wk10

OCEAN OF SOUND – DAVID TOOP – week ten

AETHER TALK AMBIENT SOUND AND IMAGINARY WORLDS

altered states i: landscape

  This chapter within the book ‘Ocean of Sound’ by David Toop includes the use of the technique of recording sounds within any environment. An example mentioned is when Brian Eno went to Ghana and took with him a stereo microphone and a cassette recorder, to record indigenous music and speech patterns. He stated that ‘The effect of this simple technological system was to cluster all the disparate sounds into one aural frame: they became music’, pushing him towards a new conception of music as a soundfield, and away from the idea of music only being fixed compositions. This reminded me of one of my previous blog posts where Cedrik Fermont recorded the sounds of different landscapes around Asia in one of his music pieces, which highlighted the culture and everyday sounds of people’s lives in Asia. Another technique mentioned was bass player Bill Laspell explaining that he would buy junk in Canal Street to record and use in his work, which he said would put these objects in a box and put reverb on it, describing ‘all these weird things to make sounds’. 

  In his book ‘Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music’, guitarist Derek Bailey, who took part in the early development of free improvisation, claims that ‘improvisation is unique in its ability to welcome such diversity’. This improvised aesthetic doesn’t only accept a number of attitudes and approaches, but it also seemed to yield better outcomes if you possessed that. When you have mismatched components, it nearly seems as if the rubbing of the components together to make it work produces a pearl.

  Ambient music is defined to be ‘music that we hear but don’t hear’, being noises that exist to help us hear silence more clearly and gives us a break from our need to concentrate, analyse, frame, categorise, and isolate.

  Throughout, different countries’ cultures and the sounds within each region are mentioned. An example that is mentioned is Japan, where objects such as gongs, bamboo listening pole that link to Japan’s culture is mentioned. 

  After reading this chapter of different sounds within different places, it brought me back to Cedrik Fermont’s work in which I researched, where Fermont used specific objects that he collected over a period of time from a certain country as an example. I find that this kind of music causes the listener to be curious about what they are hearing and can even picture the scene.