Category Archives: live sound

Spheric resonances / eggflutes

Posted on November 25, 2021 by davidtoop

Last September, when social contact was still a desert landscape, Ecka Mordecai cycled to my home to present me with a gift of eggflutes. To describe them (only) as musical instruments would be to reduce them to a functionality that … Continue reading →

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emanation, as if by a charm: Ami Yamasaki

Posted on November 19, 2019 by davidtoop

Surprise is a dubious pleasure, cultivated in the search for musical forms that take the listener into realms of impossible/imaginary. Then suddenly, after decades of searching, the surprises diminish in quantity, often in quality, leaving an unavoidable sense of melancholy, … Continue reading →

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FOLD

Posted on March 24, 2018 by davidtoop

Nine people sitting on the basement floor folding paper into origami birds, four microphones hanging from the ceiling, a loudspeaker pair at each end of the room. A sound going on, unmistakeably but ambiguously emanating from this activity, suggestive of … Continue reading →

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listening is intimacy

Posted on September 20, 2017 by davidtoop

 Within listening is intimacy. The path to intimacy – with phenomena, other beings, objects, time, sensuality, the aliveness of things – lies through listening. A passing through. Seiji Morimoto, holding a rectangular metal box, slight movement, angled towards and away … Continue reading →

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raw materials

Posted on July 31, 2017 by davidtoop

The late-19th century spiritualist and campaigner Louisa Lowe was unjustly, if legally, incarcerated because her husband claimed she was mad. Giving evidence against her, the proprietor of Brislington asylum – Dr Charles Henry Fox – had this to say: “She … Continue reading →

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the sweat of toads

Posted on July 21, 2017 by davidtoop

“I was in search of something – a small detail which I remembered with special intensity as part of my vision.” George Eliot: The Lifted Veil (1859)   The man whispers in Spanish as he pisses, sniffs, sighs, washes his … Continue reading →

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many private concerts

Posted on December 8, 2015 by davidtoop

I was obsessed with the slippery, unstable nature of the categories through which we learn to divide experience: time, the materiality of objects and the imperceptible slide into intangibility, what some called spirit though I would reject the word for … Continue reading →

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a voice, uncanny instrument

Posted on November 7, 2015 by davidtoop

The Quiet Coach on a train is often a site of tension. So when three male off-shore workers, all of them drunk as wasps drowning in a whiskey vat, decided to occupy a table just by the sign that said … Continue reading →

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Skin and Bone Listening

Posted on December 15, 2014 by davidtoop

How to be, where to be, in a space, with sound, with other bodies? For me, in relation to what performance is becoming, this has been the biggest question of the past year. What does it mean to hear? What … Continue reading →

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that lead beneath brambles to the bodies and minds of others

Posted on September 7, 2014 by davidtoop

The book jacket is designed by Vanessa Bell, sister to Virginia Woolf. Her drawing for the front of the jacket is of trees and grasses, many black pen lines pulling and curling in vortical movement, little differentiation made between figure … Continue reading →

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