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Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds
by
Sun Ra, Brian Eno, Lee Perry, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Brian Wilson are interviewed in this extraordinary work of sonic history. It travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to virtual Las Vegas; from David Lynch's dream house high in the Hollywood Hills to the megalopolis of Tokyo.
Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debu ...more
Ocean of Sound begins in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debu ...more
Paperback, 320 pages
Published
February 22nd 2001
by Serpent's Tail
(first published 1995)
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Start your review of Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds
I listen to a lot of boring music. Really boring. Astonishingly boring. This book helped me understand why.
'Ocean of Sound' is a loose meditation on accidental and intentional ambient sound. It's meandering and inconclusive. It privileges tone over facts. I love it.
Debussy hears a Balinese gamelan orchestra in Paris in 1931. Sun Ra composes and performs the history of the future in the late 1950s. Japanese soundscape gardens designed around the noises particular insects make. Richard D. James st ...more
'Ocean of Sound' is a loose meditation on accidental and intentional ambient sound. It's meandering and inconclusive. It privileges tone over facts. I love it.
Debussy hears a Balinese gamelan orchestra in Paris in 1931. Sun Ra composes and performs the history of the future in the late 1950s. Japanese soundscape gardens designed around the noises particular insects make. Richard D. James st ...more
I found this pretty frustrating. I don't mind books which are wide-ranging and unafraid to explore the fringes of their subject matter, but this was pretty much *all* fringe, with less than half of it conforming to my expectations of what a book about ambient music should be like. Maybe that's my fault (or the fault of the back cover blurb writer), but I can't really see the relevance of the extended chapter describing in tedious detail the author's journey into the amazon rainforest. So he made
...more
Feb 26, 2012
Individualfrog
rated it
really liked it
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
nonfiction-for-readers,
my-sci-fi-love-hate
Even now, 15 years on, this is a book that makes me feel pleasantly like I'm living in the future. It's sort of like a William Gibson novel, a constant stream of semi-bewildering cross-cultural syncretic references, in a fascinating poetic style. Appropriately enough, it's a great book for browsing around in, which is what I did with it for all these years until just recently I decided to read it all the way through at last.
I once told a friend that it was a book about ambient music, and saw hi ...more
I once told a friend that it was a book about ambient music, and saw hi ...more
I mean it, literally, when I say I cannot imagine music writing that is better than what's in these pages. Something very close to the pleasure of discovering new musics is experienced, reading his prose. The Toop reader comes away informed, and the mind buzzing for more.
As with his Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom, David Toop adopts a subtly immersive approach related to the main theme, doing his best in Ocean of Sound to put his thoughts into an ideascape thro ...more
As with his Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom, David Toop adopts a subtly immersive approach related to the main theme, doing his best in Ocean of Sound to put his thoughts into an ideascape thro ...more
Less a survey of ambient music at the turn of the millennium than a drifting across its synchronic plane, through regions of anthropology, travelogue, surrealism, philosophy, poetry, visual art, popular culture, reverie — it is to sound as Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space is to place. Dense with media references, this is best read at a daydream's pace, with a highlighter (or .txt document, in my case) at hand.
(To demonstrate the volume of references: I consider myself well-versed in the book ...more
(To demonstrate the volume of references: I consider myself well-versed in the book ...more
To a degree, the author delivers what is promised by the title of this book: David Toop clearly is a radical and avid listener of all sorts of music, broadly classified as ambient or otherwise. Toop refers to a dazzling array of musical genres and artists which tempts you to explore further. While the book offers some interesting nuggets, it remains far too “ambient”, impressionistic and anecdotal, at the cost of not making or even having a point. The one point that does come across strongly how
...more
Probably the best book about music I've read yet.
More a collection of essays, journal entries and quips, coherently anthologized.
Not just about "Ambient" music. Links disparate movements from music concrete to free jazz to new age to hip hop and techno.
...more
More a collection of essays, journal entries and quips, coherently anthologized.
Not just about "Ambient" music. Links disparate movements from music concrete to free jazz to new age to hip hop and techno.
...more
Ocean of Sound was written by David Toop, a British music-thinker, who has a history within the British free improvised scene of the 70's. Published in 1995, very current. My impression is he free-associated and free-wheeled through a whole roster of ideas and musicians, possible and impossible realms of music as a phenomenon, and linked them to general cultural trends of previous and tangibly close eras. I find his writing on point using a personal sphere of examples and drawn connections. He d
...more
Really wonderful survey of "ambient," expanded to include jimi hendrix, rahsaan roland kirk, kate bush, etc. More to do with world-building than rock and roll. Hippie but not hokey. "There is talk of the object of the future as something evanescent, light, psychic; of immaterial objects akin to images or holograms." // "Transient non-articulated feelings... 'The Poetics of Space,' whether the ambience of a room, the ribbon of road, or the boundless envelopment of oceanic space." (!!) LOVELY, moo
...more
Toop's style is oceanic ,eg it flows everywhere,has no genre-sea-wall-barriers and is sometimes gloriously shambolic,but much to follow up and revisit here in this 1995 survey. He is good on the history of 'pre-ambient'( Debussy,Satie) and also the later (Le Monte Young and after).
Some great observations,based on his musical encounters with figures such as Eno -naturally ,and others- Sun Ra for example. In fact he doesn't really have a 'coast' to his oceanic musings,and often pulls in a wide var ...more
Some great observations,based on his musical encounters with figures such as Eno -naturally ,and others- Sun Ra for example. In fact he doesn't really have a 'coast' to his oceanic musings,and often pulls in a wide var ...more
This isn't just a potted history of ambient music, although it covers the subject comprehensively. It's a meditation on why people make music, what music is, and what it does to us, delivered during a journey that takes us from the reverberant Fort Worden Cistern in Port Townsend to the upper reaches of the Amazonas. It's a journey in the company of a bewildering cast of characteers that includes Yanomami shamans, Brian Eno, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and Richard "Aphex Twin" James. The a
...more
I admire David's effort to create an expansive, personal narrative of the development of ambient music from Debussy to Ryuichi Sakamoto. Without appealing to any sense of objective authority, Toop is able to draw connections between chill-out spaces, rave culture, Sun Ra, Kate Bush, Aphex Twin, Derek Bailey, and Derrick May. I did find the amount of name-dropping a bit overwhelming, but I enjoyed checking out some of their music. If you don't already have a working knowledge of musical developme
...more
"Some aspects of life in a small community have to be abandoned when you move to an online metropolis; the fundamentals of human nature, however, always scale up" -Howard Rheingold
"A high-tech campfire, people plugging in to remind themselves of life as it was when they were plugged out, twisting their isolation into something resembling community"
"Music in the future will almost certainly hybridise hybrids to such an extent that the idea of a traceable source will become an anachronism"
"inspire ...more
"A high-tech campfire, people plugging in to remind themselves of life as it was when they were plugged out, twisting their isolation into something resembling community"
"Music in the future will almost certainly hybridise hybrids to such an extent that the idea of a traceable source will become an anachronism"
"inspire ...more
like gaston bachelard's 'the poetics of space', but for recorded sound. dense and yet warm, toop threatens to jump off the deep end into obscure inscrutability, but he's a generous sage of an author. far too many insights and knowledge pearls for one sitting, this book seems to invite dog-eared pages as a way to mark something curious that you might want to research later; this I gladly obliged him.
...more
Best book of music criticism I’ve ever read. I have returned to this book over and over for inspiration when I am looking for a slightly different direction in my listening. If you like music that is more about rhythms and textures designed to entrance and transport the listener, this book is your bible.
One of the best books on music I have read. The fact that the book has a discography is laudable. If the genre of ambient music wrote a diary it would read like this. An ethnographic patchwork of environmental sound.
An excellent assemblage of connections, references and concepts. If only there was a little less David Toop wrapped up up in it all.
all over the place // stellar writing // ultimately scratching the surface
,,,,,,subversive and accurate account of the mindful music scene,,,,,
One of the best books about music I've ever read. The story about Aphex Twin using a set of food blenders and sand paper at a DJ set was worth the price alone.
...more
a surreal and nourishing dream
Unbelievably pretentious and completely unreadable
“Sitting quietly in never-never land, I am listening to summer fleas hibernating on my small female cat...”
not sure what I was expecting, but this is just not my kind of book. I'm sure it has its fans.
...more
This real bad.
"The sound object, represented most dramatically by the romantic symphonies of the nineteenth century, has been fractured and remade into a shifting, open lattice on which new ideas can hang, or through which they can pass and interweave. This is one metaphor. Landscape is another - a conjured place through which the music moves and in which the listener can wander."
Toop presents his subject in a similarly non-linear fashion. Some parts are more successful than others; not all meandering is of i ...more
Toop presents his subject in a similarly non-linear fashion. Some parts are more successful than others; not all meandering is of i ...more
Reverberating reflections on the development of ambient music and its linkages to the main musical currents (pun intended) of the last Century or so. The book reads (at times) like a historical memoir of Toop's own life as it is more than peppered with his experiences and relationships to soundscapes and eminent musicians. I felt like it lost its way a bit in the middle, hence not giving the full five stars. I also felt personally resentful about Toop's references to people who have clearly reso
...more
"The magician is assisted by a boy, to whom (in the dark) he speaks at a distance through a tube formed of the windpipes of cranes, storks, or swans ... A skull is made from the omentum of an ox, Etruscan wax, and gypsum and is connected with the windpipe of a crane through which an assistant speaks. Then burning coals and incense are put around it, and the skull vanishes (by the wax melting)."
There is enough raw musicological data in this little book to last a lifetime. Fuck what yo mama say -- ...more
There is enough raw musicological data in this little book to last a lifetime. Fuck what yo mama say -- ...more
I flew through this one, and really appreciate this kind of journalism/journaling. Lots of jumping around and connecting seemingly disparate pieces of 20th century music into, well, like a kind of a large body of salt-water, except with, like, sound instead of starfish.
He's a bit of an-extra-corraly-colored writer at times, with the Poetry knob turned up high to a point that will turn some more bare-bones favoring readers straight off, but I can hang with that sorta language just fine. ...more
He's a bit of an-extra-corraly-colored writer at times, with the Poetry knob turned up high to a point that will turn some more bare-bones favoring readers straight off, but I can hang with that sorta language just fine. ...more
Pretty amazing voyage into the murky realms of recorded sound. Ocean of Sound is a good title: the connections Toop makes between disparate musics and musicians does give the book an oceanic feel that defies traditional analysis, much like most of the music he touches on. A book like this leaves you wanting more, but that's probably the whole idea... I feel like when I reread it, it will be a different book.
...more
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