„So many years later, autumn 2020. Throughout Apparition Paintings, perhaps his most accessible album, Toop gathers live instrumentation, field recordings, percussive sounds, and non-English vocalizations, then unlocks them from their frames of reference and fuses them into mercurial, dreamlike unities.“
Another jump. September, 17, 2017. Twenty years after the meeting in London. My diary in time traveling mode. Now again, it has been special, the 13th or 14th installment of Kristiansand’s outstanding Punkt Festival, who wants to count? The live-remixes did often live up to, and extended the original performances. There are some stories to tell (and I will), but this blog doesn’t need quick shots, it’s always the gap, the in-between, the unspeakable that matters first. In the end it all comes to story-telling, gotcha!?
After her duo with David Toop, and the mind-blowing „live remix“, Sidsel Endresen was standing outside, her eyes met my eyes, and instantly we embraced one another, and I heard her whispering two words into my ears: „my sweetheart“. Well, we never had an affair going on, so what was that? It simply was a purely improvised moment, with the much-quoted beating heart. David Toop has written a book about the history of free improvisation, and this way to communicate has never just been an attitude of music at the margins, it has always been, in many aspects & not so mysterious ways, a model for breaking patterns in the everyday life.
„Sit, do nothing: this is improvisation. Allow strange thoughts, inner tremors, sensory impressions to pass through the body. To listen is to improvise: sifting, filtering, prioritizing, placing, resisting, comparing, evaluating, rejecting and taking pleasure in sounds and absences of sounds; making immediatate and predictive assessments of multilayered signals, both specific and amorphous, balancing these against the internal static of thought. From moment to moment improvisation determines the outcomes of events, complex trajectories, the course of life. Humans must learn to improvise, to cope with random events, failure, chaos, desaster and accident in order to survive.“
(A random quotation from David Toop’s „Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom before 1970“)