Sinister Resonance The Mediumship of the Listener

by Toop, David

• ISBN13: 9781441155870
• ISBN10: 1441155872
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-20
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Sinister Resonance begins with the premise that sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location is ambiguous and whose existence is transitory. The intangibility of sound is uncanny - a phenomenal presence in the head, at its point of source and all around. The close listener is like a medium who draws out substance from that which is not entirely there. The history of listening must be constructed from the narratives of myth and fiction, 'silent' arts such as painting, the resonance of architecture, auditory artefacts and nature. In such contexts, sound often functions as a metaphor for mystical revelation, forbidden desires, formlessness, the unknown, and the unconscious. As if reading a map of hitherto unexplored territory, Sinister Resonance deciphers sounds and silences buried within the ghostly horrors of Arthur Machen, Shirley Jackson, Charles Dickens, M.R. James and Edgar Allen Poe, Dutch genre painting from Rembrandt to Vermeer, artists as diverse as Francis Bacon and Juan Munoz, and the writing of many modernist authors including Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and James Joyce.

Author Biography

David Topp is a musician writer, and sound curator. His acclaimed books include Rap Attack, Ocean of Sound, Exotica and Hunted Weather. His writing has also appeared in The Wire Bookforum, and the New York Times. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

Prelude: Distant Music	p. vii
Aeriel-Notes Toward a History of Listening	p. 1
Drowned by voices	p. 3
Each echoing opening; each muffled closure	p. 27
Dark senses	p. 39
Writing sigla	p. 53
The jagged dog	p. 58
Vessels and Volumes	p. 65
Act of silence	p. 67
Art of silence	p. 73
A conversation piece	p. 107
Spectral	p. 123
Chair creaks, but no one sits there	p. 125
Interior Resonance	p. 179
Snow falling on snow	p. 181
Coda: Distant Music	p. 231
Acknowledgments	p. 234
Notes	p. 237
Index	p. 253
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