David Toop

In early 2015 Christian Marclay turned White Cube Bermondsey into a working space for sound. His solo exhibition, open from 28 January to 12 April, gathered works about glass and drinking. Among them were the video installation Pub Crawl, where he coaxes sounds from bottles, cans and glasses left on East London pavements, and the silent film room Surround Sounds. Every weekend musicians performed in the galleries, free and open to the public, some of them with commissions for the London Sinfonietta. The Vinyl Factory pressed each concert on site with its mobile VF Press, and Coriander Studio screen-printed Marclay's sleeves. Fifteen records came out of the run. This is the second, a solo set by David Toop from the opening weekend.

Toop is a London composer, improviser, writer and curator, author of Ocean of Sound and Haunted Weather. His work has taken him from recording Yanomami shamanism in Amazonas to the opera Star-shaped Biscuit, staged in Aldeburgh in 2012, and his collaborators range from Evan Parker to Akio Suzuki. At the time he held the University of the Arts London chair of Audio Culture and Improvisation, and the performance is archived in the university's research repository. On Saturday 31 January 2015 he played The Myriad Creatures will be Transformed of Their own Accord, a solo piece made for Marclay's series. The credits list strings, autonomous devices, water and air, digital electronics, percussive objects, Korean paper and glass vessels. The sound comes from materials as much as from instruments, close to the show's own interest in containers and what they hold. The piece runs across both sides, about twenty minutes on the first and eleven on the second. Flo Kaufmann recorded the set and cut the lacquer, and the runout grooves still carry the date of the concert. In 2024 Marclay and White Cube gave the complete series of fifteen records to the Centre Pompidou, which catalogues this one as the second session.

Black vinyl LP, hand pressed on The Vinyl Factory Press, in a sleeve with artwork by Christian Marclay screen-printed by Coriander Studio, with a silkscreened A-side label. Limited edition of 500 copies.