word. The way I mean it is less ‘act of God’ and more ‘act of Economy’. Just like the Industrial Revolution two hundred years earlier, the Digital Revolution had a stampeding quality, herd-like, at once willed and out of control. Industrialisation ripped up old folkways, uprooted populations, ravaged the environment, restructured society. It even installed a new temporality: labour paid by the hour, the seasons irrelevant, the cycles of sunrise and sunset overruled by the requirements of production and profit. Industrialization also brought undeniable boons: cheap consumer goods, the relative freedoms of the anonymous cities.

The digital revolution had a similar pell-mell quality, a feeling of impersonality and inevitability. From the internet to the MP3, the whole caboodle took off because it was technologically possible, and because people just went along with it. Paul Virilio famously argued that every technological innovation is also the invention of a new accident or disaster. The digitization of information and culture had all kinds of unforeseen, wrenching consequences. The compact disc, for instance, seemed to the record industry like a great idea. In the short term there was a boom off the back of back catalogue being issued as overpriced CDs. But somehow nobody in the industry foresaw that turning audio (and later video) into code would make it vastly easier to copy. At first this was old-fashioned piracy (CDs and DVDS being much quicker to copy, with less loss of quality than cassette, vinyl, VHS). Later, it all went haywire with the MP3. That was another invention supported by big entertainment corporations, and a classic case of the industry shooting itself in the foot. The broadband component of the file-sharing cataclysm was more to do with capitalism’s lack of central command: an innovation introduced in one sector of the economy (because essential to the furtherance of the internet) led to devastating consequences for another (the entertainment industry whose audio, video, games, etc got trafficked globally).

‘Tectonic’ rather than ‘catastrophic’ is a calmer, more dispassionate word for what’s happened these past 15 or so years. There has been the media-cultural equivalent of a shifting of the continental plates, causing a new ‘land-mass’ to emerge out of nowhere: the internet, which really is closer to a New World than a new medium. Such a seismic passage from what could be called the Analogue System to the Digital System has inevitably left a host of wreckage in its wake.

The Analogue System – based around vinyl and tapes, print music magazines, terrestrial radio and TV broadcasting– created particular kinds of affects, modes of identification and convergences of social energy. Because it was largely organised around the physical movement of information-containing objects (records, magazines), it had a particular sense of temporality, structured around delay, anticipation and the Event. The Digital System – based around the dematerialized information flows enabled by the MP3, netradio, YouTube, blogs and webzines, et al – has a different sense of ‘culture-time’, one marked by a paradoxical combination of instantaneity and permanence, speed and stasis. Online is all about the this-minute tweet you can’t remember half an hour later and the persistence of the past as a readily accessible archived resource (a YouTube of T Rex from 1972, a 1967 Stan Brakhage reel at UbuWeb, a pirate radio session from 1993 via some old skool rave blog).

Under the Analogue regime, time was tilted forward. In Digiculture, time is lateral, recursive, spongiform, riddled with wormholes. It is characterized by operations like cut and paste, simultaneity (keeping open multiple windows), rewind/fast-forward/pause using mouse and cursor, saving things ‘for later’, fitting cultural or news experiences into your schedule (I won’t watch that major Obama speech as it happens because I can always catch it later on YouTube). One’s control of time is vastly more flexible than under the Analogue regime, but one’s experience of time is vastly more brittle.

The digital landscape emerged gradually and it has certainly generated new ways of experiencing and discovering music. Yet overall it’s hard to avoid concluding that the intensities possible under the Analogue System have been replaced by distraction and a kind of restless ‘circulation for its own sake’. Fanatical identification with an artist, scene or youth tribe has given way to drifting eclecticism and ‘partial allegiance’. The album, as a cohesive artwork whose internal temporality the listener submitted to, has been displaced by the playlist and the mix. Music increasingly functions as a mood modifier or background sound for the multitasking listener.

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An Analogue>Digital analogy. Under the Analogue System, culture was a complex but delicately balanced set of channels or pipes through which culture-stuff was pumped. For the most part this was a one-way transmission. Because the pipes were narrow, you had a cultural economy organized around scarcity and delay, which created affects of craving and anticipation. What happened with broadband is that the pipes dramatically increased in size, by a factor of a hundred or a thousand. Moreover, these conduits became traversable in both directions. Everyone could be both a transmitter and a receiver. They could distribute their opinions, publically document their lives or interests, and traffic in music or other cultural data outside the usual channels (the ones that required remuneration of the producers of the culture-stuff).

The repercussions of this jolt to the hydraulics of culture were massive and manifold. When everybody enjoys both instant access and total access, it stokes an insatiability, the delirium that I gesture at in the title of my book Retromania. When music became effectively ‘free’, consumerism was unshackled from all constraints. But because the channels are traversable in both directions, not only did the music consumer’s greed become limitless, so too did generosity. I understand only too well my own, almost literally insane compulsion to acquire more music than I could ever conceivably listen to, to the point where storing and managing it becomes a burden. What I don’t quite understand is the bloggers who hurl (in almost the vomitous sense of the word) vast quantities of sound up on to blogs or message boards, filleting the entire discographies of artists that they seemingly admire and care about. You might call the syndrome ‘oversharing’, except that that the term already has another Web 2.0 meaning: the unguarded, minutiae-oriented self-documentation encouraged by blogging and Facebook-style social networks. In both cases, ‘too much information’ is the appropriate response.

There’s a delirious quality to the archive fever raging across the web, from YouTube to the legion of collective blogs dedicated to particular backwaters of culture or zones of sensibility. It’s like some kind of blind, data-swarming drive, as if we are ants or bees building a vast construction whose ultimate purpose is beyond our ken. Which is perhaps why techno-utopians are so tempted to talk mystically about the noosphere as an emerging macro-intelligence. But another way of seeing it would be as a gigantic data dump, the collective archive as landfill.

Digitech virtually enforces this kind of activity by making it so frickin’ easy to upload and share, but still leaving just enough of a dopamine buzz that these acts signify ‘achievement’ to our brains. That’s the neurological theory of internet addiction as espoused by Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Another explanation draws on post-Freudian psychoanalysis. Developed by Jodi Dean in Blog Theory, the core idea is that the compulsive pleasures associated with netculture – down-and-uploading, tweeting, updating, searching – engage us on the level of drive as opposed to desire. Our transit back and forth across the net is not really in pursuit of an object of desire, but for the intransitive sensation of going. More primal and basic than desire, drive is associated with repetition and regression: it’s not the quest for the (impossible) object that will fill lack, but a kind of enactment of loss itself. Dean analyses our participation in digicultural activity in bleak dystopian terms of capture, the ensnaring of human energy. I’m not entirely convinced that desire has nothing to do with it: you go on YouTube or comb the blogs because in the past you’ve found delicious morsels of culture-matter; there’s also a neurotic dimension rooted in the anxiety of missing out on something. But Dean’s theory does account for the addictive, kill-time aspect, the way that you can fall into a trance on the computer and the hours just fly away.

Probably the most disconcerting and provocative idea in Blog Theory is the suggestion that the cultural worth of doing-it-yourself has been voided by its recuperation by digiculture’s interactivity and participatory mechanisms. When pre-formatted platforms such as Blogger and Bandcamp bring once arduous activities (producing a fanzine, self-releasing music) within the reach of anyone who can be halfway bothered, the result is an excess of access and a glut of artistic production. Digiculture is an exact inversion of the Situationist notion of the Spectacle. That concept emerged in reaction to the post-World War Two expansion of the mass media, with its centralized and unidirectional broadcasting. Situationists like Guy Debord critiqued entertainments that enforced passivity and isolation, and called for participatory situations that breached the barrier between art and everyday life. This in turn influenced punk and the subsequent DIY explosion of micro-labels that persists to this day. In this schema, doing-it-yourself was not just about unleashing your personal creativity: regardless of any political content to the art, it was a political act that threw down an egalitarian challenge to the professionalized culture of media and the hierarchy of stardom. The existence of the mass media and the mainstream was what gave DIY its utopian charge: you were ‘answering back’ the monologue of the monoculture.

Digiculture is the Anti-Spectacle: now we’re all doing it for ourselves, incessantly. The passing of the Analogue System makes it possible to see the benefits of the Mono-Mainstream (TV networks, major labels, government-run public broadcasting). This apparatus created mass experiences, mobilizations of energy and desire. But it also brought into being undergrounds, subcultures that grew in the darkness, outside mediation. In time, these would break through into the mainstream, via certain libidinally charged thresholds (in UK terms, the weekly music press, Top Of The Pops, Radio One). They would change pop and be changed by it. It was hard to break through, but if those barricades could be surmounted, things would then get propelled into mainstream consciousness and couldn’t be ignored. This antagonistic symbiosis of underground and overground resulted in a dialectical process of renewal and recuperation that kept music moving.

For my generation – who grew up when the 1960s was very much still a presence in the culture and who then lived through punk, post-punk, hiphop, rave – what you might call our cultural libido (what turned us on, what roused us) is inextricably bound up with these moments of breakthrough. But that entire cultural terrain is disappearing. The netscape means that there is an increased tendency for music to find only the pre-disposed.

The Analogue System was centripetal, its flow-structure innately resisted entropy. Digiculture is centrifugal because it is designed to promote individualization and differentiation at every level. Consensus and convergence become harder to achieve. Scenes fragment into micro-scenes. This atomization can even be detected at the level of the artistic self: auteurs ‘disagree’ with themselves, split up into multiple alter ego and side projects. When creating/documenting/distributing become so easy, the volume of output increases monstrously. Digital is based around encoded information and near-infinite storage; analogue culture involves costly materials. Because, say, taking a digital camera snapshot involves far less existential weight than using film, you’ll take dozens of pictures in rapid succession, then sift through for the best take. In music, the effect of digital technology is not simply that there’s many more musicians putting stuff out there, it's that each individual musician generates so much more, thanks to minimal costs for recording or materials.

This is why the discographical arc of your typical underground musician has gone nuts recently. From Lil B to James Ferraro, Wiley to Sean McCann, unspool an endless stream of mixtapes, limited cassettes, podcasts, web-only remixes. Fandom is no longer organized around anticipation, waiting with baited breath for an album your favourite artist has laboured over for months or years. Being a fan now means keeping up with the non-stop emissions of your cult icon. Some major talents can sustain that level of output without drying up, but for the most part it has led to redundancy and a flattening of the artistic landscape (fewer ‘event releases’ or ‘landmark masterpieces). Such saturation bombing has sparked a kind of retroactive appreciation for the filtering effects and in-built delays of the Analogue System.

The endzone of digital facilitation is people who can’t even give their music away: the mass graves of MySpace. Everybody talking, nobody listening. In the topsy-turvy world of digiculture, the scarcity economy of music has entirely gone... replaced by a scarcity of consumers and spectators. Momus’s celebrated maxim that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 people might have been over-optimistic. You can even imagine some future European Community subsidizing people to be uncreative, mere passive recipients of cultural transmissions.

When everyone is DIY-ing, the act of putting out your own music or magazine loses much of its ethical and political charge; it becomes something you do, a pastime or hobby. Another problem for the concept of ‘underground’ is the curious spatiality of the internet, which creates the illusion that everything is somehow equal, on the same level: the flat plane of webspace. Real and enduring inequities of media power and prominence still exist but they are disguised. The New York Times occupies the same amount of screen space as Not Not Fun’s website. Neither seems any more accessible or less ubiquitous than the other. The dialectic of invisibility/secrecy and visibility/publicity that worked so well during the Analogue Era has been tampered with.

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The final and most disorienting effect caused by digitization is the principle concern of Retromania: the phenomenon that William Gibson and Bruce Sterling have recently been theorizing in terms of ‘atemporality’. If you’re under the age of 25 and have grown up with a relationship to music based around total access and the erosion of a sense of sounds belonging to a historical sequence, thinking about music in terms of development through time becomes alien and unrecoverable. When music is distributed across the virtual spatiality of the web, styles seem to connect to each other much more through sonic affinity or uncanny trans-temporal echoes (ghosting, prophesy) than through a chronological logic (causal chains, stylistic evolution). You can get peculiar reversals of time’s flow: a later group feels like it has influenced a group from the past, which in turn comes to seem like a pale copy or unrealized prototype.

It's as though the space-time of culture has been flipped on its axis: the place once occupied by the future is now taken by the past. Which is why the orientation of so much music making in the last decade has taken the form of retro-activity (see The Wire 319). In the 60s, during postpunk and mostly recently with the Techno-rave 90s, artists sent out sonic probes into the beyond. Nowadays, they’re no longer astronauts but archaeologists, excavating through layers of debris (the detritus of the analogue, pre-internet era). The exploratory impulse survives, but its accent has shifted from discovery to rediscovery. They’re questing not so much for the unknown as the lost. This is still a utopian impulse, grasping for something beyond the artist’s immediate reach. But if McLuhan and Marcuse were the philosophers of the 60s, then Benjamin and Borges are the avatars of our ‘time out of joint’ era.

It’s not just the fourth dimension that’s affected either. This upending of cultural space-time means that modern musicians are as post-geographical as they are post-historical. Ideas of local scenes and regional sounds dissolve like sugar in water. Issues like appropriation and cultural property become as irrelevant as the distinctions between decades.

Fourth World Music was a theorem devised by Jon Hassell in the early 80s: the mingling/mangling of ancient and modern, ethnic ritual and Western hi-tech, as put into practice on his own albums like Possible Musics and Dream Theory In Malaya, and paralleled by works by Talking Heads, Byrne & Eno, Ryuichi Sakomoto, and Holger Czukay (who could claim to have reached the Fourth World ahead of everyone with 1969's Canaxis, not forgetting Can's 'Ethnological Forgeries' series). Blogger Kid Shirt has been mooting a successor concept, ‘Fifth World Music’, to tag a new strain of neo-geo exoticism and tribal vibes in recent underground music. Beyond the specific sonic coordinates Kid Shirt has in mind, the idea of a Fifth World strikes me as being extremely applicable to the postgeographical/post-historical archive-space that is the Internet, and to the superhybrids emerging from a historically unprecedented situation/predicament where not only virtually everything happening across the world is accessible but where virtually everything that ever happened is at our fingertips.

Despite the atemporality of so much contemporary left-field music (tracks that could have come out in 1991, 1972, or 1983), one way you can sort of tell the time with today’s music is the emergence of a new aesthetic of maximalism. More than just a response to the supersaturation of input and influences, it’s also a result of musicians exploiting the scope for micro-surgical intricacy offered by audio workstations. The new maximalism is not extensive, as it was with Progressive rock and jazz fusion, but intensive: a convolution that doesn’t involve structure (song cycles and side-long album pieces, like houses with too many extensions) but the density of events and layers per bar. Digi-tech encourages the finessing of micro-edits and subtle tweaks; it favours sound design over focus and thrust. If there is an aesthetic that defines our time then it’s one of exquisite clutter and generic indeterminacy. Seen negatively, a sort of dithering; framed positively, an affirmative embrace of everything (what philosophers call ‘plus/and’ rather than ‘either/or’). That these aesthetic characteristics bear some relation to the zeitgeist is indicated by the way they crop up all across the leftfield music spectrum, from TV On The Radio, tUnE-yArDs and Gang Gang Dance to Flying Lotus, Hudson Mohawke and Nicolas Jaar.  

Gang Gang Dance's new album Eye Contact starts with the words: 'I can hear everything. It's everything time.' Increasingly with the Post-Everything Generation, you get a kind of splayed sensibility, an artistic self that is diffuse and centreless: Hype Williams, Mosca, Pyramid Vritra. When on "The Age of Information" Lil B says, “I’m on computers profusely”, I don’t think so much of the endless ripples of web buzz and tweet fame encircling him, so much as the peroration of Jean Baudrillard’s 1983 essay “The Ecstasy Of Communication”, an unwitting prophecy of networked culture and psychology:“The schizo is... open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion... [defenceless before] the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things... the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being... He is now only a pure screen, a switching centre for all the networks of influence.” The corollary of this ceaseless influx is constant out-flow. Like a rap James Ferraro, Lil B issues an endlessly spewing spoor of creativity, not through limited edition cassettes but mix-tapes that are really unshelled spurts of immaterial data.

A creature of another age, I find it hard to imagine how anything artistically coherent can be created under such overloaded conditions. That said, the Analogue Era ideals of community and resistance achieved through music (as developed in the 1960s) were ailing by the 90s, and digitalization simply put those notions out of their misery, leaving a clear space for music to be repurposed. But most of the artists who’ve come to the fore in recent years retain an experiential memory-sense of what fandom and creativity were like in a cultural economy of scarcity, distance and delay; their sensibility was forged during the 1990s, when the Analogue System had yet to be fully displaced. The next generation, who’ll have never known anything but the internet, music for free, superabundance and atemporality, might well be better equipped to navigate the profusion. Who knows what uses their music will have, the shapes it will take, or the kind of convergences it will bring about? 

For the moment, though, an awful lot of music remains bound up with sign-play. It is meta-music largely dependent on its echoes of past radicalism (Sixties rock, postpunk, 90s rave), or conversely, on its witty, frisson-laced inversions of orthodox notions of what makes music edgy, experimental, important (as with hauntology and Hypnagogia’s attraction to the functional background sounds or glossy commercial pop of yesteryear). But when sound styles finally shed all those ghost-traces of History and achieve a perfect non-referential blankness, the past will cease to be a museum or even an archive, and become simply a set of resources: material to be used without reverence or nostalgia. No longer pointing to the past, music will perhaps be ready to reconnect to the world happening beyond the screen.