Apparition Paintings

A companion piece of sorts to his recent, brilliant “Field Recording and Fox Spirits” tableaux of magic-realist location recordings, “Apparition Paintings” is an ambitious, sprawling new album from David Toop, at this point 50-years deep into a career that his seen him explore constantly shifting musical topographies, as well as work as a researcher, writer and critic. It’s an ambitious and restless work, featuring contributions from Áine O’Dwyer, Rie Nakajima, Paul Burwell and Elaine Mitchener among others, and shifts from a sort of skewed Fourth World ambient to atomised jazz-fusion and country-folk with curiously plasmic results. “Don’t ask me about genre or consistency
Who cares?” says Toop – and of course we don’t, and you shouldn’t – especially at this precise moment in time. What you get here is a personal narrative mapped out on the back of Toop’s eyelids, one moment reminding us of Eiko Ishibashi’s recent folklore masterpiece Hyakki Yagyo, before retreating down a mazy Gamelan wormhole, into shimmering chorus-pedal dreampop, Laswellian fusion and concrète abstractions – without flinching. “Half the world is drowning; the other half is in flames. Each story is an animal, a plant, something you drink, a surface you touch, a faint line, some memory emanating from a cardboard box. “Things” in themselves are only events that for a while are monotonous,” wrote Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. Maybe sounds are melting “things”, tired of the monotonous real