David Toop Paul Burwell - Suttle Sculpture (2018)

Never released before recordings from Logos Foundation live sessions in Brussels, on May 7, 1977. When Paul Burwell and I started playing together just after Christmas, 1969, we found ourselves wrestling with a new language of sound, listening, actions, objects and space. At first it was music. We studied in the improvisation classes given by John Stevens at Ealing College in 1971-2, also took classes in African music at London's Africa Centre. Most of the musicians lasted only one or two sessions so we resigned ourselves to being a duo and worked out an approach to free improvisation that expanded from simple structures and instrument combinations. Decomposition, we called it. We had worked intensively together, searching for techniques through which to decondition ourselves from orthodoxies, devising exercises in listening and instrument building, studying esoteric organology, bioacoustics, environmental sound, raw musics and anthropology. We were both fascinated by phenomena like diffraction, propulsion, resonance, projection, masking and heterodyning, and by shamanism, the symbolically grounded agency of shamanic drums, animal-becoming and noisy costume, the shaman's capacity to enliven quotidian space with the commotion of discarnate audible entities from the spirit world. This recording is one of the very few that conveys anything of what we were about. David Toop.