Sonic Experiences - On the Airport

It is Thursday, July 18, 2019 and I’m at Gatwick Airport. There are two different routes for the passengers to get on the plane. Those passengers with seat number greater than 20 need to go down the stairs and pass under the plane to get in. I have ticket number 16D, but for some reason I went down the stairs, although I shouldn’t.

I’m on the airport aisle walking under the wings of the plane and I sense a sonic experience that it is very different to what many people would compare to the Eno-squeue ‘Music for Airports’. A different way of sensing the space with all the sounds muted from the airplanes. Thinking about it again why this listening experience is so intense. It seems like the time is much slower. An esoteric word expression struggles to express something similar to a Terrence Mallick movie. The space is vast and the objects are dominating. Using a good pair of headphones helps so much to isolate the other sounds and focus on what I see.

These rare coincidences happened this morning. What I have been listening is a track called – Session III (Angelige Noaten) from Peter Broderick & Machinefabriek in the ‘Mort Aux Vaches’ album. The track starts with slow piano, possibly from Peter Broderick and a background continuous electronic sound. Quite rare to categorize into an electronic noise or minimalistic sound.

The music instruments while listening to the track change. Broderick plays the violin and Machinefabriek uses a more noisy background sound with voices that are like they are transmitted from radio, which are hard to discern what they are saying.

Voices make their appearance in the track. Broderick possibly records them and they repeatedly being heard in this composition. Piano appears again, and Machinefabriek use a low frequency more pitched electronic sound to accompany the peak of the track.

Listening the track I feel the vast space of the airport overwhelming. The presence of the airplane is huge, but listening again feels like an ambient and live composition coming from everywhere. I don’t know exactly where to look. The huge space of the airport or the airplane. I need to get up to the stairs. I want to stay longer and use all my senses to feel the moment…but I can’t stand still.

Flutter Echo - Book from David Toop

Recently I ordered from the Wire Magazine a signed copy of David Toop's new book 'Flutter Echo'. Before that, I had read the amazing 'Ocean of Sound', which - needless to say - totally changed the way I perceive the sounds that surround us in our every day lives. But it also opened up new knowledge and horizons and I started to watch movies and follow artists that I wasn't aware of. I would say that it has been very influential, such as reading the great 'Undercurrents' edition from the Wire Magazine, and Brian LaBelle's books.

After the 'Ocean of Sound', the next book I read was the 'Sinister Resonance' and was definitely something that was capturing my attention. David Toop has always been an artist that I meet in many gigs in London, such as Cafe Oto, but never got the courage to talk to him. The last time was in May 2019 in Stoke Newington, where I had the pleasure to watch him performing at the Dronica festival. Although later in social media he thought that the experience was difficult, mainly due to the architecture of the church. The following is a collection of thoughts about the book, and some excerpts that definitely caught my attention.

After finished reading this book, I felt it was very different to his previous books, and that is because it was a collection of Toop’s memoirs and not a collection of experiences, thoughts or opinions around sound or sonic experiences. The memoirs do not follow a particular time series of events, but are grouped by themes such as exhibitions, gigs, journalism etc. Of course, in the book very important names are being referred to, such as Bob Cobbing, his long-term friendship with Steve Beresford, Evan Parker, Brian Eno, Peter Cusack, and Max Eastley are amongst many others. Toop also refers to the time that he met with Rie Nakajima and their collaboration until today.

David Toop writes about his childhood and living with a working class family that wasn’t well cultured. He continues talking about his studies and dropping out from the Fine Arts school. The long years of struggling financially and trying to make a living through writing and journalism. Other attempts to be creative such as the magazine Musics and Collusion, the creation of the London Musicians Collective (LMC), and his trip experiences in places like Venezuela and Japan.

While I totally respect and admire David Toop and all his life time collaborators or just people that he worked with, what I found the most interesting were the many details about his personal life and the suffering he went through. Apart from the big financial problems, the suicide of his ex-wife and the responsibility of raising his daughter are events that I didn’t know before reading this book. How he dedicated himself into work not only to support financially his family, but also as a means of catharsis and solace. A life full of agony, struggle and personal misfortunes that shows how many great artists have been through these problems and how it shapes and defines them. Moreover, one of my favorite excerpts in the book is how he refers to age and getting older: “When I said age is a devastation I meant not in itself but in the way we become victims to it through self-loathing, a collapse in confidence, the feeling of entering into a kind of shadowland. But more and more I’ve been thinking of time going in circles, back on itself to beginnings, each time refreshed or seasoned, almost broken, a skin that is thinner but toughened or sometimes stripped away completely to reveal the rawness underneath, rawness always there from the beginning.”

At a personal level, this book helped me a lot to understand my interest in arts, especially in relation to music, sound, and experimenting about it. The fact that I grew up in a family that had no relationship whatsoever with arts, and how it appealed to me from a very young age. That even I was never taught how to play a musical instrument I could sense the sounds around me and grew a curiosity to understand how they are connected with daily life, what are the various influences, and how it defines my way of viewing things. The need to read books, journals, attend exhibitions and installations and understand the world through sound, and most importantly understanding myself.

It is quite unavoidable not to make personal projections reading a book like that and perhaps any other book that goes into someone life, whether it is memoirs, psychology or philosophy. And this is what I did while reading this book. The music that was actually used as a resort to a difficult adolescence. The need to escape and rely on a world that existed somewhere else. The art as a savior. This savior that makes things far more important and meaningful. A life that wouldn't be the same without individuals such as David Toop.