Audika Records To Release Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs, From Iconic Composer/Musician David Toop And Collaborators, Today

Audika Records, famed for bringing the music of Arthur Russell to critical acclaim and a broad international audience, is pleased to announce a new release: Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs, directed and produced by composer/musician, author (Ocean of Sound,Into the Maelstrom: Improvisation, Music and the Dream of Freedom) and curator David Toop. The album, which Toop describes as a response to "our poisonous present," draws inspiration, anti-nostalgically, from similarly reactive records and live performances from the 20th century, including The Soft Machine and Pink Floyd circa 1967-68, The MC5's Kick Out the Jams, The Stooges, Sun Ra's Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapyand the Isley Brothers' The Heat Is On. Audika makes the recording available in multiple formats-16-track vinyl LP, 17-track CD, and 21-track download / stream-on October 20.

Featured on this singular concept album is Dirty Songs, "a psychedelic space rock soft soul free-improvising band," including Toop on bass, guitar, digital electronics and VCS3 synth; vocals by Phil Minton; Evan Parker on soprano and tenor saxophones; Steve Beresford on Farfisa organ and VCS3 synth; and Mark Sanders on drums.

Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs is the musical offshoot of a project conceived by visual artist Maxime Rossi, originating in (among other things) speculations on Pink Floyd's (then unreleased) legendary 1967 collaboration with conceptual artist John Latham and the 1964 FBI investigations into subversive and obscene messages supposedly buried within the recorded lyrics of The Kingsmen's "Louie Louie." Developed through conversations between Rossi and Toop and through support from Fondation Fiminco and the Musée régional d'art contemporain (MRAC) in Sérignan, France, these ideas metamorphosed into the band and recordings known as Dirty Songs, existing both as audio recordings and audiovisual elements of Rossi's installation Christmas On Earth Continued, which MRAC will exhibit in November of this year.

Ricocheting as a 1960s teenager between blues guitarist, art school dropout and psychedelic light shows, David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This practice encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes seven acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010) and Into the Maelstrom (2016), the latter a Guardian music book of the year, shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize.

Briefly a member of David Cunningham's pop project The Flying Lizards (his guitar can be heard sampled on "Water" by The Roots), he has released thirteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno's Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian's Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings on Lawrence English's ROOM40 (2016). The Wire called his 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual, released on Sun Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016), a "tsunami of weirdness," andPitchfork described his Entities Inertias Faint Beings as "an album about using sound to find one's own bearings . . . again and again, understated wisps of melody, harmony, and rhythm surface briefly and disappear just as quickly, sending out ripples that supercharge every corner of this lovely, engrossing album."

In the 1970s Toop performed with sound poet Bob Cobbing, butoh dancer Mitsutaka Ishii and drummer Paul Burwell, along with many key figures in improvisation, including Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Georgie Born, Hugh Davies, John Stevens and John Zorn. In recent years he has returned to collaborative performance, working with many artists and musicians including Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Max Eastley, Tania Chen, Ken Ikeda, Alasdair Roberts, Thurston Moore, Extended Organ (with Paul McCarthy and Tom Recchion) and a revived Alterations, the iconoclastic improvising quartet with Steve Beresford, Peter Cusack and Terry Day first formed in 1977. Major sound art exhibitions he has curated includeSonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery in London (2000) and Playing John Cage at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol (2005-6). In 2008, Sub Rosa released a DVD of the Belgian film I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Portrait of David Toop Through His Records Collection, and in 2017 Du Books in Japan published Toop's autobiography, Flutter Echo: Living Within Sound.

Dirty Songs Play Dirty Songs Track Listing

1. Dirty Air
2. Dirty Tricks
3. Dirty Bomb
4. Dirty Harry
5. Dirty Songs
6. Dirty Laundry
7. Dirty Mind
8. Dirty Little Secret
9. Dirty Needle
10. Dirty Protest
11. Dirty Hippies
12. Dirty Mouth
13. Dirty Lie
14. Dirty Plotte
15. Dirty Politics
16. Dirty Rat
17. Dirty Planet

Stream the Track "Dirty Harry" Here

Audika Records Album Preorder Here

To post a comment, you must register and login.