Dear friends
Covid-19 is dangerously impacting the social-economic category of musicians. No concerts, poor political and social consideration, uncertain earnings. As a consequence, an ever-growing number of musicians, especially those from the experimental area, are trying to promote their music on BandCamp in digital format only. It is increasingly difficult for me to follow and review this incredible flow of music. I therefore decided to open this section on my blog Neuguitars where I propose music in digital format that I consider particularly interesting and worthy of attention. I hope you like it. Let’s support musicians. They need it.
Andrea Aguzzi
Apparition Paintings by David Toop, Room40, 2020 on #neuguitars #blog
https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/apparition-paintings
From David Toop
Maybe these titles, torn as they are from cinema screens and the pages of literature and philosophy, give a feeling of romantic or sexual love or some dark pool of nostalgia but that’s not it, or it could be if you want it for yourself but not for me, not now; for me it’s about the teeming proliferation of complex events in the world, their vivid, hyperreal intensity as this human life steps closer to its end and their sense of fading, like a mist that thins out to leave not a clear bright day but almost nothing of substance as all that beauty is crushed, burned, dug up, wiped out, to be replaced by banality, so it’s about a language of love and desire in which we speak openly to all the unknowns, the speculative, the ancestral, the forgotten, the different, the extinct, the unimaginably distant and vast, the incomprehensibly small and intimately close, the fast or the slow, as if as we spoke we were becalmed in a wooden galleon off the coast of Java, sleeping microscopically in soil of a thousand years hence, hearing the voice of a dead person from the rim of a vibrating cup, gliding backwards and weightless through the alleyways of a city unrecognisable yet heartbreaking in its poverty, speaking in conference with winged and amphibious beings, crouching in a cavern whose opening only reveals the spectre of many wonders now apprehended as memories of the skin, heard through cheekbones, nostrils, the crepitation as a neck turns, pains of the knee and thumb and some not yet fully understood sensation within the throat which suggests a way of comprehending that which is being lost of this magical place. All I desire is what already exists or once existed, now falling asleep outside the world.
Don’t ask me about genre or consistency. Who cares? 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.
released September 11, 2020
Guitars, flutes, whistles, bass, bass recorder, drums, keyboards, other instruments, sounds and field recordings played and recorded by David Toop except for the following:
Elaine Mitchener – voice, 1
Keiko Yamamoto – voice, 6, 12
Yifeat Ziv – voice, 8
Áine O’Dwyer – harp, 12
Rie Nakajima – objects, 3, 4, 5
Paul Burwell – original recording of bells, 9
Voice of Ornette Coleman, B2 (recorded by David Toop, 13 September 1995); voices of Yifeat Ziv and Elaine Mitchener recorded by Dave Hunt; voice of Keiko Yamamoto recorded by herself, Áine O’Dwyer harp recorded by herself.
Bass recorder (A3), recording by Jon Leidecker at Tom’s Place, Berkeley, California, October 2018, using a Sound Devices 702T at 192 kHz..
Snail shell whistle and bamboo flute played into a well (A2, A5), recording by Renato Grieco at Ano Syros, Greece, July 2018.
Thanks to Dave Hunt for mix assistance.
titles from Marilyn Monroe/Arthur Miller, Nnedi Okorafor, William Faulkner, Douglas Sirk, Peter Sloterdijk, Dorothy Richardson, Antonio di Benedetto, Djuna Barnes, Robert Musil, Gloria Grahame/Fritz Lang
All tracks composed by David Toop except for A6 and B6 Toop/Yamamoto, B2 Toop/Ziv. All tracks published by Quartz Publications, © 2020.
NeuGuitars 