In 1974, New/Rediscovered Musical Instruments was published as a small-press book featuring the inventions of Hugh Davies, Max Eastley, Paul Burwell, Evan Parker, Paul Lytton and David Toop. This modest volume began a 40-year ongoing conversation between Evan Parker and David Toop, founded in their love of global musics and esoteric auditory techniques and technologies. For the first time they will take this conversation to the stage, playing records from their extensive and rare collections as a live event. They may even talk. To quote Donald Fagen: “We do what we come to do.”

DAVID TOOP

David Toop is a musician, composer, author and Chair of Audio Culture and Improvisation at University of the Arts London. He was a member of The Flying Lizards and a prominent contributor to The Face and The Wire Magazines. He has published five books, including Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather, and Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener.



He released eight solo albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Black Chamber and Sound Body. And curated several exhibitions including; Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, PlayingJohn Cage at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Blow Up at Flat-Time House, London. Musicians he has worked with include Brian Eno, John Zorn, Prince Far I, Jon Hassell, Derek Bailey, Talvin Singh, Evan Parker, David Cunningham, Scanner, Ivor Cutler, Akio Suzuki, Jin Hi Kim, Frank Chickens, Alasdair Roberts and Henry Grimes.

Having composed and written a 90-minute chamber opera, Star-shaped Biscuit, under the auspices of a Jerwood Foundation/Adeburgh Music fellowship, he is currently developing music-theatre works for live voice, HD video and digital sound. He is also researching and writing a new book – Into the Maelstrom: Improvised Music In Pursuit of Freedom.

davidtoopblog.com

EVAN PARKER

"ln The Human Province, Elias Canetti writes "lt is not enough to think, one also has to breathe. Dangerous are the thinkers who have not breathed enough." In Evan Parker's music, thought and breath are continuous, each the instrument and measure of the other." Stuart Broomer, Coda 1995

Evan Parker has been a consistently innovative presence in British free music since the 1960s. Parker played with John Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, experimenting with new kinds of group improvisation and held a long-standing partnership with guitarist Derek Bailey. The two formed the Music Improvisation Company and later Incus Records. He also has tight associations with European free improvisations - playing on Peter Brötzmann's legendary 'Machine Gun' session (1968), with Alexander Von Schlippenbach and Paul Lovens (A trio that continues to this day), Globe Unity Orchestra, Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, and Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra (LJCO).



Though he has worked extensively in both large and small ensembles, Parker is perhaps best known for his solo soprano saxophone music, a singular body of work that in recent years has centred around his continuing exploration of techniques such as circular breathing, split tonguing, overblowing, multiphonics and cross-pattern fingering. These are technical devices, yet Parker's use of them is, he says, less analytical than intuitive; he has likened performing his solo work to entering a kind of trance-state. The resulting music is certainly hypnotic, an uninterrupted flow of snaky, densely-textured sound that Parker has described as "the illusion of polyphony". Many listeners have indeed found it hard to credit that one man can create such intricate, complex music in real time.