Toop interview in BOMB on the launch of his book ... Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener,

quoting Toop ...'I was wondering what the nature of listening actually is. It’s an everyday experience, not necessarily a special thing, but it has elements of the uncanny about it because sound is so fleeting. Where does it exist in space? Where does it come from? It’s one of the peculiarities of listening that when we can’t identify the source of the sounds we’re hearing, we make assumptions, and, of course, that leads to ambiguity. That’s accentuated by the fact that sound seems to be at its source, all around us, and in our heads simultaneously. There’s a strong overlap there among what exists, what we think of as the real, and what may be auditory hallucinations. All this material is mixing in our mind with the constant flow of thoughts. The term I came up with was mediumship—there was some sort of power there. As we listen we’re trying to draw out information from something that has already passed, and was ambiguous anyway. This seemed to fit with the notion that the representation of sounding events or listening experiences can exist in silent media. It’s not so big a jump to think of literature in that way, because it’s a verbalization of experience. But a 17th-century painting is a bigger jump..'

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