David Toop has long been one of my favorite music writers. His new book is called Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory. It’s about various modes of contemporary experimental music, including free improvisation, environmental (ambient) music, music produced entirely on computers, music produced by chance procedures or by generative algorithms, music that is so minimal, and at such low volume, that it is barely distinguishable from silence, and so on. It’s also about the psychoacoustics and affectivity of playing music and of listening to it, the blurriness of the distinction between music and other types of sound, the way we relate to sonic environments, the effects of digital technology on the musical experience, listening as an experience of space, the way sound evokes memory, and so on. Toop’s approach is not systematic or theoretical, but associative and evocative: he slips and slides from topic to topic, from musical piece to musical piece, from interview to anecdote to description to open questioning. He rarely states specific theses, but continually provides suggestive formulations, food for thought. I love his writing for the rich, emotionally charged detail with which he describes musical compositions, most of which I am unlikely ever to actually hear. (Though Toop has compiled a CD to go along with the book). Haunted Weather is a book as beautiful, and almost as impalpable, as the music it evokes: its prose flows along lightly, and its ideas haunt the reader, without ever congealing into statements you can actually pin down.
Haunted Weather
David Toop has long been one of my favorite music writers. His new book is called Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory. It’s about various modes of contemporary experimental music, including free improvisation, environmental (ambient) music, music produced entirely on computers, music produced by chance procedures or by generative algorithms, music that is so minimal, and at such low volume, that it is barely distinguishable from silence, and so on. It’s also about the psychoacoustics and affectivity of playing music and of listening to it, the blurriness of the distinction between music and other types of sound, the way we relate to sonic environments, the effects of digital technology on the musical experience, listening as an experience of space, the way sound evokes memory, and so on. Toop’s approach is not systematic or theoretical, but associative and evocative: he slips and slides from topic to topic, from musical piece to musical piece, from interview to anecdote to description to open questioning. He rarely states specific theses, but continually provides suggestive formulations, food for thought. I love his writing for the rich, emotionally charged detail with which he describes musical compositions, most of which I am unlikely ever to actually hear. (Though Toop has compiled a CD to go along with the book). Haunted Weather is a book as beautiful, and almost as impalpable, as the music it evokes: its prose flows along lightly, and its ideas haunt the reader, without ever congealing into statements you can actually pin down.