MAX EASTLEY & DAVID TOOP
Doll
creature
CD, bip hop
This here doll creature is an eerie specimen. A nightly
ghost, solemnly wandering through dark areas, swamps and woods, empty halls
and closed down machinery plants, and delighting in the tiniest sound made
by small critters rustling over cemented floors or unseen predators laying
hunting somewhere in the bushes. A scary and dimmed environment that makes
the inner self turn outwards and the outer ambience seep magically inwards.
Boundaries between the self and the outer dissolve in the pauses between
rustling and crackling sounds that follow the random order of nature into
the synthetically manufactured setting of a sound installation in downtown
Birmingham, rainy cobblestones, seedy air and scary characters included.
I am too young to recount the history of these two
artists meaningfully. Of course, as a reader of The Wire I have come across
Toop’s writing (sometimes also in other magazines such as The Face, Spin,
GQ – obviously Toop knows no boundaries for himself as well) and books.
Then heard about him again as a curator and composer for festivals and
compilations, various CDs of his own and so on. Whatever someone tries to
do, when he wants to make a living on avant-garde music. Max Eastley is more
of an unknown to me. I know he is also a painter, I once downloaded a track
he did with the Spaceheads from Epitonic and if I really tried hard I would
have remembered his connection to Brian Eno.
But in 1994, when the last collaboration of Eastley and
Toop was released, I was heavily into Japan Noise (as well as hyperfast
hardcore-punk), so I never came across that, which I attribute to the fact
that Austria still was a subcultural backwater back then (though I once saw
Illusions of Safety play live scaring away a hored of goths gone industrial,
though I guess mainly by wearing blue jeans, sneakers and old pullovers and
only then by the music they played …). Judging from what I can hear today,
“Buried Dreams” must have been more scary than the whole
Masonna-backcatalogue. Max Eastly and David Toop have of course worked
together a lot over the years, but I leave the internet search to you.
Especially since I feel that I haven’t explored into the whole
Eno-Ambient-avantgarde-music enough yet, to be able to judge this record
rightfully. So I’ll stick to judging the actual sounds on this work
instead.
“Doll creature” is also a frightening record, until
you stop connotating every sound for the result of some organic movement,
from the wind blowing to unheard of monsters lurking in the dark. (Always
the dark…) As soon as you take sound for sound and nothing else, the
scariness is almost gone. Whenever your mind starts to fill the holes and
pauses between the scarcely sounds – for instance with the faint echoes of
human voices as happened to me yesterday late night with “bandaged
moments” – it becomes even more scary. The invisible appearance of
ghosts howling somewhere out of reach while listening to this kind of
ambient after midnight on headphones is more than a grown up person can take
with the lights out. So I turned them back on again. Adding to my personal
act with “doll creatures” of the broken, tumbling and retarded kind such
as can be found in music videos by Tool or in Jan Svankmeier-movies.
