Toop — Ocean of Sound

Author: David Toop
Title: Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds
Year: 1995
Type: Book (Serpent’s Tail; reissued 2018)

Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds is a book by the English musician and writer David Toop, published by Serpent’s Tail in 1995. Starting from Claude Debussy’s encounter with Javanese music at the 1889 Paris exposition, it traces the breaking down of musical categories through the twentieth century toward the ambient and electronic music of the 1990s, and it treats immersion as one of the late century’s key ideas. Its evidence is Toop’s conversations with musicians, his criticism and his memories. A two-disc companion compilation followed on Virgin in 1996. Pitchfork placed the book among its sixty favorite music books in 2011, and an interviewer counted it as essential reading. Serpent’s Tail reissued it in 2018 with a new foreword by Michel Faber.

Toop, born in 1949, is an English musician, writer and curator who played in the Flying Lizards, wrote for The Wire and The Face, and later became an emeritus professor at the London College of Communication. His first book, Rap Attack (1984), was an early history of hip hop.¹ Serpent’s Tail published Ocean of Sound in London and New York in 1995.²

In its publisher’s description the book begins “in 1889 at the Paris exposition when Debussy first heard Javanese music performed” and travels “from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo,” with Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Brian Wilson, Kraftwerk and Brian Eno among its subjects.³ “What I have followed, starting with Debussy in 1889,” Toop writes, “is an erosion of categories, a peeling open of systems to make space for stimuli, new ideas, new influences.” Its thirteen chapters carry titles such as “memory,” “scanning: aether talk,” “burial rites” and “theatre of sound.”² Mark Richardson, writing about it for Pitchfork, singled out Toop’s conversations with David Lynch, Lee Perry and Pauline Oliveros and described a method “mixing interviews, criticism, history, and memory.”⁴

Toop asks: “What is ambient music? Calm, therapeutic sounds for chilling out or music which taps into the disturbing, chaotic undertow of the environment?” “There are two separate, quite different moments in the past twenty years which tend to define interpretations,” he writes, the first of them Eno’s.² Elsewhere he names one of the period’s key ideas: “Immersion is one of the key words of the late twentieth century. Bass is immersive, echoes are immersive, noise is immersive.”²

Toop compiled a companion album, also titled Ocean of Sound: a two-disc set of thirty-two tracks that run into one another, released by Virgin in January 1996. It finished fourth among compilations in the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll for that year.⁵ Robert Christgau gave it an A and called it a “gorgeously segued 32-track tour of trad ambient.”⁶ The set includes Aphex Twin and My Bloody Valentine as well as Debussy, Satie and John Cage.⁶ Asked in a 1997 interview with Perfect Sound Forever why it included free jazz, Toop said that “there is no such thing as background music, in the sense that so-called background music is always deployed (though not always accepted) as a lifestyle accessory.”⁷

Writers on music have praised the book. Jason Gross, introducing that interview, counted it among the books on music he would call “essential reading.”⁷ Richardson, in Pitchfork’s 2011 list, wrote that “there’s no single term that is adequate to describe what Toop has accomplished here,” and praised its scholarship despite its non-linear structure. In the same list, Jess Harvell, writing on Toop’s later Haunted Weather, called Ocean of Sound “epochal.”⁴ Among the notices the publisher printed on the cover, Melody Maker called it “a definite route forward for the pop book.”² Serpent’s Tail reissued it in its Serpent’s Tail Classics line on August 2, 2018, under the subtitle Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication, with a new foreword by Michel Faber.³

Key contributions

• Twentieth-century music told as “an erosion of categories,” from Debussy’s encounter with Javanese music in 1889 to the 1990s.
• Ambient music posed as an open question, calm sound for relaxing or music in touch with the “disturbing, chaotic undertow of the environment.”
• Immersion as one of the key ideas of late-twentieth-century listening.

See also

• Energy Flash — Simon Reynolds’s 1998 history of rave music and culture
• Assembling a Black Counter Culture — DeForrest Brown Jr.’s 2022 history of techno and Black electronic music
• Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off — Victor Szabo’s 2022 history of ambient music