David Toop

A fascinating ninety-minute film capturing David Toop at home with his record collection, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden not only gives an insight into the sounds most important to the renowned composer, author and Wire journalist, it also lets you hear them for yourself, switching as it does between Toop in discussion about the music and isolated playback against a black screen. Being a very fine music journalist and theorist, Toop makes an excellent candidate for a film like this. He's unceasingly articulate and gives a great insight into some genuine obscurities from around the world.

Toop's LP collection boasts some incredible stuff, whether that be early electronic experiments by Richard Maxfield, AMM's intoxicating free music or Buddhist devotional chants. Further to all that you'll hear everything from documentary wildlife recordings (such as a mind-blowingly weird, most un-McCartney-like frog chorus, or an improbably mellifluous Venezuelan bird recording from the 1970s) to the sounds of purgatorial shamanic rites - how many of us can say we spend our leisure time not only listening to, but actually recording for ourselves an Amazonian vomiting ceremony? Aside from the material that gets played and talked about extensively, there's a variety of fascinating vinyl that gets pulled off the shelves - there's an Aleister Crowley 7" in there, a jaunty country song by Wendell Austin about his murderous LSD nightmares and audio trailers for Russ Meyer films. An especially intriguing moment arrives right at the end of film, when Toop brings out an album by '60s rock and roller Hasil Adkins in order to compare and contrast its reverberant, Suicide-like propulsions with the elemental electronics of Pan Sonic, who apparently, are big fans. There's plenty here for all you nerds out there to get your teeth into...