David Toop — Doll Creature

Max Easley and David Toop are two improvising musicians in the field of contemporary electronics and composition. Toop has had a long and distinguished career as a musicologist, authoring the critically acclaimed books Ocean of sound, Exotica and Rap attack. His most recent publication is Haunted weather. Max Eastley is better know as a creator of sound sculptures for art installations, and has displayed his work across the UK and abroad. 

Here the duo create a soundtrack to the short life of a fictional character, the Doll Creature. Part baby, part machine, walking through a broken urban landscape full of decay. The style is quite minimalist compared to Toops previous works Pink Noir, Screen Ceremonies, and Black Chamber, and is at face value a more atonal and academic work.

The album begins with Mouthful of silence, a very atonal track that is composed of tuned static and sine tones, over which various electronics are deployed. There isn’t much to grab you to begin with, and you get the impression that the artists are attempting to recreate the desolate urban environment literally, rather than an abstraction to paint a picture of the Doll creatures world. It’s as if a microphone has been left on the ground of a alleyway in a bladerunner like city.
Eyelash turned inwards runs a similar course but with some interesting concrete elements that sound like rubbish being dragged across a stone floor.  Sounds to evoke the image of the creatures broken frame moving through the landscape. Many of the tracks follow a similar path, using very stark electronic textures and developing them with the use of some of Eastley’s sound sculptures. 
Toop also makes use of various Flutes, processed guitar and tubes to produce a myriad of industrial and organic sounds that interact with the more overt electronics in ways that range from the evocative to the unnerving.  Tracks like Flooded garden, Three sand voices and Moth Cinema have a haunted feel about them that don’t make for particularly light listening.

Indeed the darkness closes in further on the ninth track Metamorphoses of tabanus bovinis where eastern tones and wind instruments are used alongside pulsing drones and distant crashing noise.
Dust of points and Graphite in Prussic are two of the stand out track where the interesting use of odd percussion and effects push the music into Organum territory. An almost live feel to the music adds to the sense of tension and dread as Doll creature nears it’s end.
Iris, Swimmer, Dreamless is more like Toops solo work Black chamber. All claustrophobic combinations of field recordings, minimal electronics and strange old-world instruments. The final track Vital Flow Meters is the end of the line for the doll creature which according to the accompanying  narrative in the sleeve notes "…is the new monument, silhouetted against a graphite sky".

Not an easy album even by Toops standards, not a hint of melody to be found. It’s the sort of improvised musique concrete that will find admirers in short supply but those with a sympathetic ear may find beauty in the dark life of the Doll creature.