David Toop: Ocean of Sound: Ambient sound and radical listening in the age of communication

Seminal work from Wire-mainstay Toop exploring the free-form 'ambient' turn in music since Debussy.

"There's an experiment I did. Since I did it, I started to think it was quite a good exercice that I would recommend to other people. I had taken a DAT recorder to Hyde Park and near Bayswater I recorded a period of whatever sound was there: cars going by, dogs, people. I thought nothing much of it and I was sitting at home listening to it on my player. I suddenly had this idea. What about if I take a section of this -a three and a half minute section, the length of a single- and I tried to learn it?"

“So that's what I did. I put it in SoundTools and I made fade-up, let it run for three and a half minutes and fade it out. I started listening to this thing, over and over. Whenever I was sitting there working, I would have this thing on. I printed it on a DAT twenty times or something, so it just kept running over and over. I tried learn it, exactly as one would a piece of music: oh yeah, that car, accelerates the engine, the revs in the engine go up and then that dog barks, and then you hear that pigeon off to the side there. This was an extremely interesting exercice to do, first of all because I found that you can learn it. Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, with sufficient listenings, becomes highly connected. You can really imagine that this thing was constructed somehow: “Right, he puts this bit there and that pattern's just at the exact same moment as this happening. Brillant!" Since I've done that, I can listen to lots of things in quite a different way. It's like putting oneself in the role of an art perceiver, just deciding, now I'm playing that role.”
- Brian Eno

Helen Weinzweig: Basic Black With Pearls

Feminist derive-ations around Toronto recalling French nouveau roman writers.

We solitaries came towards one another, passed; other came up from behind and passed me; at times we walked side by side for a few paces. Soon I got a sense of common activity: I thought, I would like nothing better than to link my arm through yours and we would walk along together. Acts of fellowship, I reflected sadly, take place only during bombings and public hangings. Under normal conditions strangers must avoid the other's strangeness.

Leslie Jamison: The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath

A homage to AA and alcoholic American writers by a young alcoholic American writer.

Nights out turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What's the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what's left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself? How long until the waiter comes back and how likely is it someone else will ask him for another bottle?


Certain parts of Peter began to repel me: his insecurities about our relationship and about himself, his hunger for my reassurance. These parts of him echoed the parts of me that had been hungry for reassurance all my life; that was probably why they disgusted me. But I couldn't see that then. I could only see that he'd gotten the same lip balm I'd gotten; he hadn't even been able to choose his own brand.


There was a little voice in me that considered the possibility that perhaps there were people who didn't spend hours every day trying to decide if their desperate desire to drink had preceded recovery meetings or been created by them. But it irritated me, that voice. I tried not to listen to it.


I am precisely the kind of nice upper-middle-class white girl whose relationship to substances has been treated as benign or pitiable - a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than punishment. No one has ever called me a leper or a psychopath. No doctor has ever pointed a gun at me. No cop has ever shot me at an intersection while I was reaching for my wallet, for that matter, or even pulled me over for drunk driving, something I've done more times than I could count. My skin is the right color to permit my intoxication. When it comes to addiction, the abstraction of privilege is ultimately a question of what type of story gets told about your body: Do you need to be shielded from harm, or prevented from causing it? My body has been understood as something to be protected, rather than something to be protected from.

Olga Togarczuk: Flights

Engrossing stories about travel crossing time and geography.

Age all in your mind. Gender grammatical. I actually buy my books in paperback, so that I can leave them without remorse on the platform, for someone else to find. I don’t collect anything.


Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that – in spite of all the risks involved – a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity. From then on, the river was like a needle inserted into my formerly safe and stable surroundings, the landscape comprised of the park, the greenhouses with their vegetables that grew in sad little rows, and the pavement with its concrete slabs where we would go to play hopscotch. This needle went all the way through, marking a vertical third dimension; so pierced, the landscape of my childhood world turned out to be nothing more than a toy made of rubber from which all the air was escaping, with a hiss.


Without the bells and whistles, its description boils down to the insistence of one’s consciousness on returning to certain images, or even the compulsive search for them. It is a variant of the Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away.


They’d set up in the designated areas, at campsites where they were always in the company of others just like them, having lively conversations with their neighbours surrounded by socks drying on tent cords. The itineraries for these trips would be determined with the aid of guidebooks that painstakingly highlighted all the attractions. In the morning a swim in the sea or the lake, and in the afternoon an excursion into the city’s history, capped off by dinner, most often out of glass jars: goulash, meatballs in tomato sauce. You just had to cook the pasta or the rice. Costs were always being cut, the Polish zloty was weak – penny of the world. There was the search for a place where you could get electricity and then the reluctant decamping after, although all journeys remained within the same metaphysical orbit of home. They weren’t real travellers: they left in order to return. And they were relieved when they got back, with a sense of having fulfilled an obligation. They returned to collect the letters and bills that stacked up on the chest of drawers. To do a big wash. To bore their friends to death by showing pictures as everyone attempted to conceal their yawns. This is us in Carcassonne. Here’s my wife with the Acropolis in the background.


Here we were taught that the world could be described, and even explained, by means of simple answers to intelligent questions. That in its essence the world was inert and dead, governed by fairly simple laws that needed to be explained and made public – if possible with the aid of diagrams. We were required to do experiments. To formulate hypotheses. To verify. We were inducted into the mysteries of statistics, taught to believe that equipped with such a tool we would be able to perfectly describe all the workings of the world – that ninety per cent is more significant than five.


As far as I can tell, this is mankind’s most honest cognitive project. It is frank about the fact that all the information we have about the world comes straight out of our own heads, like Athena out of Zeus’s. People bring to Wikipedia everything they know. If the project succeeds, then this encyclopaedia undergoing perpetual renewal will be the greatest wonder of the world. It has everything we know in it – every thing, definition, event, and problem our brains have worked on; we shall cite sources, provide links.


There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints. There are those who boast they have discovered places totally unknown, and then we envy them for experiencing the truest reality even very fleetingly before that place, like all the rest, is absorbed by our minds.


Am I doing the right thing be telling stories? Wouldn’t it be better to fasten the mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single though gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs. I could use quotes and foot notes …. I would be the mistress of my own text …. As it is I’m taking on the role of midwife, or of the tender of a garden whose only merit is at best sowing seeds and later to fight tediously against weeds. Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is impossible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray.


I studied psychology in a big gloomy communist city … that part of the city had been built up on the ruins of the ghetto, which you could tell if you took a good look – that whole neighbourhood stood about three feet higher than the rest of the town. Three feet of rubble.


Sedentary peoples, farmers, prefer the pleasures of circular time, in which every object and event must return to its own beginning, curl back up into an embryo and repeat the process of maturation and death. But nomads and merchants, as they set off on journeys, had to think up a different type of time for themselves, one that would better respond to the needs of their travels. That time is linear time, more practical because it was able to measure progress towards a goal, a destination … And yet the innovation is a profoundly bitter one: when change over time is irreversible, loss and mourning become daily things.