by David Toop (Author)
This is a major new philosophical work from one of the world's most erudite, intellectual, and influential thinkers and writers about sound and music. Sinister Resonance argues that sound - the entire continuum of the audible and inaudible spectrum, including silence, noise, quiet, implicit and imagined sound - can be identified as a hidden history of otherwise silent media. A profound engagement with sound runs through human culture and yet in many cases that engagement goes unrecognised. Neglect invariably engenders a counter movement, so sound and silence (even noise) can be idealised as the most pure and positive of sensory impressions. This reduces the fullness of sound and ignores its darker attributes as a trespasser, an invader of territory, an agent of instability. This is David Toop's most philosophical book. It's also his most literary, artistic, and scientific work to date, a work that looks at novels, poems, paintings, and myriad other sources to examine the peculiar nature of sound and its relationship to the other senses. It's a meditation on the art of listening - about how it connects us with the world, and about those aspects of the world that seem entirely disconnected from it.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 272
Publisher: Continuum Publishing Corporation
Published: 24 Aug 2010
ISBN 10: 1441149724
ISBN 13: 9781441149725
It's as if contemporary culture has developed a case of hyperacusis in the form of Toop's 'perpetual vigilance' as he haunts the permeable boundary between the extremities of sound and the fullness of silence. Ruminating on its unmatched power of evocation, Toop manifests sound after transient sound from the pages of this 'silent art', increasing awareness of our own auditory acuity as the walls between inner and outer space collapse around our ears. - David Sylvian
David Toop is the brilliant voyager of our sonic century, for whom music is a map of our dreams. With Sinister Resonance he takes us yet farther and deeper into coordinates uncharted but remembered all the same, beyond the horizon where the listener meets the listened. - Steve Erickson
It's all about a sound that no one could hear except those who might listen. And for ears that [can] dream.........what a noise !!! -Brothers Quay