Ocean of Sound

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Engaging reading - Rated
I picked this book up for 50p at a market and had I not I would really be missing out! I came home with it and my house mate said 'when are you ever going to read that?' so that night I started it to prove a point.

It's very difficult to put down, it's not pretentious or smug and is fluid and captivating reading. I found everything Troop mentioned interested and even researched further into some of the subjects touched upon.

This book is for somebody who likes music and art and the evolution of these subjects. I wouldn't recommend it to a music hater, but also you only need a keen interest in music for this book to really appeal.

The disintegration of music - Rated
It seems as if every book title has to have a subtitle these days and Ocean of Sound is no exception: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds provides a useful clue to Toop's wide-ranging interests. The book discusses ambient music in passing, touching on Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, The Orb, Mixmaster Morris, Jon Hassell, Harold Budd, Scanner, Paul Schütze, Pauline Oliveros, Thomas Köner and others. It also explores more wide-ranging musical points of reference, such as John Cage, Claude Debussy, Luigi Russolo, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Derek Bailey, R. Murray Schafer and John Oswald.

But it's also about virtual reality, shamanism, semi-mythical invented instruments, science fiction, post-modernism, environmental sound, the digital revolution, and more. One moment Toop will recount a dream, the next he'll be discussing post-modern philosophy, and then it's on to an autobiographical episode or an interview with a musician. Trivia, theory, anecdote: it's all here.

Ocean of Sound is a survey of the disintegration of all music and sound in the twentieth century, taking Debussy's encounters with gamelan music as a possible point of departure. For Toop, it has become increasingly difficult to tell music apart from background noise, and increasingly unnecessary to differentiate. Music has lost the plot: narrative and structure have been replaced by decentring and formlessness. Space has become more important to music than time.

I'll admit to having in the past found Toop's writing opaque: shoe-horned into a record review or magazine interview, speculation of the sort that fills Ocean of Sound often seems irrelevant. Here, however, everything coalesces, everything makes sense.

It's easily one of the best music books I've read in years, articulate and enlightening. This is true however much I disagree with Toop's generally positive attitude towards the musical trends he surveys.

At one point he writes: "Blankness - at best a stillness which suggests, rightly or wrongly, political passivity; at worst, a numbness which confirms it - may be one aspect of losing the anchor, circling around an empty centre or whatever the condition is. But openness, another symptom of the condition, may be more significant." I find his willingness to promote post-modern escapism and ignore the "political passivity" which these musical trends breed to be a little disagreeable, but it's a mark of Toop's ability to deal with such substantial issues that his ideas are so provocative. Recommended.

Awesomely incisive, if anything overloaded with information - Rated
You have to hand it to David Toop; in the 280 pages which form the main body of this book's text, he has focused on a growing shift in Western music that you would have thought impossible to grasp, and has explored it so exhaustively that he comes perilously close to demistifying the great musical works it examines. To describe it as succinctly as possible, Toop's subject is the oriental influence, miasmic and fluidly immersive, on Western music, the formative moment being Debussy's first encounter with Javanese music at the Paris Exposition of 1889.

In the information age so vividly documented/ prophecized by Marshall McLuhan in 1964's 'Understanding Media', humankind has jacked into an electronically generated hub of information and sensation, uniting us in sensory response but dividing us from ourselves. The effect is both alien and ancestral, and the fragmented, glitchy electronic post-rock, meditative 'New Age' soundscapes and hyperkinetic, stuttering, info-freako hip hop headrush staples of modern pop all serve to confirm this.

Of course, like all massive commercial presences in the popular music sphere there is a lesser known, artistically more 'respectable' precedent, and early avant-garde pioneers the rank of Stockhausen, La Monte Young and Pauline Oliveros are given their due alongside latterday giants such as Phillip Glass and the omnipresent Brian Eno. Japanese gagaku, Balinese gamelan, the Indian raga and even environmental acoustics (the sea, birdsong, "the sound of fleas jumping off my small female cat onto the polished wood floor") are also woven into this heady mix to convincingly anchor the development of modern music in the rhythms of the body, the electric pulsing of the nervous system, the hiss and clamour of the city and the natural processes of our ever evolving Earth.

Toop deliberately writes in a stream of consciousness style which is sometimes laid on a little too thick. The rolling procession of images, sounds and sensations invokes a kind of symptomatic synaesthesia which is sometimes brandished self consciously, like Aphex Twin's controllable dreams and allusions to schizophrenia. But don't worry that 'Ocean of Sound' may read like a narcissistic self-love letter from a cosmic bore, Toop is sober, erudite and very much grounded in the realities of this world.

He casts doubt on the claims to shamanism made by modern rave gurus and tedious, New Age milksops. Shamans, historically, sought the secrets of the universe by journeying to its dark heart, not escape from our untidy existence via blissful and ultimately mindless retreat: "If ambient means only white-light bliss, then the musicians are mere functionaries, slaves to cool the brows of overheated urban-info warriors". Above all, what Toop honours is integrity and vision, the hallmarks of those who abandon trend and the pursuit of glory for something more elusive, risking obscurity and obsolesence for something permanent and nourishing. And 'Ocean of Sound' has a permanence all of its own.