Breaking the sound barriers

David Toop's work zigzags through all of the most interesting parts of modern music. The pioneer of sound art tells Jim Carroll about the ideas he wants to bring to Cork

When it comes to sound David Toop has heard more rattles and hums than most. As a musician, writer and sound-art curator Toop has always made it his job to scan the airwaves and note what's going on between the static. While his Rap Attack book remains the last word on the early days and growing pains of hip hop, it's Toop's work and commentaries on ambience and sound art that are much sought after today.

From music with words to music with no words, Toop's span is considerable: curator of Sonic Boom, the UK's largest sound art exhibition, in London in 2000; author of the acclaimed Ocean Of Sound; collaborator with Brian Eno, John Zorn, John Hassell and many others; and compiler of some bewilderingly eclectic and enchanting CDs. Toop's work zigzags with aplomb through every area and aspect of interesting modern music.

Invited to Cork by the National Sculpture Factory, to talk at Crawford Municipal Art Gallery in June, Toop will become a regular visitor to the city over the next few months if a proposal for Sound Out, an exhibition of outdoor sound art around the city, gets the nod for Cork 2005. "The process seems to be going well, and I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. There's always money difficulties with these things, but everyone seems confident," says Toop.

Having worked on a similar exhibition in Belgium, Toop believes such installations can be revealing, for both locals and visitors. "Outside artists come and find hidden or forgotten parts of a city, and they use that as a starting point to connect the city with their own work."

The Belgian exhibition, in Bruges, drew out parts of the city even the locals had forgotten about. "When you live somewhere and you go about your daily business your immediate environment can become invisible or inaudible to some extent," Toop says. Yet he also believes such public art installations need to be aware of their surroundings. "You see some exhibitions and you do sympathise with people's criticisms of the projects," he says. "But there will always be people who object to having this kind of thing presented to them in a way and an environment they can't avoid - they'd prefer it to be hidden away."

Toop's own immersion in sound began at an early age, leading to "this weird interest in music and sound work which some people see as incompatible or odd". Not for him any random categorisation based on spurious genres. "In my teenage years I was listening to soul music and John Cage, because I felt it was possible to be interested in both popular and experimental music," he says.

He has begun to notice increasingly that he's not alone in this regard, and he credits club culture with democratising the listening process. "Club culture helped to break down the boundaries between so-called high art and popular music," he says. "The boundaries between genres like techno, hip hop and industrial music became more blurred because of changes in club culture. Clubs became places where you might have a DJ in one room, an Indian tabla player in another room and a sound-art installation hidden away somewhere else.

"It helped to create a new form of listening, not just with people who were young and inexperienced when it came to that sort of music but also with an older listener who was very dissatisfied with how everything had become compartmentalised. At home this person would listen across boundaries, so when he or she went out they were always looking for a more fluid environment.

"When I wrote Ocean Of Sound, in 1995, it was very much about what was happening in experimental ambient music, which was very much part of club culture. It was a way for me to talk about 20th-century music from a different perspective."

Toop believes it was natural for both post-club-culture audiences and performers to take an interest in sound art. "When it came to performance it made more sense to create an installation for a gallery if you wanted to work in a non-traditional way, and so a lot of musicians and DJs gravitated towards the sound-art area - and that comes from a post-clubbing situation."

As a long-standing sound artist Toop felt the influx of new blood was exciting, but some of his fellow artists were not so convinced. "They hated this intervention by people who were making music which was less sophisticated and noisier and had not developed within this specialist area," he says. "They were quite snobbish about it."

He recalls feeling the brunt of such displeasure in the wake of his Sonic Boom exhibition. "The Hayward Gallery space was not conducive to producing soundproof environments, so I made a decision to have overlaps throughout a person's path through the exhibition. One work would bleed into the next, so the whole gallery was one big installation. I remember talking about this at a lecture a few years later, and a German sound artist was absolutely enraged by this. He was furious at me and claimed I was manipulating other people's work against their will."

It was an example for Toop of how some purists really dislike and distrust development and profession. "To me the overlapping sound works as a reflection of how we live, and all the artists were more or less happy with it and the public enjoyed it."

Toop's latest book, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence And Memory, is another wide-ranging exploration of the possibilities inherent in both sound and silence. Between musings on the ins and outs of digital music Toop has much to say about the tremendous changes and choices brought by technology. He views it as a "definite problem" for him as a composer.

"I have so many different choices available to me in how I make work in relation to how many choices I had 30 years ago that sometimes you can waste so much time creating far too much material without being selective about it," he says. "It requires self-discipline and focus to find a way through the huge amount of material you can create with new technology. You have to be so sure and clear about what you are doing."

Because such means of production are now available to allcomers, there is a huge mass of material to sift through. That everyone can produce work, however, doesn't mean that everyone is producing work that's worth hearing. "I've been on the jury for the Art Electronica digital music prize at Linz, in Austria, for the past two years," Toop says. "You have to listen to five or six hundred CDs in three days to find a winner, and it can be really disheartening listening to all this mediocre stuff."

Yet Toop's enthusiasm for new music continues unchecked, even if there is now more music finding him than he can find time to listen to. While he finds it takes "more of an effort to find out what is interesting about the new music you hear", there are now times when Toop prefers to just switch everything off and listen for the hums. "The will to keep up has changed and there is more of a necessity to experience some silence," he says. "It has become so important to have times when you don't actually listen to someone else's music. It's good to have a pause when you're not inputting anything at all."

Haunted Weather: Music, Silence And Memory is published by Serpent's Tail, £12.99 in UK