We were on Dartmoor, Brent Fore Hill at Ball Gate to be exact. The date was the 29th July, 1971, though there was little evidence of summer to be heard in the howling wind. During the same year I was given access to the BBC Sound Archives. Among the treasures of that vast collection was a song from Barra by Mary Morrison, an ecstatic Gaelic clapping song whose title was printed in English – “Who Will Go Mad With Me” – an invitation to entrancement I assumed at the time, given the song’s shamanistic repetitious circularity, the singer’s breathless air of abandon and a ragged communal accompaniment of voices echoing her lead, whooping at the joy of it.
In reality it seems the madness referred to romance rather than trance, a song about boys, a tease, a release shared by women after a hard day of waulking the tweed. But an inherent sound, its uncertainties and disturbances, a more than historical remoteness for which the crude reverb added for unknown reasons at a later date seemed to locate Mary Morrison and her companions deep underground in chthonic ritual space, all of this complemented by the surface noises of its transfer onto crackling 10” vinyl, then the hiss of my cheap mono cassette machine, a layering of effects converging into a tangibility of being in a place both known and unknown as if to form a shadow or echo, which is how a recording might be described, of the pagan moor, its legendary mists and bogs, its standing stones and bleak horizons leading not to 20th century roads and seaside towns but to the edge of the world. We were walking and marking places as if building a henge without form, Marie Yates placing fragile sculptures of twigs and muslin, their life as short as the temper of the weather (http://marieyatesblog.wordpress.com/). I was marking invisible boundaries with flute sounds carried away by the wind. Field Workings, Marie called these activities, and that is how they seemed – walking and working from within the self and under the sky, deeply private even though conducted on open land and documented. From this remove an intentionality or conscious method seems apparent but at the time it was all instinct, a response to the volition of unstoppable forces. At one point I took advantage of another boundary, hanging my microphone on a wire fence, then walking away as I played sounds that were snatched from me as if by invisible hands.
Later I listened to the recording and felt a shift away from the centrality of myself as singular humanity, beginning to hear sound as an ear, like a shell – the wind’s course over rough land and stone walls, the rattling fence, the bleating of the sheep, all opening up and gathering together the sounds passing through, brushed away, dying away with my slivers of breath only a part of this flow of forces. Other examples of Mary Morrison’s remarkable singing have been given an afterlife, notably a recording by Alan Lomax of her interpretation of canntairreachd, the mouth music used in the oral teaching of Pibroch, an astonishing virtuosity of voice and line, again relocated to an echo chamber as if the hard notes of some unknown archaic instrument were rising up from the burial chamber at Ball Gate on Brent Fore Hill, then falling, as Adorno wrote, stars down to earth.
Who will go Mad with Me (a question of post-alchemical objects), (2013)
David Toop: string/winds/analogue and digital electronics/objects
Ricocheting as a 1960s teenager between blues guitarist, art school dropout, Super 8 film loops and psychedelic light shows, David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This practice encompasses improvised music performance (using hybrid assemblages of electric guitars, aerophones, bone conduction, lo-fi archival recordings, paper, sound masking, water, autonomous and vibrant objects), writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera (Star-shaped Biscuit, performed in 2012). It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016, a Guardian music book of the year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible (2019).
Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards (his guitar can be heard sampled on “Water” by The Roots), he has released fifteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2020) on Lawrence English’s ROOM40 label. His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual - released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016) - were called by The Wire a “tsunami of weirdness” while Entities Inertias Faint Beings was described in Pitchfork as “an album about using sound to find one’s own bearings . . . again and again, understated wisps of melody, harmony, and rhythm surface briefly and disappear just as quickly, sending out ripples that supercharge every corner of this lovely, engrossing album.”
In the early 1970s he performed with sound poet Bob Cobbing, butoh dancer Mitsutaka Ishii and drummer Paul Burwell, along with key figures in improvisation, including Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Georgie Born, Hugh Davies, John Stevens, Lol Coxhill, Frank Perry and John Zorn. In recent years he has returned to collaborative performance, working with many artists and musicians including Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Max Eastley, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Thurston Moore, Jennifer Allum, Miya Masaoka, Extended Organ (with Paul McCarthy and Tom Recchion), Ryuichi Sakamoto and a revived Alterations, the iconoclastic improvising quartet with Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack and Terry Day first formed in 1977. He has also made many collaborative records, including Buried Dreams and Doll Creature with Max Eastley, Breath Taking with Akio Suzuki, Skin Tones with Ken Ikeda, Garden of Shadows and Light with Ryuichi Sakamoto and co-productions (with Steve Beresford) for Frank Chickens, the 49 Americans and Ivor Cutler.
Major sound art exhibitions he has curated include Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London (2000) and Playing John Cage at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol (2005-6). In 2008, a DVD of the Belgian film – I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Portrait of David Toop Through His Records Collection – was released by Sub Rosa, and in 2017 his autobiography – Flutter Echo: Living Within Sound – was published by Du Books in Japan. His most recent records are Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs (Audika, 2017), Suttle Sculpture (Paul Burwell and David Toop live, 1977, Sub Rosa, 2018), John Cage: Electronic Music for Piano with Tania Chen, Thurston Moore and Jon Leidecker (Omnivore, 2018), Apparition Paintings (ROOM40, 2020), Field Recordings and Fox Spirits (ROOM40, 2020), Until the Night Melts Away (with Sharon Gal and John Butcher, Shrike, 2021) and Garden of Shadows and Light (with Ryuichi Sakamoto, 33-33, 2021).
He is Professor Emeritus at London College of Communication.
We were on Dartmoor, Brent Fore Hill at Ball Gate to be exact. The date was the 29th July, 1971, though there was little evidence of summer to be heard in the howling wind. During the same year I was given access to the BBC Sound Archives. Among the treasures of that vast collection was a song from Barra by Mary Morrison, an ecstatic Gaelic clapping song whose title was printed in English – “Who Will Go Mad With Me” – an invitation to entrancement I assumed at the time, given the song’s shamanistic repetitious circularity, the singer’s breathless air of abandon and a ragged communal accompaniment of voices echoing her lead, whooping at the joy of it.
davidtoop 
Would love to be there tonight to experience this collaboration…any plans to bring it all to London? There are many wonderful examples of Mary Morrison’s singing on the Alan Lomax website:
http://research.culturalequity.org/rc-b2/get-audio-ix.do?ix=recording&id=2579&idType=performerId&sortBy=abc