A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and
sound.
In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that
music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping,
the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant
gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices
in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched
time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather,
meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects,
interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and
performance art.
Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work
from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to
do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still
acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as
they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop
focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the
theoretical and abstract implications of their works.
Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop's
essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the
company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter,
unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of
sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and
philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and
air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.
