Field Recording And Fox Spirits, by David Toop

Field Recording And Fox Spirits

by David Toop

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Limited Edition CD and Book
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Matte laminated embossed CD, insert card and 40 page perfect bound book with archival images and extended in conversation with David Toop.

Includes unlimited streaming of Field Recording And Fox Spirits via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Fox Spirits 36:40	info	buy track
2.	Wasp, recorded in Somerset, c. 1971 00:53		buy track
3.	Rain In the Face, long flute and frame drum, c. 1973 or 74 01:31		buy track
4.	Conversation with Syd Senior, 1979 03:20		buy track
5.	Beijing sounds, recorded March 2005 11:19		buy track
6.	Rain In the Face, “Do the Bathosphere”, c. 1974 02:55		buy track
7.	Conversation with Derek Bailey, February 2003 05:03		buy track
8.	Flute Orchestra, 20.8.1972 02:54		buy track
9.	8. Chiang Mai, Thailand, blind group playing in the street. 01:12		buy track
10.	David Toop solo, Iklectik, London, 2017 17:10		buy track
11.	Conversation with Annabel Nicolson, c. 1992 02:44		buy track
12.	Rain In the Face, prepared guitar, drums, two-string fiddle, c. 1974 05:56		buy track
13.	Sheep Wind Fence Flute, recorded on Dartmoor, 1971 03:40		buy track
14.	Chiang Mai bell rhythm and tuk tuk 00:42		buy track
15.	Conversation with Ornette Coleman, 13.9.1995 04:35		buy track
16.	Ano Syros bells, Greece, 2018 01:25		buy track
17.	Rain In the Face, ghost flute and cymbal, 1973 02:19		buy track
18.	Night frogs, La Sabana, Venezuela, 1978 08:13		buy track
19.	Juliette Toop, “You Know That You and I”, circa 1995 01:30		buy track

about

From David Toop
What are field recordings? “My memory is not what it used to be, David,” my grandfather, Syd Senior, said to me as we huddled round a fireplace in 1979. Thanks to a cassette tape I have the memory of his gradual loss of memory, hearing him speak of Queen Victoria’s funeral and the severity of patriotism back in those old days, 1901. Syd Senior is long dead, no longer part of the field of living relations but still within the field of memories that can be revived by technology, albeit an old one that squeaks like a mouse, hisses like a cat.

Where is the field? The field is populated by all the ravishing, painful, poignant, nondescript moments of remembered life. Field recordings forget, just as memories forget. My recording of Ornette Coleman forgets that he fell asleep as we were talking together. I sat quietly, waiting for him to wake; the tape machine continued its work, oblivious.

During lockdown, a warm spring day, I sat working in the garden. A small fox appeared close to me, started, retreated into the shelter of plants by my pond. I took a photo with my phone but when I looked at the image no fox was visible. Earlier that day I had been reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of short stories written by Pu Songling during the course of his life in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. In many of these tales, fox spirits inhabit the physical spaces of living humans in a variety of guises. Some are malicious; some benign. Their presence in the material world is wrong and yet accepted as either a temporary nuisance or a blessing that would later be regretted.

“All the memories are very incomplete,” said Annabel Nicolson during a conversation I recorded with her in the early 1990s. “It’s like trying to substantiate something that was important to us . . . When I was younger I thought that didn’t matter. I thought everything could be transient because people would always be creating more . . . when you get older it seems rather different because you realise many wonderful things have just vanished. Which in some ways doesn’t matter but it also means that they can’t be shared with anyone other than those who were there.”

credits

released September 11, 2020

All recordings by David Toop.
Fox Spirit collage created by Lawrence English

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