have been haunted for 15 years by these words: “Very often if I was given the choice of listening to a piece of music I really liked or listening to nothing at all, I would choose nothing at all. … These days I don’t listen to a lot of music, and I find a lot of pleasure in no music. There’s a kind of silence and just hearing some conversation from outside, or hearing a police car in the distance, just these fragments of daily life are very poetic and very peaceful somehow.” They were spoken by Britisher David Toop, confirmed musichead, someone who has spent—at the end of the day prefer regular sounds that would not even fit the dictionary definition of music? I could see no possibility of ever coming around to his point of view, or ever wanting to, but Toop’s words stayed with me, like a riddle I could neither solve nor forget.
