In Conversation With David Toop

David Toop is one of our sonic heroes, a music adventurer, curator, and maverick author. We invited him to talk about Japanese gardens, literature, climate crisis, and to give us some hints about his forthcoming book.

For our first edition in this series, Christine invited master field recordist, author, curator, and collaborator David Toop to talk about Japanese gardens, literature and much more. Music today would not be the same without his earth-shaking Ocean of Sound, from the Flying Lizards to his solo releases ‘Pink Noir’ or duo project General Strike’s ‘Danger in Paradise’, Toop keeps us on our toes.

Christine: Hello David, thanks for joining. How did it go yesterday with the publisher?

David: Hello Christine, oh, yeah it was good meeting, thanks. We fixed the publication date and discussed the practicalities and whether the book will be illustrated or not. And editors, possible editors, so yes, it was good.

C: That’s good news, is it coming out this year?

D: Not by the end of this year, but autumn next year is what we talked about.

C: Can you tell us a bit more about it?

D: Sure, to some extent it deals with music and race, which is something I’ve wanted to write about more specifically for a long time. But I never quite found the subject. It’s about one particular record which focuses a lot of the positive aspects and also the problematic aspects of that issue. That’s as much as I’m prepared to say.

C: We will discover the record next year, I guess! You’ve been to Japan several times — when did you first go to a Japanese garden, and could you tell us about their influence on your work?

D: I first went to Japan in 1993. I wanted to go for many years because I was interested in Japanese music, culture, and philosophy. I went there on tour with my friend, Max Eastley, and we performed in Kobe, Hiroshima, Tokyo, and Yokohama and ended up in Kobe, staying with a sound recordist. He played me a recording he’d made of a garden instrument, a water feature called a Suikinkutsu. It’s a chamber, a ceramic pot buried underground. On top, there’s a water basin where normally you’d wash your hands. The water trickles down from the basin into the pot buried beneath the earth, and we listened to this reverberant dripping sound. These instruments were very popular at one time in Japan, then more or less forgotten about. They started to go through a revival partly due to this CD that he released.

I was also taken by his assistant to Ryōan-ji, one of the most famous Japanese gardens, with the stones placed very precisely. That made a big impact because I knew of that garden through John Cage’s work. It’s based on real energy.

We also went to a moss garden, which was really extraordinary. Japan has a very good climate for moss because it’s very humid in the summer, you can have rain every day. I’ve tried to grow moss in this country and it’s really difficult. It just grows where it wants to, you can’t make it grow. Also, it needs a lot of attention. One thing you notice when you go to Japanese gardens, is that there is always an elderly person, maybe more than one, down on their knees. Everything looks perfectly maintained, but that’s because you have this very quiet activity, making sure everything is exactly right.

“The garden itself in Japan tends to have more uniformity, though its design may be dramatic and to our eyes, relatively avant-garde. So whether it’s a 20th century designer like Mirei Shigemori, or whether it’s the designer of Ryōan-ji, who was working in the 15th or 16th century, it looks to us strikingly modern.””

C: Did it affect your sense of time?

D: For us time is about seasons. In Northern Europe, where you have very clearly defined seasons, if you have a garden or if you’re a gardener, you can more or less tell the season according to what’s happening. So, gardens make you aware of time, the fact that things can happen very quickly but they also happen through slow evolution. If you live with a garden for a long time, you see shrubs and trees grow very large. That’s kind of a marker of your age, as well as the garden’s age.

The aesthetic of a garden also impacts your sense of time. A garden is very colourful and chaotic, like a firework display. It can be restful, but it’s restful in that it’s always providing visual points of interest. Japanese gardens aren’t just green and grey depending on the season, they can change dramatically. In spring, you have the famous cherry blossom and in the autumn you have these incredible yellows and oranges and reds. In winter, you may have snow.

But the garden itself in Japan tends to have more uniformity, though its design may be dramatic and to our eyes, relatively avant-garde. So whether it’s a 20th century designer like Shigemori Mirei, or whether it’s the designer of Ryōan-ji, who was working in the 15th or 16th century, it looks to us strikingly modern. Many gardens have a viewing platform where you can sit and engage in meditation, contemplation. Last time I was there, in 2017, I was in a garden at Daitokuji temple, sitting and trying to absorb some of the symbolism. There’s a lot of symbolism in Japanese gardens.

For example, there’s a garden called Daisen-in, a small, austere kind of Zen Garden, but on the other side of it there’s a nightingale floor. Do you know about nightingale floors?

C: Hmmm, no, I don’t.

D: It’s a particular kind of construction where they deliberately make the wooden boards squeak, using a system of wedges underneath. If you step on the boards, they make a squeaking sound. Originally it was a self-defensive measure. I was also looking at the symbolism of stones. One of the stones represented a turtle, which symbolizes life’s lowest point, disappointments, because the turtle swims to the bottom and it swims against the tide. In this garden, the rocks represent the turtle. The turtle is swimming against the tide and trying to hold on to youth. So you can take the garden at face value, or you can go deeper into the symbolism and, contemplating the symbolism, reflect on aspects of yourself. Inevitably you think about your own disappointments, and your own attempts to hang on to youth.

“So you can take the garden at face value, or you can go deeper into the symbolism and, contemplating the symbolism, reflect on aspects of yourself.”

C: You are an avid reader of François Jullien. Could you tell us more about The Silent Transformations?

D: He’s very relevant to what we’re just been speaking about, because that book is about this idea that people and things transform, without you really noticing, unless you’re distant from them. When you’re living with somebody they change, but you can’t see them changing. If you see somebody once every few weeks, you notice some change. If you see somebody you haven’t seen for two years, wow, it’s a big shock. This applies, obviously, to gardens because things grow or they die off or flowers come into leaf and then the leaves go, but it applies to objects too. Religious icons, people just touch them gently, but over hundreds of years, you see the indentation where hundreds of thousands of people have touched. That’s what Jullien is talking about in The Silent Transformations. I like that book very much.

I also like his book The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting, about a type of Chinese painting which is extremely faint or seemingly formless. One of the terms for this is apparition paintings, in that they seem quite ghostly. I called my last album Apparition Paintings after that.

I also like In Praise of Blandness very much, which is about the neutral or barely noticeable as a characteristic of Chinese ancient aesthetics, particularly Chan or Zen aesthetics. There’s a certain intensity about something being hardly there. I was interested in it because of being interested in silence, which is actually an intensification of listening. What we call silence is actually becoming very focused on extremely small sounds. There are a number of Chinese poems which talk about a lute with no strings. The idea is that if you play an open string on an instrument it makes a sound which is very rich, resonant and complex, then if you play another string, from a certain point of view you spoil the sound of the first string. Maybe it’s better to have no strings at all. It’s an extreme position but I think we can learn a lot from this extreme position.

C: It’s full of possibilities.

D: I think so. It really focuses your senses. It’s particularly interesting in terms of taste. There’s a Japanese sweet, which is more or less water, it looks beautiful, and it has almost no taste. Tofu is very important in monks’ cuisine because many Buddhist orders don’t eat meat. I’m vegan, right, so I know how to cook with it. If it came up in a conversation ten years ago, people would be totally dismissive and say, oh, it has no taste. But in a way, there’s no such thing as no taste, in the same way that there’s no such thing as silence. If you introduce something into your mouth, there’s a sensation and in the same way, if you’re listening and there appears to be no sound, you begin to hear more sounds.

A long time ago when I was living in a previous house, I had a Japanese garden. I remember going out one night about midnight and sitting quietly, and I began to hear these really small tiny sounds and it was strange you know it because I couldn’t see anything that was making sounds. It was an area of dry garden, slightly landscaped with plants. I walked into the dry part of the garden, and I could see that there were snails and slugs eating my plants. What I was hearing, like this tiny mouse eating tiny pieces of leaves, was a snail. So, you can go down and down and down and you’re still hearing stuff, there’s always some kind of energy and that was a lesson I learned from my own garden.

C: It’s interesting to think about the time we’re living in as a potential silent transformation.

D: Yes, one of the things François Jullien says is that in Chinese practices like, for example, martial arts, there’s no sense of coming to a stop. I practice qigong, in fact I have a class this evening which is of course happening online, we’ve been doing it for a year online. One thing about the stances is that you should never think of them as frozen, I always think of them as moving. It’s a standing practice, so you may hold one stance for 10 minutes but you should never think of it as being held rigidly. If you compare that with western exercise, there tends to be more rigidity and tension in holding something.

There’s another garden in Kyoto said to be the smallest stone garden in Japan. It’s just a flat sheet of rock with circular wave designs around it. The wave patterns around the rock symbolize falling drops of water. Made with the most stable material possible, which is rock, it’s symbolizing this constant movement. This idea of transition is present at a very profound level in our daily life, in the course of our lives, but we maybe don’t think about it.

C: You’re also reading Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain?

D: A friend of mine, a writer called Daniela Cascella, said oh, I’ve been reading The Magic Mountain and it’s fantastic. So I started reading and it is fantastic. It’s set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, in the Swiss Alps, like a holiday place, but everybody there is sick. Obviously, in that situation, people get to know each other and there are romantic liaisons. It’s set before the First World War, when they had peculiar therapies that involved lying down. Very strict restrictions on exercise. In one incredible section, the central character of the book, Hans, is forbidden to go out skiing, but it’s snowing, so he gets some skis and he goes out. Because he’s been in this strange environment, almost trapped in it for such a long time, he becomes completely reckless, and just carries on skiing and skiing. Then there’s a snowstorm and it looks as if he’s going to die in the snowstorm. It’s the most incredible passage.

C: You mentioned that you’ve been working on a book, can you tell us a bit more about your process?

D: Well, writing has been difficult, but yes, I came back to writing during this time. When I was talking to the publishers yesterday, they both said they’d had a lot of problems writing. I was saying to them that because this book I’m writing is so much about research and detective work, I’m not looking for inspiration outside of the subject matter of the book. Normally a lot of my ideas come when I perform in front of an audience, often that gives me ideas later — not during the performance, but later on. Of course, we haven’t had that public side of things. I did one online performance, but I really didn’t enjoy it because it didn’t have that sense of the presence of other people. The atmosphere of the people in there. The tangibility of their listening.

C: A detective story sounds intriguing!

D: Yes, it’s a detective story, but because there’s a lot of misinformation around this record, there’s a lot of misinformation originally from the creators, and many mysterious aspects to it. If you go online, you find completely inaccurate or wrong information about it. It’s a question of trying to find out what happened to the record. How things came about, that’s one of the things that really interests me. How things come into being.

C: I read A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, and it had the same feeling that you don’t know what happens to the main character because it’s told by external narrators. It really impacted me.

D: Yes, that classic device of the unreliable narrator. I haven’t read that one but I’ve read a number of Faulkner novels. The Sound and the Fury is so obviously confusing, because it has this polyphony of voices, you’re trying to work out: Who is saying what? Are they saying out loud? He doesn’t help you at all, you just have to try and work it out.

C: Yes, it’s really fascinating. Thomas Mann stated about The Magic Mountain that “what [Hans] came to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health.” Have you experienced that through the book?

D: Yes, I’ve experienced that through the book, and in my own life, not through sickness but going through tragedy. I think unless you go through these things, you don’t really have a complete, or you don’t really have a good understanding of the world. The period we’ve been through is a reminder of how fragile everything is. I think partly because the last World War was at the end of the 1930s to the middle of the 40s. Since then, wars have been local, devastating, tragic and stupid, but still more or less local. From my generation onwards, in Europe, we’ve been spared that experience of going to war. It builds up a kind of complacency.

“Things don’t have to work as they always did. You can stop traveling. Entertainments can stop. It’s very hard to deal with. But we’re still alive. Those of us who’ve survived, who were lucky enough not to get ill and die.”

The idea of society based on neoliberal principles, and the idea that certain kinds of democracy were the only political possibility, all of these things contributed to feeling that the world was unchanging. Of course, there were minor disturbances here and there, but everything was progressing as it should. Then suddenly that stops, very suddenly. And there are many realisations, one realisation being that there are other ways to live. Many people will have to reassess, do they want to live as they did beforehand? Of course, many people will eventually go back to something like the life they had before. But many will either choose not to or be prevented from going back. Things don’t have to work as they always did. You can stop traveling. Entertainments can stop. It’s very hard to deal with. But we’re still alive. Those of us who’ve survived, who were lucky enough not to get ill and die. What does that mean for this idea that the economy has to work the way it does, politics has to work the way it does? I think it raises huge questions, which are extremely interesting.

I’m speaking personally, a lot of my life was about traveling. Last March, I was supposed to go to northern Italy with a friend. It seems incredible now, but we were talking about whether we should go or not. We were worried about the promoters, you know, disappointing them and upsetting them. We decided not to go. A few days later, most of the flights coming from Italy to the UK were cancelled. It happened so quickly.

One thing we learn is what we value and what we don’t value. I was just reading about air travel. Something like 7% or 8% of the population takes more than four flights a year. That puts me in this percentage of the population. That 7 or 8% is causing more environmental damage than the other 93% or 92% of the population. I talk about the global heating emergency yet I’m guilty of being one of the worst culprits in that respect. So everybody has hard questions and, going back to Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain, without going through sickness or the consciousness of sickness, we don’t learn that lesson. If the world seems to be, from our privileged place, functioning normally, we can’t learn. Through news stories we can see and read that things aren’t functioning normally, but because this is global, happening to everybody everywhere, it’s not something we can look at and say, well that’s shocking, terrible, but it’s happening thousands of miles away. I would say there’s something profound about the book, in the way that it deals with notions of sickness, death and time. It’s taken me up to my age now to read it, so we learn, we always learn.

C: We should end on this positive lesson. Thank you very much for your time, David, it was a real pleasure to talk to you.

D: Excellent, nice to talk to you, time to say goodbye.

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