Toop, David

I Never Promised You A Rose Garden [DVD]

Label: Sub Rosa Country: Belgium

"A Portrait Of David Toop Through His Records Collection. In his home in the northern part of London, David Toop plays us records for several days and asks: does music have any limits? Is the collective vomiting of Amazonian shamans on a vision quest music, or not? What about the funeral dirges of the Potu people? How did New Orleans jazz-bassist John Levy's recordings radically change our perceptions? How did improvised music and electronica redefine some secular frontiers? What influence did solitary rockabilly singer Hasil Adkins have on Finnish electronic group Panasonic?

Sub Rosa presents a 90-minute film of these questions and more in a 96-minute film, directed by Guy-Marc Hinant and Dominique Lohle. However, this film is not only about music, it is about speech patterns, and the moments where speech progresses towards exhaustion, where at any moment, words are lost, the body's limits take hold, and the film is over. Toop's record collection is endless, but after a while, the man gets tired, as if envisioning himself commenting on tens of thousands of records, one by one. Could that be done? At one point, the tone switches from the desire to continue to the desire to see it all stop. A type of despondency and hidden sadness is revealed."-Sub Rosa