|
David Toop & Max Eastley at ICC
All titles composed by Max Eastley
and David Toop - 2003
Recorded and mixed by David Toop @the bathosphere
Max Eastley: mechanical and whirling instruments, sculptures, bowed
Arc, percussives, abrasives, Purple Ray Vitalator, insectoids, weather,
computer.
David Toop: computer, guitars, flutes, tubes, organic matter, book
pages, dog whistles, percussives.
No living creatures or actual landscapes were used, harmed or destroyed
during the making of this recording
|
MAX EASTLEY / DAVID TOOP
doll creature
(Bleep 25)
Doll Creatureis the third album release in thirty years by sound
sculptor/musician Max Eastley and composer, author and sound curator
David Toop. Their first record together, New and Rediscovered Musical
Instruments, was released in 1975 on Brian Eno’s Obscure label;
their second, Buried Dreams, released in 1994 on Beyond, was voted
third placed album of the year, behind Portishead and Massive Attack
in the 1994 Wire critics’ poll, and described in Melody Maker
as ‘The scariest ambient record ever. An album beyond your
disturbed imagination.’
Doll Creature is a further exploration of the mysterious zones in
which Eastley’s mechanical sound sculptures, instruments with
a life of their own, are transformed within the computer by David
Toop’s additions and manipulations. The spatial dimension
has changed again from the first two albums, being even more a marker
of the differences between human and machine actions, computer space
and physical space. The cover image shows a little doll who lost
his way, then found himself in a halfway state between doll and
child, wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape. His body
is bulky enough but those arms and arms need more than one dinner.
His outlook is positive. At least he has the boots for the job.
Minoru Hatanaka, curator at Tokyo’s ICC, has written these
notes about Eastley and Toop: ‘By creating maps of sound as
performance in Toop's terms, they are trying to create a mysterious
imaginative landscape through sound, a narrative that takes form
within our emotions through the unvisualizable phenomenon of sound.
When the delicate micromotions woven out of the highly minimal movements
of Eastley's whirling sound machine evoke further images and beckon
us into that narrative we are likely to find animistic emotions
awakened somewhere inside our memory.’
More information about the artists can be found at: www.davidtoop.com
www.maxeastley.com
See Doll Creature t-shirt at www.moretvicar.com/shop/30/31/index/shtm/
| tracks |
realaudio |
| |
32kb |
| 1.
mouthful of silence |
|
| 2.
eyelash turned inwards |
|
| 3. bandaged moments |
|
| 4. cardiomancy |
|
| 5. nights, demixed, circles |
| 6. flooded garden |
| 7. three sand voices |
|
| 8. moth cinema |
|
| 9. metamorphoses
of tabanus bovinis |
| 10. green silence |
|
| 11. dust of points |
|
| 12. graphite in prussic |
|
| 13. inscription on skin |
|
| 14. iris, swimmer, dreamless |
|
| 15. vital flow meters |
|
| total time
: 57:34 |
|
 |
| |
DOLL CREATURE
Doll Creature drags his feet through salt marsh and leaf fall, skrikkk
. . . skriikh, calligraphic tracks unfolding in his wake, blown
into broken lines by harsh winds from the north. Seasons tick, sun
falling like a slow fire bomb, moon rising as a ghost. In the reflection
of a glass eye, landscapes roll out their scrolls of secret text.
The scratching stops, suspended in a frozen moment. He puzzles over
the marks before him, signs made from moss, rock and steam, then
hobbles on. This gloomy space is flooded. His ears are soaked in
submarine calls, the amphibious dwellers of two worlds. Boots thresh
through floating roots. Nothing is alive yet the air crackles with
life.
A suggestive darkness of great spaces and dead lamps gathers in
stealth. Hunting light, leopard moths and owl moths envelop his
head, wing beats pressurising his personal air space, tipping him
off balance. He purses bee sting lips, blows gently, issuing high
frequency whistles. Moths disperse, dust floating in formless clouds.
In sunlit hours, yellow billed jacamars intercept butterflies in
their slow flapping dance, the vivid wings hanging in bright rags
from beaks too small to finish an entire meal in one sitting. Doll
Creature stares, fascinated, asks himself a question. Is he a she?
Now torrid summer, she churns through swamp mud suction, swatting
dizzy circle trails of micro nits. Entities stir in every hidden
place, their choking breath rolling around the edges of her chaotic
tumbling progress. Stillness falls, chopped and punched by the coarse
drum talk of barking toads, bwuark . . . bwuaark . . . bwuark. Swollen
like puffer fish, gross as cannon balls, they drop into thick muck
and close the shutters.
Dry follows, fetid liquidity soaking into the granular flats, where
heat vacuums every drop of moisture from her throat. As if the gods
were turning the pages of parched old books, cracking snaps the
sky. Oppressed by a fear of being shrivelled in this desiccated
loneliness, she croaks out her word: Mummaa, Mummaa. Sand voices
whisper in reply, yet the whisperers have no discernable form.
Doll Creature emerges onto flat rock, overlooking the ocean. Out
at sea she hears aether music, flutes of the never-living, the dreamless
swimmers. Rising up from the deeps, their emphysema gasps merge
with grindings and drones of unknown provenance, echoing among mountain
valleys far down in the sightless abyss where sharks lie in sleep.
Machines were dumped overboard, a historical event, long forgotten.
Rocks tumble, disturbed by her sliding gait. She kicks at stones,
scraping at the green silence. Thunder echoes and decays in the
granite chambers below. Scattered, shattered, Doll Creature strokes
brush lines in fine dust, kssst . . . kssst; hears music in the
sliding of a coral snake. Her hands and arms are open, inviting
the world. She lies face down in low water, deliberately inviting
the attentions of electric eels.
A flash, in the peripheral distance, illusion perhaps but a glimpse
of naked women, carrying firewood and babies, quickly dipping out
of sight into tree shade. Dressed in bandage wrapping and the ragged
leavings of synthetic flesh, Doll Creature holds still, the little
beggar caught in her guilt. Her eyes cast from side to side. All
around her, epiphytes, rhizomatous creepers and aquatic hyacinths
thrive, as if solid roots have lost their purpose. Waxy perfumes
colour the heavy air.
Now there is no sex, no gender, only a join at the crotch. War stripped
life bare. Homer’s vultures circle high above. Experiments
with natural electricity resolve nothing. Doll Creature moves forward
again, pushing through skin cutter winds that carry unspoken memories,
suicide thoughts, fragmented souls. Tundra, taiga, wetlands, lowlands,
glacier, thief. Robbed of thought, Doll Creature sinks into the
glamour of the snow. After three months, the white softness washes
itself into clean nothingness. Crepitatious joints iced in stasis,
Doll Creature is the new monument, silhouetted against a graphite
sky.
David Toop
David Toop
http://www.davidtoop.com
Born near London in 1949, David Toop is a musician, writer and sound
curator. He has published three books, currently translated into
six languages: Rap Attack (now in its third edition), Ocean of Sound,
and Exotica (selected as a winner of the 21st annual American Books
Awards for 2000). His first album, New and Rediscovered Musical
Instruments, was released on Brian Eno's Obscure label in 1975;
since 1995 he has released six solo albums - Screen Ceremonies,
Pink Noir, Spirit World, Museum of Fruit, Hot Pants Idol and 37th
Floor At Sunset: Music For Mondophrenetic - and curated five acclaimed
CD compilations for Virgin Records - Ocean of Sound, Crooning On
Venus, Sugar & Poison, Booming On Pluto and Guitars On Mars.
In 1998 he composed the soundtrack for Acqua Matrix, the outdoor
spectacular that closed every night of Lisbon Expo '98 from May
until September. He has recorded shamanistic ceremonies in Amazonas,
appeared on Top Of The Pops with the Flying Lizards, worked with
musicians including Brian Eno, John Zorn, Prince Far I, Jon Hassell,
Derek Bailey, Talvin Singh, Evan Parker, Max Eastley, Scanner, Ivor
Cutler, Haruomi Hosono, Akio Suzuki, Jin Hi Kim and Bill Laswell,
and collaborated with artists from many other disciplines, including
theatre director/actor Steven Berkoff, Japanese Butoh dancer Mitsutaka
Ishii, sound poet Bob Cobbing visual artist John Latham, filmmaker
Jae-eun Choi and author Jeff Noon.
As a critic and columnist he has written for many publications,
including The Wire, The Face, The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian,
Arena, Vogue, Spin, GQ, Bookforum, Urb, Black Book, The New York
Times and The Village Voice. He has curated Sonic Boom, the UK's
largest ever exhibition of sound art, displayed at the Hayward Gallery,
London, from April to June, 2000. In 2001-02 he was sound curator
for Radical Fashion, an exhibition of work by designers including
Issey Miyake, Junya Watanabe, Martin Margiela and Hussein Chalayan,
held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2001-2002 and featuring
music by Björk, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Akira Rabelais, Paul Schütze
and others.
Other recent projects include the composition of a soundtrack for
Mondophrenetic, a CD-ROM installation created in Belgium and exhibited
in Brussels and Santiago, and 'Needle In the Groove', a collaborative
album with novelist Jeff Noon, released on Scanner's Sulphur label
in May 2000. In January 2000 he exhibited the sound installation
'Dreaming of Inscription On Skin' with Max Eastley at ICC in Tokyo;
in April 2001 he created sound collages for the Hayward Gallery's
Brassai exhibition; in June 2002 his Ocean Volumes installation
was exhibited in the WAV festival in Bruges, Belgium; in 2001/2002
he curated a double CD of English experimental music for the Leonardo
Music Journal issue, Not Necessarily English Music, published by
MIT. Siren Space, his composition for tug boats, electronics, text
and the solo saxophone of Lol Coxhill, was performed on the River
Thames as the climax of the Thames Festival in 2002.
Currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sound Department of
the London Institute, he has recently completed a new book - Haunted
Weather: Resonant Spaces, Silence and Memory - published by Serpent's
Tail in April, 2004.
Haunted Weather
http://www.serpentstail.com/books/?_p=BOK1852428120
To check his more ancient books :
Ocean Of Sound
http://www.serpentstail.com/books/?_P=BOK1852427434
Exotica
http://www.serpentstail.com/books/?_P=BOK1852425954
Rap Attack 3
http://www.serpentstail.com/books/?_P=BOK1852426276 |
|
 |
David Toop
|
|
 |
Max Eastley
|
|
|
how to order
