David Toop

A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound. In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art. Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toops essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.

¿Qué pueden tener en común el encuentro casual entre Claude Lévi-Strauss y André Breton en un barco rumbo a Martinica con una jam que se organiza espontáneamente en un club nocturno después de la hora de cierre? ¿De que manera pueden el art brut de Dubuffet, las practicas esotericas de Gurdjieff, las caligrafias de Henri Michaux, los principios taoistas del I Ching o las transcripciones en estado de trance hipnotico de Robert Desnos contribuir a una teoria de la improvisacion? Al igual que la musica de la que se ocupa, este libro no se desarrolla a traves de una unica linea argumentativa: su forma brota inesperadamente al entrelazar experiencias musicales y extramusicales que abordaron preguntas fundamentales sobre la naturaleza de la libertad y la espontaneidad humanas en ese momento critico para las artes que tuvo lugar desde el periodo de entreguerras hasta fines de la decada del sesenta.En esta primera entrega de lo que promete ser un recorrido en dos volumenes, David Toop nos ofrece un panorama que no es ni estrictamente cronologico ni exclusivamente historico de los origenes de la improvisacion. Los entrecruzamientos transnacionales, los contagios con las artes visuales, los pliegues entre bandas de musica popular como The Beatles, Cream, Pink Floyd y grupos de improvisacion libre como Group Ongaku, MEV, Nuova Consonanza o AMM, las incursiones pioneras de Art Tatum, Django Reinhardt y Lennie Tristano, la era de la indeterminacion post-cageana en la composicion o la ruptura vanguardista del free jazz son revisitados y puestos en dialogo con el objetivo de echar luz sobre una practica que pareciera tener mucho para decirnos sobre la creatividad humana.Frente al creciente avance en nuestras sociedades de las tecnicas de control, predictibilidad y management de las conductas, la musica de improvisacion subsiste como anomalia, conciencia, critica y refugio. Esta obra propone una reflexion sobre el potencial subversivo oculto en estos arriesgados ejercicios de espontaneidad colectiva, que dieron la espalda a la autoridad del compositor o del director para descender al Maelstrom de lo imprevisto.

A forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night trippers Gris-gris.Two-Headed Doctor is a forensic investigation into a single LP: Dr. John, the night trippers Gris-gris. Though released in 1968 to poor sales and a minimum of critical attention, Gris-gris has accumulated legendary status over subsequent decades for its strangeness, hybridity, and innovative production. It formed the launch pad for Dr. Johns image and lengthy career and the ghostly presence of its so-called voodoo atmosphere hovers over numerous cover versions, samples, and re-invocations. Despite the respect given to the record, its making is shrouded in mystery, misunderstandings, and false conclusions. The persona of Dr. John, loosely based on dubious literary accounts of a notorious voodooist and freed slave, a nineteenth-century New Orleans resident known as Doctor John, provided Malcolm "Mac" Rebennack with a lifelong mask through which to transform himself from session musician in order to construct a solo career. Somewhere between puzzle, experimental rhythm, blues disguised as rock, and elaborate hoax, Gris-gris was a collaborative project between Rebennack and producer/arranger Harold Battiste (at the time musical director for Sonny & Cher). A few brief sessions held at Gold Star Studios in Los Angeles brought together many of New Orleans finest musicians, including Shirley Goodman, John Boudreaux, Plas Johnson, Jessie Hill, Ernest McLean, and Tami Lynn. Along with their complex histories, the cast of characters implicated in the story includes Ornette Coleman, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Cher, Sonny Bono, Sam Cooke, Ishmael Reed, Black Herman, Prince La La, and many others. The story details in discursive style the historical context of the music, how it came together, its literary sources, production and arrangements, and the nature of the recording studio as dream state, but also examines as a disturbing undercurrent the volatile issue of race in twentieth-century music, the way in which it doomed relationships and ambitious projects, exploited great talents, and distorted the cultural landscape.

Sobre la escucha siempre ha pesado un estigma: el de ser, de entre todos nuestros sentidos, el menos fiable. Mientras que aquello que vemos y tocamos se nos revela como una realidad "objetiva", una certeza a partir de la cual establecemos nuestro lugar en el mundo, el sonido se parece mas a un fantasma; su lugar en el espacio es ambiguo y su existencia en el tiempo, transitoria. Es por ello que el sonido ha actuado desde siempre como metafora de la revelacion mistica, los deseos prohibidos, lo siniestro, lo informe, lo sobrenatural y lo desconocido.

CAJA NEGRA. 2016. Rústica. Nuevo. Nuevo. 1