avid Toop is principally known as a music critic for The Wire and the author of books on ambient music (Ocean of Sounds), exotica (Exotica), and rap (Rap Attack, volumes 1, 2, and 3). He's also released a series of albums, some well received and some not (though none really as well received as his books, to be honest). Now, I don't know enough about Toop to speak of him with any authority, but I sense that, like a lot of people who write about music, he always fancied himself a musician first, a journalist second. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, though, as Simon Reynolds notes, there are a lot of good musicians out there and a limited number of writers writing about (and telling people about) these artists. Judging by the efforts on Black Chamber, I think I'd side with Reynolds and say that Toop should stick to writing.


This is a work littered with the sounds of nature, of voices, and of popular culture, yet it is also an undeniably musical work, filled with free jazz saxophone improvisation, orchestral strings, organs, pipes, and cymbals—all wrapped around an electronic fuzz of noise, aberrant synth wails, and other fluttering, digitally-enhanced ambient sounds. In comparison to other works of "ambient fusion" (or whatever you want to call something that combines field recordings with musical compositions), Black Chamber seems oddly stilted, as though Toop wants to fuse these disparate parts together into some sort of collective whole, to make some sort of Cageian statement about sound and our relationship to music and life, yet never quite figured out how exactly to combine sax solo A with chicken squawk B in such a way that they fuse into aesthetic insight C.


There are, to be sure, some beautiful and eerie passages here, moments that make me stop what I'm doing and close my eyes, shutting out vision so I can best listen to and absorb the amazing sounds. One of those moments is "Blind Eel Priestess," a work that features what sounds like a koto (though the instrument is not mentioned in the liner notes, so I could be wrong) plucked over a distorted rain shower of static. I like this track because the electrical noise seems to blend nicely with a plucked instrument, creating two showers: one electronic, one acoustic. There are other tracks (the later ones, mostly) that do effectively blend the disparate parts together into an interesting whole. However, these interesting tracks are the exception, not the norm. Most of the album left me indifferent at best, annoyed at worst.


The liner notes to this CD note that the "black chamber (kurodo) is a room where the emperor from Komatsu after his accession to the throne always cooked for himself, still remembering how in the past, when he was a private person, he had dabbled in cookery. They say it is called the Black Chamber because it has become sooty from kindling smoke." The Japanese tone found on the later tracks seems to take its cue from this description, and the chime and cymbal sounds spread throughout suggest the sounds of pots being struck by utensils. Too bad he didn't just stick with that motif—one person, a kitchen, memories, and appliances. That would have made an interesting work.