Customer Reviews

Haunted Weather: Music, Silence, and Memory

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Rather than argue a thesis, Toop's style is the chase down a thread of meaning via the points at which various thoughts and anecdotes cross over. This perfectly suits the nature of his subject matter- the vast, largely uncharted terrain of non-genre-based music, for which a dominant narrative and vocabulary do not yet exist as with, say, rock 'n roll or classical.

The book meditates on, among other things, the boundary between performer and audience, environmental sound and music, improviser and composer, and the role of digital technology in mediating or enhancing these distinctions.

As a journeyman music writer, critic and musician, Toop has spent a lot of his time travelling. This seems to inform his writing style as he is constantly in motion, moving quickly between personal recollections, excerpts from correspondence with diverse musicians, and lengthy quotes from various topically obscure yet philosophically related texts.

These (non-)random stop-overs make the book a slow read, as the reader is left to do a lot of the piecing together. Yet this is part of the pleasure to be found in Toop's writing- like a brilliant but challenging piece of music, the book offers an experience in which the mind of the reader is engaged as more than just a passive receptor of received ideas and emotion.

Beautiful, challenging and nourishing.

I read this upon its UK release in July and still find myself dwelling upon some of the ideas raised. Reading it challenged me to use my ears afresh, and to think about what music can be.