‘Ocean of Sound’ by David Toop was first published over a decade ago but still reads as a highly contemporary if occasionally confusing account of experimental music in the 21st century.
Toop, born in 1949, is described as a musician, author and music curator. He’s a regular contributor to The Wire magazine and has released half a dozen solo albums of instrumental electronica. On top of this, he’s also been involved in numerous collaborations with artists like Eno. Prince Far I, John Zorn, Derek Bailey and (rather less fashionably) The Flying Lizards.
The book is subtitled ‘Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds’ and its stated aim is “to explore is the path by which sound (and music in particular) has come to express [an] alternately disorientating and inspiring openness through which all that is solid melts into aether”.
Clear? I didn’t think so!
As you might appreciate from this description,Toop is not predisposed to simplification and goes out of his way to avoid making crass generalisations about music trends. He argues convincingly that “no genre category amounts to much more than media shorthand or a marketing ploy“. As an alternative, he attempts to describe sound in terms of a the Cagean notion of an “imaginary landscape”.
Toop snubs commercially orientated releases in favour of “music without narrative; music as function; music as a technical process”.
Describing the floating, physical sensations this form of music offers the listener is a very tall order. Toop relies heavily on metaphorical language and anecdotal evidence culled from interviews and subjective observations. The fact that much of the music he discusses is characterised by a drifting randomness rather than being static makes watery similes particularly useful. It allows him to speak of listeners being immersed in waves of sonic experience, swimming in an ocean of sound.
Inevitably, a lot of his writing is pretentious and head-scratchingly obtuse. Often it reads like a series of inconclusive diary entries or notes on dreams – frequently I noted in the margin “….and the point is…? His travelogue account of a trip up the Orinoco is particularly infuriating.
But within the dense text are numerous insightful observations about music which now largely exists without the ‘hard copy’ of cassette, vinyl or CD. He notes for example how “technology can reduce live performance to an anachronism” and how “gradually, the DJ becomes the artist. Gradually the song, the composition, was decomposed“.
Music is still everywhere and nowhere, sound-tracking our daily lives. The shadow of Brian Eno looms large over much of what Toop has to say about the effect this has on the psyche.
Listening is often not, for instance, an active process since we so frequently take the sounds that submerge us for granted. We absorb this sponge-like, almost imperceptibly.
Eno, as ‘inventor’ of ambient sound, understood the phenomenon of music that is “as ignorable as it is interesting”.
Toop comments that “I always felt that music took off where words stopped”. I think he’s right that imagination has a much freer rein when not dictated by the traditional narrative of songs. Ambient music, noise or drone take the urgency out of the equation allowing you to choose whether to experience the music in a passive or engaged manner.
Paradoxically, for a book dealing primarily with experimental sounds Toop is particularly sharp at contextualising more commercial artists. I like, for instance, the sarcastic way he observes the “conspicuous dexterity” of Rick Wakeman and his summary of the Eno produced U2 albums is spot on: “Achtung Baby and Zooraopa deconstruct, somewhat self consciously, into lurid, lo-fi grab images of urban dissonance and media overload”.
Insights like this far outnumber the tendency towards self-indulgence. Ocean of Sound is not by any stretch of the imagination an easy read but David Toop makes an admirable job of trying to identify the intangible and elusive means by which abstract music touches us emotionally and physically.
