David Toop

Haunted Weather

When Spaniard Francisco Lopez played at Auckland's Kenneth Myers Centre in July this year, attendees were issued blindfolds upon entry. For the unwitting, this was the first clue that Lopez' performance at the Alt.Music.3 festival would be a unique experience. Inside the darkened venue, concentric seating faced outwards, fully immersing the audience in a surround sound experience enhanced by the removal of any visual information. At the centre of the circle Lopez proceeded to sonically savage those gathered with layers of decontextualized field recordings, derived from both the natural and man made realms. The result was an astonishingly pure aural experience, spanning broad spectrums of frequency, volume, and dynamics.

This brave new world of sound for sound's sake, removed from traditional modes of performance, has burgeoned in experimental music circles over the past decade. English writer, musician and sound curator David Toop delves into an essentially hidden world of sound in his fourth book Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (Serpent's Tail). By Toop's telling it is a truly global phenomenon, with enclaves firmly established in such far flung destinations as Glasgow, Mexico City, and in particular Tokyo. Haunted Weather is a different sort of travelogue, an intrepid journey into sound that takes in the author's experiences performing in these locales, his dreams and memories, and his sheer enthusiasm for music.

It was this enthusiasm that spurred Toop to pen Rap Attack in 1984. Now regarded as the bible of hip-hop history, Rap Attack uncovered the roots of the genre in other African American musical forms. Toop assiduously interviewed all the main players at a time when hip-hop was maligned at best. "It was a timely move really," he reflects. "People said to me 'Why are you writing this book about music that's kind of finished?' But by 1985 hip-hop had really taken off. I didn't know that was going to happen, but it just so happened that I had written the book at the right time, and that led to me getting offers, in particular from The Face magazine."

Prior to this Toop worked as a musician, and on several specialist music publications. Fed up with the paucity of income from these endeavours, he seized the opportunities Rap Attack afforded him. For a long period he was music columnist for The Face, while also contributing to Elle, Vogue, and broadsheet newspapers such as The Times. However, he was something of a reluctant journalist, constrained by conservative values and the crushing monotony of delivering stories about uninspiring subjects to deadline. "It took over my life," Toop sighs. "I was getting very frustrated because I had this totally alien background in free improvisation experimental music. After a while I just got tired of it."

1995's Ocean of Sound provided a handy escape valve from the journalistic treadmill. Sewing together Toop's multifarious musical loves, from early avant-garde electronics to Miles Davis' jazz-fusion of the 1970s, the book succeeded in defining the pulse behind the nascent ambient music of the 1990s. It was also where the impressionistic and vaguely psychotropic style that's imbued his writing since was refined. "The breakthrough for me was the idea of writing something as the thought came up," he explains. "It wasn't like a continuous narrative sequence. I'd write a short passage about something, and if an idea came up related to that, I could drop it in, like samples into a piece of music. From that point I felt absolutely liberated, it became a much looser, more poetic way of writing, more to do with making connections sideways."

Ocean of Sound plugged into a submerged world of music that was just breaching the surface of popular culture. Although bracketed with commercial electronic club music, these new ambient sounds were often resolutely experimental, both in conception and in the implementation of emerging technologies. Where avant-garde music making had previously been stunted by technological limitations, this was no longer the case. And after the cultural scorched earth of the eighties, there was a renewed interest in things contemporary. "Nobody was really interested in any kind of experimental music during the eighties," says Toop. "And suddenly there was a more open, younger, bigger audience, and there were a lot of crossovers happening between certain sorts of music that had been marginal up till then. I found that very exciting."

The opportunity to write about subjects that had long been of interest, and connect them to current cultural happenings "was a gift to me as a writer" admits Toop. Yet it was also a gift to David Toop the decommissioned musician. Because for the better part of ten years he had not actively pursued music, and since Ocean of Sound he has released seven solo albums, including Pink Noir, Screen Ceremonies and Spirit World. Performing around the world at experimental music festivals has fed back into Haunted Weather and 1999's Exotica. "There's a constant reciprocal feedback between one activity and the other," explains Toop. "In practical terms it's not always a good situation, but on the whole it is, because I kind of have two careers which are interconnected."

This hasn't always been the case though. As Toop details in Haunted Weather, for a time his attempts to take in every aural stimulus almost destroyed his desire to listen to anything. He overcame this by becoming more ruthless in his listening, and says his most recent book has reawakened a desire and excitement in him. This is evident on the pages, as Toop guides the reader through a dizzying array of ideas, drawing connections between movements separated by both geography and history. While initially it is a dense, impenetrable world, Toop’s luminescent prose makes the trip worthwhile. But he is careful to point out that he’s never wanted to evangelise to others about music. “This is what interests me and I hope it might interest other people. I try and be very clear that it's my subjective view, and I'm simply making a case for these ideas and this particular emphasis.”

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

Gavin Bertram.