Sinister Resonoance: David Toop

David Toop. Musician and teorist: I was thinking about the nature of listening, and the nature of sound, and the particular qualities of sound. And it seems to me that sound is almost like a ghost.
Sound is transient, very difficult to locate. So in that way we eavesdrop on sounds that often we don’t know where they come from, so that is a particularly mysterious quality to sound, and I was thinking about that in contrast with the foundation of our perception. When I say “our” I mean a kind of generalized culture of this moment and it seems to me that that is very much based in touch and seeing, you know, the tactile nature of the object and the visible truth of the object, and that’s how we evaluate the world. And sound of course is quite different. By comparison sound is unreliable, it’s never fixed so… I think this is a very interesting thing, modernity, I think; the beginnings of modernity in literature. So you read for example James Joyce, or experimental writers of the period… Virginia Woolf, or Kafka, or Faulkner in America… much of their work is about a kind of intensive creation, it’s about intensity, often shifting perception. T.S. Elliot and all of these writers, Kafka, they all wrote about listening in the same way that painters were shifting ideas of visual reality, writers were moving away from this focus on seeing.

I got interested in the idea of silent media, the way you can perceive listening through a medium that is ostensibly silent, so I started to look back and I had this revelation on coming across a mid-seventeenth century painting by a Dutch genre painting, Nicholas Maes. He painted a series of pictures; they really struck me because they showed a person mostly in the center of the painting who was listening. You knew that she was listening because she had her fingers to her lips and she was indicating something in the other part of the painting that was a sound. It addressed the perceiver of the painting very directly and said to the perceiver of the painting, “Listen with me”.

It occurred to me… as we know, audio recording was an invention of the late 19th century and the effects –as we know- have been dramatic in changing our perception of the world, in changing ideas about listening. If sound was a ghost before then, then it becomes a different kind of ghost after the invention of sound recording, audio recording. But it occurred to me that all of these silent media that in some way represented sounding and making a sound, or the act of listening, were recording devices. They acted in similar ways to the invention of wire recording, or cylinder recording, or magnetic tape recording, or digital recording, or whatever: they captured incidence of sound. I mean, this is not a new idea because it’s something exploding after musicology for example. So we have to look at these silent media to give us this lost dimension if you like of human culture. But it seems to me that painting for example is a really interesting indicator of the auditory life that existed prior to the invention of recording media. There have been studies on this but they tend to focus on music, on musical instruments, music is very commonly represented in painting, but of course you find all kinds of life, we don’t have to wait for the Italian futurists to show us representations of the sound of life.

Dutch genre painting, which I concentrated on in (… 6:45) residence, the Dutch painters showed many kinds of silence, for example. So you begin to get a really vivid sense of the auditory life of that location in that period. It’s like a very beautiful recording, but it’s just that we can’t play it back except through imaginative means.

Well, look at Picasso. Picasso is so interesting, because he had a reputation of not being interested in music. From what I’ve read, he was interested in some Catalan folk music; so sometimes he painted this clarinet. Again, and again, and again, and again you find the representation of musical instruments in his works, in paint and sculpture… I began to wonder why these musical instruments… which are common in Cubism but with Picasso it was something very striking because it persisted throughout his painting and it occurred to me that the guitar is a fantastic device for expressing emotion of space and time because like many instruments the guitar is a chamber, it’s like a hidden chamber of air, it has an opening, and the sound flows out of the opening. It has a strong graphic sense.

Well, you say it’s not real but I think it is real because we perceive it, but it’s simply a different kind of real. And to me it’s movement towards embodied sound. It’s more to do with the objectification of sound. I suppose this comes back to a very early influence on me, which was a British artist, John Latham. I met John Latham when I was maybe 21 years old. I had encountered his work in the 1960’s. He was involved with the Destruction and Arts symposium. It was very interesting for me to look at the museum had some material on the destruction and arts symposium because some Spanish artists Juan Hidalgo for example was involved in the Destruction and Arts symposium in London in the 1960’s. But I found this very interesting, the role of destruction in arts. I saw John Latham give a performance in maybe 1968 where he was cutting up a box with a big electric sword, and the electric sword was amplified with a contact microphone so it was like this incredible noise music. I’d seen some of his work in the Tate in London, the work he was doing with books, assemblage, burned and semi-destroyed books… and then I met him. He and his wife at the time had started a good artist placement group which was exploring the different ways in which artists could engage with the institutions of society as free agents. I mean now it’s a very common idea but then it was a very new idea. How could artists work in industry for example, or museums, or political decision making… and so on. At that time John Latham already had this theory about event structure, structure of events, and he felt our focus on the object meant that we had a language always split, that we could talk on the one hand about things, objects, the real, and then there were all these other areas which were intangible, that were very hard to fit into this framework of the real, the embodied. It becomes very difficult to talk about sound, for example, within that context. And I don’t know why but there was something about this idea that really appealed to me, perhaps because I was a musician. I was attempting to write about sound even then; I had attempted to write about music when I was a teenager and I found it extremely difficult, so this problem of language as a way of articulating the experience or theory, became explained I supposed by his theory that we have a language that is much better at describing objects than it is at describing intangibles. I suppose ever since that has been my orientation.