“Music is a memory machine,” David Toop wrote in The Quietus in May. The British composer, improviser, author, and scholar was talking about the COVID-19-related deaths of fellow experimental-music elders, but that declaration has the ring of a time-honored maxim, and it’s about as close as one could come to summarizing a 50-year career that ranges from the esoteric pages of The Wire to a pioneering book on rap, from Brian Eno’s Obscure Records to Top of the Pops.
The line echoes Roger Ebert’s famous aphorism about movies and empathy, and it shows why Toop is as distinguished in his recondite sphere as Ebert was in his popular one: They both believe their chosen art form has a specific, morally weighted, urgently human function. A veteran global field recorder, Toop is as much a conservationist as an ethnomusicologist, and the thousands of baroque intellectual inquiries he has raised might be said to rest on one burningly clear, almost instinctive question: How much of this world can be perceived and saved?
Apparition Paintings, a new album that’s great both for newcomers to Toop and to sound collage in general, is more than just canning audio preserves for the long winter. For that, turn to Field Recording and Fox Spirits, also new, from the same label. The illustrated book features dozens of pages of dizzying Toop talk with Room40 label head Lawrence English; an accompanying CD amounts to a sonic biography comprising unvarnished recordings (a Beijing street in 2005, a certain wasp in 1971), improvisations on the kinds of sculptural instruments people are always inviting Toop to play, and other raw materials that form his compositions. There are also conversations with subjects as diverse as Ornette Coleman and Toop’s grandfather, who said, as the cassette tape rolled in 1979, “My memory is not what it used to be, David,” succinctly stating the impetus behind Toop’s prodigious recording life.
If the phrase “sound collage” makes you despair of listening to someone untangling a mess of wire hangers while a kettle whistles in the next room, that’s fair. There is a lot of sound collage like that, which counts on the listener’s imaginative labor, the idea of boredom as a kind of medal, or the fear of not getting something other people claim to get. But while layer upon layer of arcane knowledge encrusts these songs—“‘Apparition painting’ is the term used to describe a certain type of ancient Chinese painting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,” a typical Toop sentence might begin—the album is strangely accessible and well rounded, full of rich, tactile environments that evoke vivid spaces and nothing unfinished or haphazard.