Currently Reading: David Toop, Ocean of Sound

It’s been a while since I became absorbed in a book lately, especially one that I stumbled upon by chance.  But now I have, even if it is a book about music, and even if it is more like a collection of articles (with a lot of interviews).  It’s still a book that I can eagerly turn to whenever I’m in transit, or in office downtime, etc., and it’s been a while since I had that.

And that book (found at St. Marks Books, where I was looking for something to read on the subway) is David Toop’s Ocean of Sound.  Mainly, it’s about the development of ambient music, up to 1995.

In recent years, I’ve actually been moving away from ambient music, or so I thought - but Toop’s idea of ambient music extends far beyond the ultra-mellow European, British or American sounds that so many have come to associate with that (sub)genre.  Toop is good at ignoring borders between nations, cultures, and eras - which puts this book very much in line with other music-related things that I’ve been reading and writing recently, which means it’s also pertinent to much of the stuff I’ve been listening to. 

I’m still fairly near the beginning in terms fully reading this (still in the part about Marshall Jefferson’s Acid Tracks, from 1987), but I have skipped ahead and sampled (so to speak) some of the writing in the chapters to come.  And it’s all good.

For example, this passage from a somewhat later chapter…

Dub music is like a long echo delay, looping through time.  Regenerating every few years, sometimes so quiet that only a disciple could hear, sometimes shatteringly loud, dub unpicks music in the commercial sphere.  Spreading out a song or a groove over a landscape of peaks and deep trenches, extending hooks and beats to vanishing point, dub creates new maps of time, intangible sound sculptures, sacred sites, balm and shock for mind, body and spirit.

When you double or dub, you replicate, reinvent, make one of many versions.  There is no such thing as an original mix, since music stored on milti-track tape, floppy or hard disk, is just a collection of bits.  The composition has been decomposed, already, by technology.   Dubbing, at its very best, takes each bit and imbues it with new life, turning a rational order of musical sequences into an ocean of sensation….

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P.S. Also pertinent to a lot of the music I’ve been writing about lately, he’s at least as well known for a book he wrote earlier called Rap Attack.