The thing about devoting some months to reading the things I meant to read years ago means that, sometimes, I sit down with a book and am furious with myself for not reading it twenty-five years ago, because it was everything I needed to know and needed to hear. This is one of those books.
It’s about the seeds and roots and emergences of ambient music, and Brian Eno is rarely mentioned. It goes really far and wide and granular, a huge work of scholarship and memory – because Toop is an experimental musician who was also a music journalist, and he met most of these radical composers and inventors. He goes everywhere:
“There’s a wonderful story about Taxi Driver”, says Schütze. “I think it was the first and only film where, when the censors saw the film, the only requirement they had in order to pass it for a screening certificate was a sound cut. What completely freaked them out was the fact that Walter Murch had taken the idea of the gun, which is a tremendously symbolic and disturbing thing, and he put cannon fire underneath the gunshots. So these gunshots are not a pop; these gunshots are like your lungs are blown out through the back of the theatre, which is probably what it would feel like if you were holding the gun. I think the censors realised that this was subjective sound from the character’s perspective. You were feeling the recoil because you were holding the gun, therefore you were empathising with Travis Bickle which is a deeply disturbing thing to realise you’re doing.”
I am so stealing that one day.
On reflection afterwards, the book seems to have a tidal structure – Toop goes all the way back to the mud, then rushes forward to the (then-current) shore – it was written in 1995.
There’s a wonderful sequence towards the end where Toop describes one of his journeys down the Amazon to meet and record shamans. Which had especial interest from me, because my partner has spent a lot of time with the Shipibo and the ayahuasceros (I got a similar jolt watching TAR, where Tar talks briefly about the Shipibo-Conibo and the icaros, the medicine songs, which she’s also described to me). We still pay for the villages she knows to throw a Christmas party every year.
And this line, my god:
That night I go to sleep listening to someone chanting a myth in the distance.
I made a lot of Kindle highlights, and am still tracking down and listening to all the unfamiliar work he references. It’s an absolute treasure chest of a book, and beautifully written.