Bangor Music Festival

What preoccupies me is foraging for resonance, searching out cavities, small acoustic spaces and amplifying surfaces as if they were food, finding and constructing containers, hollows, perforated spheres and caves. I work with blown objects like flutes, percussive objects, bowed objects and cassette tapes. The cassettes are usually from my own collection, accumulated between the years 1971 to the mid-1980s, played back through cheap cassette players connected to bone conduction and vibration speakers. These tiny speakers allow me to use materials and objects of various kinds – paper, tin cans, drum snares, cardboard boxes or my own teeth – to resonate and amplify whatever is on the cassette. All of these materials, including the cassette recordings themselves, have some personal resonance for me. Their lo-fi quality is intended, expounding as it does on the humility of certain materials, the decomposition and decay of artefacts, technologies, sound, memories and the body itself, all of which are significant for an improvised approach to life.

With thirteen solo albums spanning over fifty years, in this concert will we rediscover some of the improviser’s sounds using a combination of instruments, electronics and unusual objects.

BIOGRAPHY

David Toop

David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes eight acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom(2016), Flutter Echo (2019) and Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound 1976-2018 (2019). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Caroline Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Alasdair Roberts, Lucie Stepankova, Fred Frith, Thurston Moore, Ryuichi Sakamoto. Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed in 2012.