Music Arcades: Various: Haunted Weather - Music, Silence and Memory

How many blogs can there be where you get two posts in two days about albums featuring Max Eastley and environmental recordings made deep inside the Arctic Circle? I suspect there are actually rather more than you might think (I've linked to a few of them in the past).

As I've said before, the ground that this avant vanguard occupies seems like an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to spend all my time there. Though some people seem to do exactly that — or that's the way they present themselves. I wonder how they get their pleasure, whether they miss the simple, if trite, joys of a 4/4 beat, a pretty tune and harmonising backing vocals. I think I got Haunted Weather, the book, at the same time as these CDs, and I remember reading it on holiday in Spain, followed by Charles Shaar Murray's Jimi Hendrix book. The first few pages of the latter felt like watching an old movie while reclining in a warm bath, "Now I can relax, have some fun, maybe even be entertained."

Not that the book is bad, you understand. The chapter on generative music is useful and insightful. It explains the work of figures like Morton Feldman and Toru Takemitsu in a much richer way than I would have ever have appreciated otherwise (sadly no Feldman or Takemitsu on the CDs). His conversation with Derek Bailey shows great humour, and the many references to add up to a moving eulogy. But Toop can be heavy going on the page (and in person, as I'll maybe mention another time). Reading two pages of him is thought provoking; reading 20 pages starts to get a little frustrating; and reading 200 pages is a long, hard slog. A bit like life, I suppose.

I wrote a review of the book back in 2004 (that's how I remember the stuff above, because, if I don't take notes, my memory of books I read is terrible), which concluded:

When I was about half way through Haunted Weather I had a dream where as part of an audition or assessment I had to do a reading to a panel that included David Toop. As I am a confident reader I had no fears, but as I started to read the newspaper article given to me, I quickly realised that the reading made no sense without the photograph that went with it. I tried to 'read' the photograph, but how? Should I read each blade of grass in the picture left to right? Then how would I deal with the tree that punctuated the lawn? Painfully aware that I had made a wrong turn into a dead end, I reverted to the text. But by now my fluency was irrecoverable, and I sputtered to a stop.