TOOPOGRAPHICA

I’ve been reading David Toop’s memoir Flutter Echo: Living Within Sound.

It turns out he’s a bit of a walker.  In fact that title comes from walking.  He writes, “My first memory of a listening experience comes from a walk, a regular journey during my early childhood.” He used to visit his grandparents, “we would take the bus from Waltham Cross to Enfield, then walk from the centre of the town to their house in Bush Hill Park …” 

"Shortly before the railway bridge that took us over the tracks into my grandparents’ road the path was bordered on both sides by a concrete wall.  The narrowness of this path meant that the walls reflected echoes from our footsteps very rapidly, an effect described as flutter echo by acousticians. Like the fluttering of a moth’s wings, sound bounces back and forth between the two parallel walls to create a ‘zing’.”

Later he lived with the artist Marie Yates, and together they did “Field Workings,” described by Toop as “walking and working from within the self and under the sky, deeply private even though conducted on open land and documented.” She made environmental sculptures, he made recordings, one of which consisted of “hanging my microphone on a wire fence, then walking away as I played sounds that were snatched from me by the wind …”. This an image from one of Yates's pieces.

Also, from his days as a (for want of two better words) music journalist there’s an article on the Artangel website about walking and art and sound related to Francis Alÿs, Seven Walks (2005), though he references quite a few other walking artists too.

He quotes Alÿs as saying, “I think it’s a natural state for somebody who’s interested in cities or architecture in general to walk. Walking offers a very convenient space for things to happen, and it allows a certain awareness in between an ongoing chain of thoughts and a series of incidental informations around, glimpses of scenes, sounds, smells, etc…” 

         This is an annotated map for one of Alÿs’s walks, titled, Guards.

Toop says, in his own write, “Urban space is divided up according to ideas of visual drama, social connectivity, and the pragmatics of movement, yet sound is taken for granted, forgotten, or ignored despite its vital role as an element in urban design. Sound is not reducible to a text, so not susceptible to ‘reading’.” 

I like that.