Before we listen to "night leaves breathing" of the English composer during the "Meditations" concert, we join forces with Łukasz Komła from NowaMuzyka.pl and the The Płyty (nie)słuchane blog to present the English artist’s profile. Have a look!

“Sounds cycle, over time; sounds slither through time, disguised as pitch relationships. Like qualities of air, sounds meet and become each other. The sound seems to rise, though this is an illusion. Although the sound seems to mirror patterns in the observable world, the sound is learning the order of things. The sound is learning to develop, to think, to live,” wrote David Toop in “Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music” (ed. Christoph Cox, Daniel Warner).

Born in 1949, the British scholar, musician, curator and professor is regarded as one of the leading theoreticians writing about contemporary music today. His books about hip hop, “Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop” (1984) and the two follow-ups “Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop” (1992) and “Rap Attack 3” (2000), provided a brand new perspective on pop culture of the time.

Toop’s other works, “Ocean of Sound” (1995) and “Haunted Weather” (2004), are canonical discourses on different musical genres (ambient, drum & bass, techno, improvised and contemporary music) taking a fresh, original look at modern culture. As well as being an acclaimed author, in the late 1970s Toop organised one of the first ambient music festivals in the UK and he was a member of the Flying Lizards collective of avant-garde and improvising musicians founded by David Cunningham. Their remarkable repertoire stood out for its postmodernist covers of tracks such as James Brown’s “Sexmachine” and Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”. The Flying Lizards’ first album, released in 1979, also features their take on Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues”. The group recorded just four albums, which were finally re-released in 2010 by the German label Staubgold.

Prior to his collaboration with the Flying Lizards, Toop joined forces with Max Eastley to record the seminal album “New & Rediscovered Musical Instruments” (1975). The artists worked together again in 1994 on “Buried Dreams” and, a decade later, on “Doll Creature”.

Toop is an active author and columnist writing for journals such as “The Wire”, “Leonardo Music Journal”, “The Face” and “Village Voice”. He is a lecturer at the London College of Communication and the author of the groundbreaking “Not Necessarily English Music: A Collection of Experimental Music from Great Britain, 1960-1977”.

In 2016 he published another important book, “Into the Maelstrom: Music, Improvisation and the Dream of Freedom: Before 1970”, and the album “Entities Inertias Faint Beings” released by Lawrence English’s Room40 label. The material brings together recordings made at different periods of Toop’s life. The artist’s varied influences include gagaku music from Japan, Buddhist rituals from Bhutan, Korean Confucianism and books and silent films by Yasujirō Ozu. The whole album acts as a catalyst for atomised soundscapes created against the backgrounds of different fields of art and science.