A BOOK that divides its potential readership is a matter for celebration, especially when the option to play safe is a very easy one. A book about a form of music that is neither commercially popular in the traditional sense, nor comforting on the ear of the casual pop fan, is no bad thing either.
Musician and musicologist David Toop writes on the development of, for want of a better term, ambient music, a current definition of which Toop provides: "Music that we hear but don't hear sounds which exist to enable us better to hear silence; sound which rests us from our intense compulsion to focus, to analyse, to frame, to categorise, to isolate." Toop uses words such as "heteroglossolalic", and claims that "the unverifiable origins of music are located either in bioacoustic or meteorological sounds or language".
Clearly, this book is not for your blinkered Britpop fan, but more an intellectually engaging - read for those people who can mix the likes of Debussy, Miles Davis, Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, and Erik Satie into a melting pot of converging influences and interests.
Not that Toop is shooting himself and his occasionally persuasive theories in the foot by using such wordy discourses. A book and subject such as this can easily be damned by those who read (and listen) with prejudice. The one thing that Toop makes quite clear is that music without hierarchy - from classical to blues to pop, and all scattered points in between - is for everybody. Willingly receptive or not, we cannot but feel and hear rhythm.
Tracing the development of ambient sounds from 1889 (at the Paris Exposition when Debussy heard Javanese music for the first time), Toop locates an interconnecting vein of what he calls ethereal "perfume" music from that time to the present day, a line of experimentation that exchanges the "structure of an armadillo for the shape of a jellyfish". To many, music such as Toop refers to is created by the addled minds of Fifties, noise scientists, Sixties hippies, Seventies progressive rock refugees, Eighties and Nineties techno boffins (respectively, Stockhausen's many perplexing exploratory sound collages; Gong, Terry Reilly, and Kraftwerk; Brian Eno and Robert Fripp; Loop Guru and Aphex, Twin). To others, this music provides a necessary but not always safe haven from the mundane.
Toop has some other thought provoking insights on the nature of noise. For instance, on crowd manipulation techniques that ally rock concerts with a certain kind of fascism, he quotes Hitler, writing for the Manual of German Radio in 1938: "Without the loudspeaker, we [the Nazi Party] would never have conquered Germany" - which is a stunning piece of information, whatever your politics. He regards the increase of Internetworking cybertalk as an expression of the "alienated yearning to leave the biological prison and transmute into a cyborg state. In the fin de siecle mind, immateriality, spirituality and electronics are synonymous. The body has become dangerous." And you thought Michael Jackson was weird?
Via grounded opinions, revealing interviews with modern ambient proponents Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Jon Hassell, and Richard James and plain old pretentiousness - the author's dream sequences are particularly risible - Ocean of Sound imagistically blends the old with the new. His arguments might not always have about them the ring of conviction, but they're well expressed and cogently presented.
A double CD of the same name, tracing the evolution of ambient culture from Debussy to My Bloody Valentine, has recently been released as an aural accompaniment to the book.