David Toop / Max Eastley - New And Rediscovered Musical Instruments (Obscure, 1975)

A1 Max Eastley Hydrophone
A2 Max Eastley Metallophone
A3 Max Eastley The Centriphone
A4 Max Eastley Elastic Aerophone / Centriphone
B1 David Toop Do The Bathosphere
B2 David Toop The Divination Of The Bowhead Whale
B3 David Toop The Chairs Story

This might be as close as some music listeners ever get to Brian Eno, who both produces and gets involved in the actual music-making. Max Eastley and David Toop have both been immersed in creative music on the London scene for decades, expressing and furthermore acting out on their fascination with strange musical instruments from the past and future. This is the theme of this album, which although a bit gimmicky in places does provide a superbly recorded document of weird musical activities, in itself a good thing.

Eastley is some kind of genius when it comes to designing and building instruments. In his presentation of the hydrophone, the centriphone, and other delights, there is a sense if wonder, similar to the way a person might feel gazing upon the Parthenon for the very first time.

The album's title refers to just this reality, that the musical instruments of tomorrow, no matter how strange, will undoubtedly have some engineering link to the instruments of a very distant yesterday. It is more than just thought-provoking, as musical traditions have a way of actually materializing right in front of a performer's nose, like an unwanted poltergeist. It is Eastley who connects most solidly to this cosmic phenomenon in his set of brilliant performances.

The Toop sessions are an altogether different story, ranging from combinations of voice and ethnic instruments such as bamboo trumpets to a larger group recording that features Eno on prepared bass guitar playing alongside the avant-garde legend Hugh Davies and several interesting, obscure players from this period on the London scene. Toop plays some beautiful flute on the final track as well as some of his trademark water effects.
Eugene Chadbourne

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Peter Cusack & Max Eastley - Day For Night (Paradigm Discs, 2000)

1 Peep Show (9:37)
2 Day For Night (8:05)
3 Zero Day To Zero Night (4:54)
4 Cast (5:05)
5 Roomshine (4:52)
6 Arc Light (1:42)
7 Shade 1 (3:12)
8 Shade 2 (3:33)
9 Nest Of Wasps (6:23)

Day For Night is the culmination of 25 years of recording work by Cusack & Eastley, who have assembled a tapestry of recycled sounds and an archive of environmental recordings for this remarkable disc. While Cusack has spent his career in the studio and in performance groups, sound artist Max Eastley is probably best known for his collaborations with David Toop and Thomas Koner. Much of Eastley’s work is in making audio documents of his kinetic sculptures, meaning that amongst the atmospheric location recordings on this album, there are elements generated by motorised sound installations that give the listener an eerie sense of displacement: the vaporous cymbal drone of the title track gives way to the looped field recordings of campfires and distant squawking birds of its counterpart, ‘Zero Day To Zero Night’. The album closes on the actually rather terrifying ‘Nest of Wasps’, sounding very much informed by early musique concrete. The close-up recording of the wasps’ buzzing and rasping is modulated to the point where they seem to become saw wave synthesizer drones. Unnerving stuff, but a fittingly effective end to a powerful collection of electroacoustic works.
Boomkat

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