Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener

Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener by Toop, David. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781441149725.

`No work on the subject of listening is as erudite, thoughtful, wide-ranging, and readable as Sinister Resonance. Toops previous books revealed the astonishing breadth of his musical tastes and the immensity of his sonic world. Here he extends his purview to literature and art, treating paintings, sculptures, novels, and poems as objects with a spectral sonic life discernible through sensitive looking and listening. The result is a profound and thrilling meditation on the senses and their interrelationships. Christoph Cox `Its as if contemporary culture has developed a case of hyperacusis in the form of Toops "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 `Toop hauls out his 233-note Jaws-Harp and plays us ancient Sirens songs, Blooms farts, Munchs round-the-world scream, the surfaces of Ad Reinhardts paintings, Virginia Woolfs brooding interiors, Lynchs scary foley designs over an Akio Suzuki inaudible installation, in a seamless, erudite and virtuoso literary performance. Alvin Curran `Its all about a sound that no one could hear except those who might listen. And for ears that [can] dream. Brothers Quay `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