Overview

"This is a major new philosophical work from one of the world's most erudite, intellectual, and influential thinkers and writers about sound and music. ""Sinister Resonance"" argues that sound - the entire continuum of the audible and inaudible spectrum, including silence, noise, quiet, implicit and imagined sound - can be identified as a hidden history of otherwise silent media. A profound engagement with sound runs through human culture and yet in many cases that engagement goes unrecognised. Neglect invariably engenders a counter movement, so sound and silence (even noise) can be idealised as the most pure and positive of sensory impressions. This reduces the fullness of sound and ignores its darker attributes as a trespasser, an invader of territory, an agent of instability. This is David Toop's most philosophical book. It's also his most literary, artistic, and scientific work to date, a work that looks at novels, poems, paintings, and myriad other sources to examine the peculiar nature of sound and its relationship to the other senses. It's a meditation on the art of listening - about how it connects us with the world, and about those aspects of the world that seem entirely disconnected from it."

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9781441149725

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Reviews

'Scarily erudite but ultimately enthralling.'--Sanford Lakoff 'This fourth in Toop's series of meditations turns out to be the most illuminating yet.'--Sanford Lakoff 'Toop has provided a valuable companion to new departures in the academic study of sound.'--Sanford Lakoff Sinister Resonance succeeds in arguing for the centrality of sound to emotional, psychological, social and political experience. This marks a welcome break from conventional aesthetic analysis.--Sanford Lakoff 'Scarily erudite but ultimately enthralling.'--, 'Scarily erudite but ultimately enthralling.'--guardian.co.uk This is not just a book about the uncanny history of sound, but about the hidden affinities between eras and art forms. The patterns it divines make Sinister Resonance something like a sonically minded companion to Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria, on the haunted nature of photography and cinema. - The Wire For starters, Toop hauls out his 233 note Jaws-Harp and plays us ancient Siren's songs, Bloom's farts, Munch's round-the-world scream, the surfaces of Ad Reinhardt's paintings, Virginia Woolf's brooding interiors, Lynch's scary foley designs over an Akio Suzuki inaudible installation, in a seamless, erudite and virtuoso literary performance of the sound of sound sounding...yeah, a veritable sonic Tsunami. For anyone looking for the ultimate lost chord, this is the place to find it! - Alvin Curran Mention in the New Titles section. The Wire, 1st June 2010. No work on the subject of listening is as erudite, thoughtful, wide-ranging, and readable as Sinister Resonance. Toop's previous books revealed the astonishing breadth of his musical tastes and the immensity of his sonic world. Here he extends his purview to literature and art, treating paintings, sculptures, novels, and poems as objects with a spectral sonic life discernible through sensitive looking and listening. The result is a profound and thrilling meditation on the senses and their interrelationships that vastly surpasses fashionable but facile conceptions of synaesthesia. - Christoph Cox David Toop is the brilliant voyager of our sonic century, for whom music is a map of our dreams. With Sinister Resonance he takes us yet farther and deeper into coordinates uncharted but remembered all the same, beyond the horizon where the listener meets the listened. - Steve Erickson It's all about a sound that no one could hear except those who might listen. And for ears that [can] dream.........what a noise !!! -Brothers Quay It's as if contemporary culture has developed a case of hyperacusis in the form of Toop's 'perpetual vigilance' as he haunts the permeable boundary between the extremities of sound and the fullness of silence. Ruminating on its unmatched power of evocation, Toop manifests sound after transient sound from the pages of this 'silent art', increasing awareness of our own auditory acuity as the walls between inner and outer space collapse around our ears. - David Sylvian

'Scarily erudite but ultimately enthralling.'--,

Sinister Resonance succeeds in arguing for the centrality of sound to emotional, psychological, social and political experience. This marks a welcome break from conventional aesthetic analysis.--Radical Philosophy

Author Information

David Toop is a musician, writer, and sound curator. His acclaimed books include Rap Attack, Ocean of Sound, Exotica, and Haunted Weather. His writing has also appeared in The Wire, Bookforum, and the New York Times. He lives in London.

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