The author and cult experimenter discusses the Icelandic icon.
Björk’s new album Utopia is threaded with samples of recordings by English author and sonic experimenter David Toop. What’s his relationship with the Icelandic icon’s work, how did his 1980 album Hekura – one of Björk’s favorites – come to be, and what’s his own vision of utopia? Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy finds out.
David Toop had an odd experience watching the 2009 adaptation of one of his favorite Cormac McCarthy novels, The Road. He didn’t think much of the film, but he found a horrific sequence involving a group of people imprisoned as a cannibal gang’s meals-to-be particularly powerful. Suddenly, a scream coming from the screen struck him, bolting him upright – Toop’s own recording of a Yanomami ritual were placed in the movie without his knowledge.
“My first response was to feel outrage,” he tells me. “Obviously they thought they would get away with it, that I wouldn’t notice because it was a fragment. But you know,” he pauses and chuckles knowingly, “I’m well-known in this field.”
Ethnomusicology isn’t the only field where Toop is well-known. Musically, he’s gone from playing Top of the Pops with avant-garde group The Flying Lizards to releasing intense found-music projects (last year’s Entities Inertias Faint Beings) and gnarled rock and roll (this past October’s Dirty Songs LP). He’s written books about hip-hop (1984’s Rap Attack), the history of ambience (Ocean of Sound) and pre-‘70s improvisational music (Into the Maelstrom) and contributed to magazines like The Face and Wire.
He’s also well known to one Björk Guðmundsdóttir. In an interview this summer for Dazed magazine, the Icelandic icon revealed that his album Hekura’s birdsong recordings would be prominently sampled throughout her new LP, Utopia (this time, with credit). Ahead of Utopia’s release, we spoke with David Toop for the lowdown on one of Björk’s favorite albums.
How did Hekura come together?
In the mid-‘70s, I got a job in a central London bookshop, there I met a Venezuelan guy called Nestor Figueras. We became friends and I had the same ambition to make a kind of journey [into shamanistic communities]. I was very interested in shamanism from my early 20s or so [and] was increasingly fascinated by all of these different musics from around the world. He was also very interested in the Yanomami [tribe] who lived in Venezuela and Brazil – we used to drink together and start talking about these possibilities and gradually it became a project. After the bookshop, he went to live in Venezuela with his partner Odile [Voisin, photographer for the Yanomami excursion]. Back in Caracas, he began to plan this whole expedition and met with one of the anthropologists working within a Yanomami community and that enabled him to make up a kind of rough plan.
In the early 2000s I visited an Amazonian community in Peru and travelled by boat for hours. I can only imagine how different it was making that journey in 1978.
It was three wooden boats lashed together by Warao Indians delivering supplies to missions on the Orinoco: they had a big fiberglass water tank, desks and chairs for children, filing cabinets. Plus there was a family, a dog and children – it took 15 days to even get to the first place but of course many things happened on that initial part of the journey. You know, hunting crocodiles and all kinds of stuff. [laughs] From there we went to the first Yanomami settlements and that’s when, you know, the real trip began. That’s where I began to record shamanistic healing ceremonies and the chanting and singing and so on.
What [Björk’s] used are the night time recordings of birds and insects between tracks. When I reissued the record [as 2015’s Lost Shadows: In Defence of the Soul], I included more of that material, partly because I had the space to do so. The original release was pretty much devoted to the Yanomami shamanistic stuff and their songs. But my ideas changed in relation to the material: I felt that these nocturnal recordings of bird and insect sounds were like a kind of framing, a context. Between the sounds of bioacoustic and environmental sounds and the Yanomami’s belief systems and the shamanistic imagery and so on, it is very important to include more. So I’m very happy that she wants to use that.
When did you first hear about the interest Björk had in your work? In the Dazed interview, it mentions that she felt this way about the album Hekura, not the Lost Shadows reissue.
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David Toop was born in London in 1949. He is a composer, musician, curator and author of several titles dedicated to the history of music. He developed in various fields of sound art and went through improvisation, sound installations, field recordings, pop music production and music for television, theater and dance.
was one of the members of The Flying Lizards, a cult English band created in 1979 and dedicated to instrumental improvisation, and co-founder of The London Musicians Collective, an avant-garde London institution that, in eighties, shaped a large part of the English experimental scene.
Toop also served as editor and columnist for magazines such as The Wire and The Face, and is the author of several books considered fundamental to the contemporary music scene, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Haunted Weather (2004) and Sinester Resonance (2010).
David Toop 2 Albums, Companion Book-
Apparition Paintings and Field Recording and Fox Spirits arrive in September 2020
David Toop, the musician, author, and music academic, has announced a new series of albums. The first is Apparition Paintings, his next studio album. (The title is derived from a 12th and 13th century Chinese painting technique.) The second is Field Recording and Fox Spirits, which is a collection of “personal recordings” from Toop that spans live performance, interviews, and yes, field recordings. It will be accompanied by a 40-page book featuring an “extended conversation with David Toop” and “extensive visual works and photographs from his archive.”
Both arrive September 11 via Room40.
plays bone conduction, resonators and buzzers, strings, paper, magnetism, archival memories, flutes, electricity and other materials. He 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, a memoir first published in Japan in 2017 (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) on ROOM40.
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 and a revived Alterations, the iconoclastic improvising quartet with Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack and Terry Day first formed in 1977.
Curator of sound art exhibitions including Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery (2000), his opera – Star-shaped Biscuit – was performed as an Aldeburgh Faster Than Sound project in 2012.
His most recent record releases include Garden of Shadows and Light, a duo with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Breathing Spirit Forms with Akio Suzuki and Lawrence English and Until the Night Melts Away with John Butcher and Sharon Gal.
Björk’s new album Utopia is threaded with samples of recordings by English author and sonic experimenter David Toop. What’s his relationship with the Icelandic icon’s work, how did his 1980 album Hekura – one of Björk’s favorites – come to be, and what’s his own vision of utopia?
David Toop had an odd experience watching the 2009 adaptation of one of his favorite Cormac McCarthy novels, The Road. He didn’t think much of the film, but he found a horrific sequence involving a group of people imprisoned as a cannibal gang’s meals-to-be particularly powerful. Suddenly, a scream coming from the screen struck him, bolting him upright – Toop’s own recording of a Yanomami ritual were placed in the movie without his knowledge.
“My first response was to feel outrage,” he tells me. “Obviously they thought they would get away with it, that I wouldn’t notice because it was a fragment. But you know,” he pauses and chuckles knowingly, “I’m well-known in this field.”
