Haunted weather: Music, silence and memory
by Ian Simmons
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David Toop has been a favourite music writer of mine since the brief appearance in the early 1980s of the proto-Wire magazine Collusions, which he co-edited. His books and their accompanying CDs are always immensely satisfying and combine a deep knowledge of a huge range of musics with an expert practitioner's understanding and the ability to write beautifully. Haunted Weather is his most ambitious book yet; previous books have concentrated on particular genres of music (rap, ambient and exotica), but this one is more about the nature of music and its borders, where it seeps off into silence and soundscape and also how music interacts with memory. In doing so he ventures into territory that few others have broached, such as the difference between silence and quiet, and how these affect our perceptions, noting that both are different from a total lack of sound, as experienced in an anechoic chamber. Toop's exploration of an anechoic chamber is one of the more fascinating moments here, as, for once, he is someone equipped with the skills to truly understand and evoke what is happening. He is also very good on memory, able to appreciate the sonic landscape that surrounds us and how it has changed through time. In doing this he takes us back and revisits lost soundworlds, such as the extraordinary, and very noisy communication by tug whistle on the Hudson River. Such experiences are totally lost to us now and were unrecorded at the time, making me appreciate the work of soundscape artists all the more, it also brings up the prospect of sonic archaeology, scouring old TV programmes for lost background noise. To explore this area of sound, Toop introduces the concept of "soundmarks" - literally aural landmarks, an interesting and useful addition to the descriptive language of sound. The book is restless and mercurial, ferreting here and there for new, oblique input, from Chris Watson on recording nature to Derek Bailey on the nature of playing. This makes it extraordinarily hard to categorise or sum up, but amazingly it all holds together and makes a compelling portrait of the sonic fringes that none the less has something important to say about all music and how we listen.
The accompanying CD is similarly excellent. Toop is an immensely skilled compiler and has an eye for the surprising and outstanding track, but, given the nature of the book, it is inevitably less successful at reflecting its contents than, say, the Ocean of Sound discs were. There, there could be a pretty much one-to-one correspondence between the themes in the book and the tracks to illustrate them. Here, though, an immense amount of the material is not really CD-friendly, so cannot be represented. None the less, the compilation is marvellous containing a Janet Cardiff soundwalk, sferics from Alvin Lucier and Chris Watson's extraordinary and riveting recording of a glacier moving as well as a myriad of other well chosen pieces from the likes of Christian Marclay, Pan Sonic, Autechre and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. Stimulating and enlightening, this is mind-stirring stuff – both the book and the CD are superb fillips for the tedium-numbed brain, they truly open up a whole array of new thought and possibility. Not to be missed
