David Toop > Quotes

“Being a critic is a terrific method for killing your love of art”
― David Toop

“Paradoxically, unusually quiet music highlights the supposedly polluting sounds of our environment. A recording studio is a quiet place until you attempt to record sounds on the threshold of hearing. “The more you try and achieve this mathematical impossibility, the more it recedes”, says Max Eastley,”
― David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication

“In 1937, Leonhard Huizinga expressed the nature of this quality more poetically. “This music does not create a song for our ears”, he wrote. “It is a ‘state’, such as moonlight poured over the fields.”
― David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication

“Reading too much into Hollywood films is an intellectual party game that can shed darkness on an infinite variety of subjects.”
― David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication

“This passing comment illuminates a particular quality of Javanese gamelan and helps to explain, perhaps, why the music of such a small Southeast Asian archipelago has so strongly influenced music in the twentieth century. In 1937, Leonhard Huizinga expressed the nature of this quality more poetically. “This music does not create a song for our ears”, he wrote. “It is a ‘state’, such as moonlight poured over the fields.”
― David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication

“Claude Debussy’s father had plans for his son to become a sailor but Claude, at the age of eight, was described by his sister as spending “whole days sitting on a chair thinking, no one knew of what”.”
― David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication