David Toop, where to begin? Since the early seventies, he has developed a unique way of playing on a wide set of instruments, ranging from flutes to leaves and cardboard boxes, and incorporating field recordings, alongside players like Paul Burwell, Hugh Davis, Max Eastley, Brian Eno, Phil Minton, Steve Beresford, Sidsel Endresen and Thurston Moore. Toop was a writer for magazines like The Face and The Wire, and is the author of a multitude of books, ‘Ocean of Sound’ probably being the most famous, and ‘Into the Maelstrom’ being a standard work on free improvisation.

These days he’s mainly playing with Moreskinsound, his duo with Ania Psenitsnikova, but for this year’s Summer Bummer, Toop reunites the ad hoc trio with Christian Kobi en Ecka Mordecai, that played at Cafe OTO in 2024.

David Toop has seen the world, but he has seen very little of Antwerp. That’s not problematic, but we’re glad to welcome him anyway.

David Toop: I’ve rarely been to Antwerp. A long time ago Alterations played an improvised music gig there, a band I was in with Peter Cusack, Steve Beresford and Terry Day. (Alterations played at King Kong Club in Antwerp in 1981, sb)

Can you tell me about the trio with Christian Kobi and Ecka Mordecai?

Christian Kobi invited Ecka and myself to play at Cafe OTO, in London. I think this came out of me being invited, very last minute, to play with the trio of John Butcher, Christian Kobi and Christian Müller. They had planned a tour for a quartet with (sound artist) Lee Patterson, but Lee got COVID, so I was the replacement for the London gig, which went very well. And then, I was asked to write sleeve notes for a record by In Situ Ens (a group with Christian Kobi, Liz Allbee, Rhodri Davies, Enrico Malatesta, Magda Mayas and Christian Müller). After that, this trio with Christian and Ecka happened at Cafe OTO, and that, too, worked out really well. I already knew Ecka, who was a student of mine, and we had worked together in various ways.

So the trio has only played once before?

Yes, but because it felt very good, unusual and tight, with a lot of interesting sounds and combinations happening, we decided to release the recording of that night on the Japanese Ftarri label.

You’ll basically revive an ad hoc situation and see if the magic will happen again?

(laughs) You could say that. Chasing magic is a very dangerous business, though…

This trio saw the light of day thanks to Cafe OTO. How important is that place these days for the music?

If Cafe OTO were to close that would be a catastrophe. The place is so important for the music. I’ve always believed you need a space. In the early seventies, there were very few regular spaces for playing free improvised music. It was a constant struggle of playing in rooms above pubs and terrible, inappropriate spaces. Then we formed the London Musicians Collective and found a space that made a huge difference. It helped grow the scene. With Cafe OTO it’s the same. It’s busy most nights of the week, often with a full audience. There’s an incredible loyalty to the place now and the audience really listens. We had another venue in London, called Iklectik, and that was forced to close last year, taken over by property developers. You really feel the pressure when a venue like that closes. Now Cafe OTO is booked up until next year. It’s a very healthy scene at the moment but you’ll always need venues.

Can you tell me how you think when you put a group together yourself?

I don’t play with so many different groups these days. For the last two years, I’ve been concentrating on Moreskinsound, the duo of me and my partner Ania Psenitsnikova, which is movement and sound. I occasionally play in other groups if I’m invited. Recently I played in a quartet with Roger Turner, Phil Minton and Rhodri Davies, which was great. But the duo with Ania is a continuing thing. What’s interesting for me is that it moves us away from music. Ania is a movement artist, who trained with Butoh dancers. What we do together is very much working with silence, and non-musical devices. We’re trying to move away from these terms like music and dance. I suppose you could say that I’ve been trying to do that for most of my life.

You’ve been trying to avoid being called a ‘sound artist’ most of your life as well…

Exactly, these terms they’re not so useful. I also hated being called a music journalist.

I have a hard time calling myself that as well.

It puts you in a box, and once you’re in that box, it’s very hard to come out. It’s much more productive to be ambiguous and unfixed. You keep the freedom to move sideways or backwards or upward or downwards, rather than being associated with what somebody else decides you are. And the kind of instruments I work with now, are very far from musical instruments. I work with cardboard boxes, leaves, paper and very simple flutes. Not the kind of instruments you can play conventional music on, for sure.

Moreskinsound

I’ll get back to the instrumentation a bit later. I first want to know a bit more about Moreskinsound. Is it you providing all the sounds, or is Ania doing that as well?

She’s doing part of that as well, using voice, body and breathing sounds. Recently she used a piano for a performance. She might use an object like a chair. All these things include the possibility of working with sound and silence. This ambiguity is important: that it’s unfixed and without strict roles for each person. I’ve done things in the past where one person is a musician and the other one is a dancer, and they don’t move into each other’s territory. This situation is more interesting. In the past I worked with some very interesting movement artists, like the Butoh dancer Mitsutaka Ishii, together with my improvising partner Paul Burwell. And then later, in Derek Bailey’s Company, I performed with Tanaka Min. So, I never had the idea of pure music. It has always come back to the body. Even in my laptop days: when you’re working with a laptop, when your body is engaged on a micro level, this big sound is coming from something that your body is in some way controlling…

There are different levels of engaging the body into music, I guess. Recently I gave myself a go at my daughter’s bassoon, and there’s something very special about blowing such a big sound out of your lungs.

With an instrument like the bassoon, there’s a tremendous compression of air. It has to pass through this very small double reed, and then it passes through a long and narrow tube, into a larger tube. One of the pieces of music love more than anything in the world is Japanese Gagaku music. And I read somewhere that the players of the hichiriki, which is like a small oboe, tend to suffer from heart problems, because of this tremendous forcing of air through a tiny aperture. If you see a bassoonist playing something like a Luciano Berio Sequenza, you get the feeling of this tremendous force they need to apply.

That’s something I think about a lot at the moment: the actions needed to activate an instrument. I use violin bows to activate materials, like cardboard boxes, leaves or thick paper: that’s all about containment, edges, abrasion and friction. And there’s a lot of technique involved. I practice guitar every day. I’ve been playing it since I was eleven, and I’m 76 now: that’s a lot of guitar playing. The strange thing is: I have no real context for that. I’m practicing, but not for a particular purpose. And bowing leaves and cardboard boxes, I obviously don’t practice that. That’s just something you’re discovering in the moment in front of an audience. That process is very much one of fine detail. Because you make a wrong move and you’re doing something that you don’t want to do. So, the margins are fine, and it’s very unpredictable. With a bassoon or a guitar, you can make it predictable. I mean, I personally can’t, but…

I wanted to ask you about that. It’s a tricky question, which could be misunderstood as an insult quite easily. So here I go: if you’re playing with people like Evan Parker, or Ecka and Christian, these are players that have mastered their instruments over decades and found their own voices on it, getting every possible sound out of their instruments. And you arrive at the scene with this set of instruments and materials that are probably impossible to master but require you to make choices in the moment as well. How does that hierarchy work?

It’s a good question, and I know exactly what you’re saying. I don’t think it’s a hierarchy, because I can be a major disruptor in that situation. I have some fragile sounds, but there are some very strong sounds in there as well. And it’s a question of placement, of course, and that in itself is its own virtuosity. I never took the time to become a virtuoso on guitar or flute. I’m a decent player of those instruments, but I was always interested in too many other things – making art, writing… – to put in the practice you need for that. The situations I was working in didn’t really demand that level of technique anyway. But I’m interested in it. I’m interested in harmony, even though you might not hear that in me bowing a leaf. There’s a sensitivity towards how objects can be repurposed, in the situation of virtuoso instrumentalists. And like I say, I can be a disruptor, sending things in very unfamiliar directions for certain instrumentalists. I think I bring a certain non-musical energy to the situation.

The notion of ‘freedom’ in free improvisation has always been problematic. The idea that you can do whatever you want is very misleading. You have to develop a voice, technique and expertise. You have to learn to listen to other people and to yourself. All of that is very demanding and asks for a lot of experience to do it well. You have to develop a mutual language. Say, if you speak English and I speak Russian, we have a very interesting problem. We’ll have to find a way around it, with gestures or drawings, or the little vocabulary we share. It’s a bit like that with free improvisation: someone may be a virtuoso performer from the classical world, and then I come along with a bag full of leaves, a cardboard box and a bamboo flute that I made myself. How do we bridge that gap?

Last year at Summer Bummer, there were twenty children playing in Fire! Orchestra CBA Youth. They rehearsed for two days and when they opened the festival on Friday evening, each and every one of them played their solo, without panicking or hesitating. Some of those solos were more brilliant than others, of course, but they all delivered. And then, a few years prior to that, I saw Eugene Chadbourne playing with a Belgian musician, who’s a virtuoso from a more rootsy context and he seemed totally lost in the freedom that Chadbourne provided him with. So, I was thinking: is improvisation a creative process that you can lose through the years?

It’s an interesting question. But I think the difference here is quite clear. In one situation the children are being prepared to do what they’re going to do. And there’s a kind of generous space for them, and so they rise to that. They can deal with it, even though it’s unfamiliar territory. The other situation, there’s Chadbourne, who’s a very free player, but who can play a lot of different kinds of music. And then there’s another guy who is accustomed to working within very specific structures. If you take these structures away, there’s nothing to hang on to. For some people it’s a complete nightmare, it’s like falling down a well or something.

In the improvisation class I taught, and where I also met Ecka Mordecai, I used to ask the question “What do you think free improvisation is?” And someone would always answer “jamming”. But that’s a whole other thing – very limiting and restricted. In those classes, sometimes an electric bass player would play a riff for ages… I would never tell somebody not to do that. Instead, I’d ask other people what they thought was happening. And the answer would be they couldn’t do anything but work with that riff. And if there are fifteen other people there, that becomes very undemocratic. So, you know, all these very interesting questions, which are ultimately political questions, arise through people’s different approach to music. I’d be interested to know how this musician was chosen, was it Eugene, or was it somebody else who thought it was a good idea? Because, in the end it’s an unfair situation. And it’s more unfair on the other player than it is on Eugene, who is very used to coping with difficult situations.

It was definitely a last-minute booking, and I agree it was unfair.

I remember going to see Derek Bailey’s Company Week, and Lee Konitz was playing. He played a very interesting solo saxophone set, with a little portable tape recorder. I interviewed him the next day for The Face magazine and asked him how he felt about his performance. He told me he had never sweated so much on a bandstand. This was a guy who played thousands of gigs in the most demanding situations, playing his ultra-technical bebop. And there he was playing solo, able to do whatever he wanted, and he sweated so badly. That’s the nature of free improvisation: people think it’s easy but it’s not.

Sculpture

Let’s get back to the evolution of your instrumentation. When you started playing in the seventies, you pioneered the prepared guitar.

Well, I was playing the flute as well. I started making my own simple flutes very early on, sometimes those were flutes that would only play one note. So, you could only change the pitch by playing it into water or something like that. But on guitar, I started preparing the electric guitar with crocodile clips, so it immediately became a percussion instrument. You couldn’t play harmonies in the same way anymore. Obviously I was influenced by John Cage’s prepared piano and by things I heard in African music: using devices to make an instrument buzz or rattle. And Paul Burwell, with whom I was playing in duo a lot, created his own percussion kit around a drum kit. So we worked with impact sounds and air sounds. But I’ve gradually cut out any conventional instruments. For what I’m doing today, I find sculptors very inspiring, in the way they work with materials.
Over the last twelve years, I’ve worked with Rie Nakajima. We organized these events called Sculpture, inviting writers, dancers, video artists, photographers or musicians from any particular field. We called them ‘sculpture’, to get away from limiting categories of practice.

Can you name some of those sculptors that are an influence?

Well, the way Eva Hesse worked with materials was very interesting to me, or Barry Flanagan, working with soft materials like cloth and sand. Even a photographer like Francesca Woodman, who is a point of reference for the Moreskinsound duo. She photographed herself in different spaces: quite disturbing images, sometimes, but sculptural as well, using the body as a kind of sculpture. I think using the body as a material is interesting because it brings up this idea that movement is a sound, and sound is always movement. Having a flute with one sound only, makes you search for different sounds on that instrument, by using different techniques. In a way that relates to these things I did in the early seventies, trying to get back to fundamentals. And in recent years, I’ve come back to that very strongly.

It’s comparable to what most free saxophone players or double bass players are doing as well, no? Exploring sounds beyond the original spectrum of their instruments?

Well, if you get into this idea of extended techniques, I think that’s a misleading phrase because that has been around since the sixties and before. Most extended techniques are quite conventional now, they’re just a part of the vocabulary. But maybe I’m coming from a different direction because if I think of somebody like John Butcher, he’s a wonderful player with this extraordinary vocabulary of things he can do with a saxophone, but he can also play it conventionally. Whereas I come with a cardboard box.

You can also play more conventionally.

Yes, I can.

I love ‘Apparition Paintings’, your record from 2020, which has a lot of ‘conventional’ sounds.

Thank you. I tried to think of that like a soundtrack album. If you listen to an Ennio Morricone soundtrack LP, there will be experimental and strange tracks, and then you’ll have this big, beautiful melody with voices and strings. But if you’re listening to it as a record, you’re taking a peculiar journey through many different styles of music. Of course, we know Morricone was a free improviser, as well as being capable of writing these extremely memorable melodies. That’s how I thought of ‘Apparition Paintings’, there are conventional tracks on there, and then there’s tracks that are relatively formless.

When free form and song crash into each other, that’s one of my favourite combinations. I’m thinking of Robert Wyatt or Ornette Coleman’s ‘Science Fiction’ record from the mid-seventies, on which he worked with these wonderful female singers.

Well, Robert and Ornette have been important people in my life. Robert, I know personally, and Ornette I met once, when I interviewed him. Such interesting and expansive people, very much interested in communication and how we can understand each other. Ornette in particular wanted to create music that got us away from what he called the ‘caste system’, in which people were separated according to gender and sexual preference, so-called race or whatever. He wanted to live in a world without those divisions. I discovered his music when I was fifteen and it had a tremendous impact. Especially a ballad like ‘Embraceable You’, the way he was making this strange, almost out-of-time amorphous sound: like nothing I’d heard before. It suggested to me a music that went beyond music.

For myself, I was never one of those improvisers who only played free improvisation and would never touch a melody. In the group Alterations, the point was always that you could play anything, whenever you wanted, no matter what anybody else was doing. So, we’d use drum machines and tunes, and it was almost a deliberately staged car crash, I suppose. A lot of people were shocked by that, because it was doing the things you supposedly couldn’t do. Obviously we weren’t the first ones to do so, it was clearly influenced by the Dutch musicians like Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg.

I was listening to some Alterations yesterday: it’s quite out there indeed.

I’m a very open listener myself. I remember I once interviewed Scott Walker, and he was talking about Mantovani. The context was that he was talking about the arrangements for his records in the sixties, and he mentioned Mantovani in a sort of lightly critical way. And I told him I loved Mantovani. You know, David Lynch used two Mantovani pieces for the soundtrack of ‘Inland Empire’, and I know John Zorn and Ryoji Ikeda are fans as well. Walker jokingly said, “I’m sorry if I offended you.” I just want to bring aspects of those different styles into what I do; I don’t feel any kind of self-censorship or inhibition.

Lullaby for Sun Ra and Ornette

In your book ‘Into the Maelstrom’, you tell this anecdote about the world-famous artist Paul McCarthy, who runs his art business like an absolute pro, juggling with big budgets and large teams working for him. You recount observing McCarthy in a musical context, sitting behind his table of electronic devices and being basically totally lost. Now, in 2016 I saw an Extended Organ-show in which you and McCarthy were participating, at the Uncanny Valley festival in Ghent, which was all about the LAFMS (Los Angeles Free Music Society, a free collective formed in 1973), and I’m pretty sure McCarthy fell asleep behind his electronics table during that show, if only he dozed off for a brief few minutes.

Ha! probably Paul had ended up making everything on that table feeding back, and he thought, okay, I can have a nap now. I have a history of people falling asleep. When I interviewed Sun Ra, he fell asleep during the interview. And when I interviewed Ornette Coleman, he fell asleep as well. I think it’s a great privilege. There’s something very intimate about that.

They were so comfortable with you that you became their lullaby?

That’s right.

The closest I’ve been to Sun Ra was a long chat with Marshall Allen, in a pub about hundred meters from my place, where he played. Allen had spotted me and a friend and thought we were his best chance to score some weed that night. We couldn’t provide him with that, but even the half hour talk that ensued felt like an epiphany.

I interviewed Marshall Allen on the same day I interviewed Sun Ra. It was fantastic talking to him, but to talk to Sun Ra was like a dream. I followed Sun Ra since I was a teenager, and I saw the famous London concert in 1970. He was so interesting, and unpredictable in what he talked about. He spoke about his days of playing with Fletcher Henderson, you know, another world, really. Somebody from another world, not just in the way of talking about him coming from Saturn, but he’d been involved in things which were so antique in a way. He had an afrofuturistic side to him, but also this antiquity. All those things coming together in such a unique way: black nationalism, Egyptology, electronics and astronomy…

That book, ‘Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom’, was subtitled ‘Before 1970’. Will there be a follow-up?

I lost momentum on it. It would have been a better idea to have continued with my original intention, which was to write from the beginning to the present. But what happened was that I got to about 100,000 words, and I asked Bloomsbury “Can I write a very long book? Or shall I write it in two volumes?” And the answer was “Definitely not a very long book.” I think that was a mistake.

Being a musician who’s also a writer about music, does that give you a headstart, or is it more of a hassle, writing about colleagues? And also: does this mean you’re never not working?

It can be all of those things. I know how to make music on stage, and in the studio. A lot of people who write about music don’t know those things. So that’s an advantage. I think I have a good relationship with many musicians: friendships and working relationships. And then writing is a thing in itself. I’m interested in writing as literature and there’s a certain musicality to that as well. So, there’s advantages on both sides. There are also disadvantages: sometimes it’s difficult to write about your friends and colleagues, although I think I’ve found a way to do that. In the past I’ve sometimes felt self-conscious about playing music. Actually, I’ve felt a self-consciousness about listening to music. When I used to go out and listen to the South African musicians in London – Louis Moholo, Dudu Pukwana, Mongezi Feza and Chris McGregor – everybody would be getting drunk and having a good time. And I’d maybe be getting drunk as well, but I’d be thinking about it, analysing. And I’d think, well why can’t I just have a good time? But of course, that capacity to analyse has been very good to me over the years. It’s given me four careers: musician, writer, curator and teacher. But it does mean I’m always working. And so, when it comes to this year, when suddenly there’s less work for some reason, I find that very difficult. I mean, what do musicians do when they’re not practicing and not playing a gig?

In another book of yours, ‘Flutter Echo’, you use short lists, giving context of what you were listening to in a certain time frame, or what shows you saw in certain years. Are those lists you kept in notebooks at the time, or did you recreate them for the book?

Mostly memory. I’ve always kept a strong continuity with my past in terms of keeping my record and tape collection. And I’ve kept the memory of all those concerts. Being so analytical when I was going to concerts meant I remembered what happened. So, I do remember important gigs that I went to in the sixties, that changed my perspective on music.

It’s interesting to see the evolution. Most people stick to what they liked as a fifteen-year-old. You started playing guitar by learning ‘Apache’, by The Shadows. In a way you could say some of these sounds came back on ‘Apparition Paintings’.

Well, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, and how their music affected me. One of the tracks by Brian Wilson that has fascinated me most over the years is ‘Let’s Go Away for Awhile’, from the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’. It’s a very interesting piece of music, arranger’s music really, in the sense that every section of the music is arranged in a different way. It’s a tune in which the melody is never stated, it comes from the beautiful chord sequence. On ‘Apparition Paintings’, there’s the track ‘All I Desire’, a guitar instrumental that’s a homage to that. In a way, I’m still playing ‘Apache’. That love for twangy guitars connected to my obsession with westerns. I used to watch as many westerns as I could on television, stuff like ‘Rawhide’ with Clint Eastwood. And that sparked my interest for Native American culture, and indigenous music.

Anthropology and ethnomusicology quickly became very important to my thinking and my ideas about music and what was or wasn’t music, or the extraordinarily varied forms that music could take in the past, simply because social organization, language and ways of living were completely different from what I was growing up with. And that was very important as a perspective to understanding and in many ways rejecting the culture I had grown up with.

You’ve made many field recordings all over the world. Are these still part of your live set-up as well?

For some years I was using a setup where I had bone conduction speakers connected to cassette players. I would be playing the cassettes that I had collected in the early seventies from Papua New Guinea, Amazonas, Bali and Java, plus my own field recordings, and amplifying these sounds with objects like tin cans and pieces of cardboard. But I stopped doing that because I wanted to move away from anything that involved electricity or batteries. So now what I do is completely acoustic.

Ok, to end in the spirit of ‘Flutter Echo’: what was the last gig that filled you with optimism?

That would’ve been the gig I played last week with Roger Turner, Phil Minton and Rhodri Davies. We’re all getting older, obviously. Roger is in his late seventies, Phil is 84, I’m 76. Rhodri is younger, in his fifties. But despite our antiquity the music was fantastic. Moreskinsound will be doing a big Japanese tour in September/October, playing extraordinary places. So, as long as my body holds out, I’m optimistic.