Toop, David

Sound Body

Label: Samadhi Sound Country: UK

"David Toop's Sound Body hums and glows with life, five gorgeous morphing electronic tracks that continue Samadhi Sound's exploration of quiet, minimal, melodic music worlds created by the likes of Harold Budd, Akira Rabelais, Fennesz, Derek Bailey, David Sylvian and others. These remarkable soundscapes have only become possible in the twenty-first century, when improvisation, digital composing and mixing, and traditional music forms from around the globe all mutate and fuse in ways that surprise and delight.

"Originally I wanted to make a record that was almost silent," says composer, improviser and journalist Toop. "This came about because I had been listening to rooms and other spaces or environments in which dramatic and dynamic sounds were absent, and so became more and more sensitive to very subtle sound pressures, shifts of atmosphere, sounds of the self, faint external sounds, structural movement, our dog's breathing, and so on. But because I was recording instrumentalists and then reshaping these recordings in the computer, the 'space' I was hearing was compromised continually by the editing process, so each piece grew in response to this, and then grew in response to the response. I kept stripping back as I added, trying to keep the character of each individual player, trying to build a 'virtual' ensemble, trying to stay close to my original intention of a 'silent' record, trying to make pieces in which intensity counterbalanced a certain stasis, in which sound pressures behave as a kind of quiet noise."

Toop studied fine art and graphic design at Hornsey College of Art and Watford College of Art and Design in the late 1960s, then in 1971-2 took part in the first improvisation workshops led by jazz drummer John Stevens. Having played improvised music since the beginning of the 1970s, he has also recorded shamanistic ceremonies in Amazonas, appeared on Top Of The Pops with the Flying Lizards, worked with musicians including Brian Eno, John Zorn, Prince Far I, Jon Hassell, Derek Bailey, Talvin Singh, Evan Parker, Scanner, Ivor Cutler, Akio Suzuki and Jin Hi Kim, and collaborated with artists such as theatre director/actor Steven Berkoff, Japanese Butoh dancer Mitsutaka Ishii, sound poet Bob Cobbing, visual artist John Latham, and novelist Jeff Noon. In 1998 he composed the soundtrack for Acqua Matrix, the outdoor spectacular that closed every night of Lisbon Expo '98. His first album, New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments, was released on Brian Eno's Obscure label in 1975; since 1995 he has released seven solo albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Pink Noir, and Black Chamber. He has also written four groundbreaking books on music, currently translated into seven languages including Ocean of Sound, Exotica and Haunted Weather."-Samadhi Sound