TOOP, David
Ocean of Sound

Chill Out is movement in the imagination, oscillating in a strange dream space between radio reception and virtual travel. Listening with detachment, I feel simultaneously as if I am moving across vast spaces, yet immobilised in one spot in the Gobi desert, watching the world go by, tuned in to organic and synthetic rhythms normally inaudible to the human ear without radio receivers, hydrophones, parabolic sound reflectors, satellite listening stations. Trains passing, a flock of sheep herded nearby, Mongolian throat singers floating in the air above me, motorbikes and cars roaring across the soundfield, a pedal steel guitar lament falling like dusk, a black preacher’s hoarse “Get ready, get ready ... East Coast, come back fat as a rat,” night insects buzzing, dolphins, waves on the seashore, “Stranger on the Shore” ... “A Melody From a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back,” “Dream Time in Lake Jackson,” “The Lights of Baton Rouge Pass By,” like Harold Norse in 1951, standing on a stage in New York City after midnight, tuning a radio for John Cage and experiencing “an automobile ride at night on an American highway in which neon signs and patches of noise from radios and automobiles flash into the distance.”

With a foreword by Michel Faber.

Published by Serpent's Tail, 2018
Music & Sound