Say what you like about David Toop — and I'll save saying what I like for another day — he's a good man to have digging around in areas of musical history you didn't know existed and then presenting his finds in interesting juxtapositions.
One of the good things about this compilation is that it comes at you fast. By four and a half minutes in, you're already into the fourth track. And if you didn't know the tracks, you might have to listen hard to detect where one stops and the next starts.
This is the fourth and last of Toop's Ocean of Sound series of compilations, which in turn were part of the Virgin Ambient series (we've already had The Music of Changes, which are also part of the series, on Music Arcades). I think just about all Toop's selections are electric rather than acoustic guitars, for he's interested in the textures of sound wrung out of the instrument rather than the virtuosity of the players. So Hendrix is represented by his "smashing of the amps" at Woodstock (?) and Zappa by an eccentric jazz excursion from Uncle Meat rather than anything with lengthy show-off soloing. Praise the Lord, the Grateful Dead track is less than two minutes!
But the real revelation for me are the pieces from the first decade and a half of the electric guitar's history when people were still working out what you could do with the instrument. I knew about The Ventures and Link Wray, but there's a rich seam of related artists on this album, like Davie Allan, Jet Harris & Tony Meehan, The John Barry 7, and fellow James Bond composer, Monty Norman.
I noticed that, bizarrely, Davie Allan & The Arrows had been tagged on Last.fm as "asparagus brine salt". As they say on the internet, WTF?! It turns out that 18 people have used the asparagus brine salt tag a total of 1,671 times. Explanations, authoritative or speculative, in the comments field, please.
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