David Toop - Apparition Paintings

Room 40

£28.80

Catalogue // RM4116
File Under // Electronic
Format // LP
Street Date // 9th October 2020

A companion piece of sorts to his recent, brilliant ‘Field Recording and Fox Spirits’ tableaux of magic-realist location recordings, ‘Apparition Paintings’ is an ambitious, sprawling new album from David Toop, at this point 50-years deep into a career that his seen him explore constantly shifting musical topographies, as well as work as a researcher, writer and critic. It’s an ambitious and restless work, featuring contributions from Áine O’Dwyer, Rie Nakajima, Paul Burwell and Elaine Mitchener among others, and shifts from a sort of skewed Fourth World ambient to atomised jazz-fusion and country-folk with curiously plasmic results.

“Don’t ask me about genre or consistency. Who cares?” says Toop - and of course we don’t, and you shouldn’t - especially at this precise moment in time. What you get here is a personal narrative mapped out on the back of Toop’s eyelids, one moment reminding us of Eiko Ishibashi’s recent folklore masterpiece Hyakki Yagyo, before retreating down a mazy Gamelan wormhole, into shimmering chorus-pedal dreampop, Laswellian fusion and concrète abstractions - without flinching.

“Half the world is drowning; the other half is in flames. Each story is an animal, a plant, something you drink, a surface you touch, a faint line, some memory emanating from a cardboard box. “’Things’ in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous,” wrote Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. Maybe sounds are melting ‘things’, tired of the monotonous real.”

1. You could touch him but he wasn’t there
2. Tiny human figurines made from sand. If you held these to your ear, you heard soft sweet music
3. A ghost travelling half a mile from its own shape
4. For believing (you were a strange beautiful unearthly creature from a faraway planet)
5. Smaller life spirits (that inhabit the joints)
6. She fell asleep somewhere outside the world
7. All I desire
8. When I first came here (I thought I’d never get used to the trains; now when it’s quiet I get nervous)
9. Always she seemed to be listening to some foray in the blood, that had no known setting
10. Some of them (to isolate themselves even further, beat their own ears until the tiny bones within were crushed)
11. Possibly it was only the coming of certain indefinable hours 01:54
12. Suddenly the world had dropped away
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