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*** OCEAN OF SOUND

(Virgin/UK import)

English composer and critic David Toop has assembled a top-notch, comprehensive, very listenable compilation of "ambient music" here. To understand what compelled him to pack King Tubby, Sun Ra, Debussy, and the sounds of howler monkeys (yes, actual primates, this isn't the name of a gothic-techno band) along with 28 others into a two-CD set would take a book to explain. So you should read Toop's Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary World (Serpent's Tail Books), a mindboggling and amazingly learned leap into the poetics of musical textures. In fact, it would have made sense to package the book and the CDs together: they work in tandem to present "ambient" as more than just a vague marketing category. Toop demonstrates how many composers have foregrounded atmospherics as a prime organizing principle, manifesting in music their desire to construct alternative and enlightening worlds.

-- Norman Weinstein