David Toop (born 5th May 1949, Enfield, London, England) 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 six acclaimed CD compilations for Virgin Records - Ocean of Sound, Crooning On Venus, Sugar & Poison, Booming On Pluto, Isolationism 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, 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.
[Text from Last-FM]

David Toop - A Cartographic Anomaly from Hot Pants Idol album

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Robert Wyatt sings John Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs for voice and piano. The piano stay closed and is used as a percussion instrument.

The song was commissioned by singer Janet Fairbank, who later became known for pioneering contemporary music. Cage chose to set a passage from page 556 of Finnegans Wake, a book he bought soon after its publication in 1939. The composition is based, according to Cage himself, on the impressions received from the passage. The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs marks the start of Cage’s interest in Joyce and is the first piece among many in which he uses the writer’s work.

The vocal line only uses three pitches, while the piano remains closed and the pianist produces sounds by hitting the lid or other parts of the instrument in a variety of ways (with his fingers, with his knuckles, etc.) Almost immediately after its composition the song became one of Cage’s most frequently performed works, and was several times performed by the celebrated duo of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio. Cage later composed another piece for voice and closed piano, A Flower, and a companion piece to The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, called Nowth upon Nacht, also based on Joyce’s book.

• The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1942)
  

From Obscure 1 LP

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Deutsche Grammophon & Decca celebrate the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth together with a revolutionary new site that seeks to open up to you the variety of interpretations of Chopin’s compositions that Deutsche Grammophon and Decca artists over the years have recorded.

Many recordings by Decca and DGG artists are available online in streaming audio.

You need to register to access the streaming, but registration is free.

Click the logo to go.

The site includes recordings by

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Listening to the Silence is a film by the english musician John Collins that explores a kaleidoscope of musical examples from Ghana: children’s games and their musical bands; traditional drums; sensual dances; trance dances; animated funeral music; and many other examples from the Ewe, Ashanti, Ga, and Frafra peoples of Ghana. Throughout the program, the leitmotif is social participation and the strikingly complex rhythmic sensibilities of the people.

Here is a gorgeous excerpt taped at a post office.

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If you desire high-resolution images of the Earth, the good folks at Unearthed Outdoors have made available the 250m True Marble image set for a free download with a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. It’s a map of the Earth made up of 32 tiles, where each tile is a 21,000 pixel square, available in png and tif formats. There’s also a series of smaller files that may be more useful — in case you don’t need a map of the Earth that ends up being 84,000 pixels tall and 168,000 pixels across. Printed at 600 dpi, that’s about 12 feet by 24 feet (m 3.66 x 7.31)!

Click here to reach the download page.

From Boing Boing

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In particular conditions the sound waves can become visible. This Atlas V launched from Kennedy Space Center at Feb. 11 2010, fly through a sun dog.

A sun dog is a prismatic bright spot in the sky caused by sun shining through ice crystals. The Atlas V rocket exceeded the speed of sound in this layer of ice crystals, making the shock wave visible from the ground.

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After the fibers made by cassette tape played by moving a tape head over the fabric, here it is fibers that can hear and sing by themselves.

To Yoel Fink, an associate professor of materials science and principal investigator at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics, the threads used in textiles and even optical fibers are much too passive. For the past decade, his lab has been working to develop fibers with ever more sophisticated properties, to  enable fabrics that can interact with their environment.

In the August issue of Nature Materials, Fink and his collaborators announce a new milestone on the path to functional fibers: fibers that can detect and produce sound. Applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones, for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions, and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain.

Despite the delicate balance required by the manufacturing process, the researchers were able to build functioning fibers in the lab. “You can actually hear them, these fibers,” says Chocat, a graduate student in the materials science department. “If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current” — an alternating current whose period is very regular — “then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.”

In addition to wearable microphones and biological sensors, applications of the fibers could include loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions: A fabric woven from acoustic fibers would provide the equivalent of millions of tiny acoustic sensors.

Read more details here.

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Arriva a Verona, dopo i successi riscontrati all’estero, lo spettacolo di danza contemporanea “Anime Salve… in terra e in mare”, ideato e realizzato da allievi italiani della Rotterdam Dance Academy, una delle più prestigiose in Europa.

Per la prima volta viene creata una coreografia ispirata ad un intero album di Fabrizio De Andrè, “Anime Salve” del 1996.

Nell’opera poetico-musicale di De Andrè i 12 danzatori, tra i quali la nostra saltuaria collaboratrice Valeria Bergamini, hanno individuato tematiche e riflessioni molto vicine alla propria sensibilità artistica e personale, e grazie alla forza comunicativa della danza e al linguaggio artistico che hanno sviluppato in Olanda, basato sull’onestà emotiva e sulla potenza espressiva del movimento, vogliono proporre la loro rilettura delle canzoni di “Anime Salve” ad un pubblico italiano.

mercoledì 21 luglio alle ore 21, al Castello di Montorio

Un estratto:

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I think that a few of you have ever seen (and listen to) a sub contrabass recorder, a monster from early music (around 1600). So here it is played by Karel van Steenhoven.

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Interesting idea by Richard Reigner

Denoising Field Recordings documents an early attempt at using denoising-techniques in a creative and compositional manner. Instead of utilising noise-reduction-algorithms for their intended purpose (the restoration of damaged audio signals), these processes are applied to various field recordings of trains, streets, swimminghalls and public transport. Due to the fact that these recordings consist entirely of noises this operation transforms the originals into an uncanny hybrid of newly introduced processing artefacts, occasional silence and sporadically audible traces of the original field recordings. What kind of sound-aesthetics can emerge while denoising field recordings? Which audible parameters are able to resist this audio-erasement-process? How are these traces comparable to the visual remanences of Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a De Kooning drawing?

Denoising Field Recordings is released as a limited edition of see-through 12″ vinyl with an intruiging white-on-white cover designed by Hans Renzler. The digital version is available exlusively at Zero” (not free - must register to download).

Click here or here to listen to some results of applying noise reduction algorithms to noise.

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