Musics: Thurston Moore & Dave Toop

Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) interviews author & musician David Toop, one of the principal editors of MUSICS Magazine — London’s very first zine for improvisers, which focused around the activities of sound art, field recording, free improvisation, live electronics, 20th century composition, and audio culture. Operating between 1975-79, with six issues per year, Musics was an interdisciplinary journal rooted in a true DIY ethic. The publication first launched in Spring of ’75, with the tagline: “an impromental experivisation arts magazine” and a manifesto that proposed the destruction of artificial boundaries. MUSICS was a blueprint for the interdisciplinary activities of sound art, field recording, free improvisation, live electronics, 20th century composition & audio culture. It came out six times a year and ran for twenty-three hand-assembled issues. The journal covered improvised and non-western music alongside performance art, reflecting the broad interests of the so-called “second generation” of London’s improvisers, and provided a convivial focus point. Overlapping with the London Musicians’ Collective (LMC), the publication first launched in Spring of 1975, with the tagline: “an impromental experivisation arts magazine” and a manifesto that proposed the destruction of artificial boundaries and linked Free Jazz, the academic ministrations of John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and K. Stockhausen and indigenous and non-European music. MUSICS was significant in the discussion of traditional Asian instruments as paths of equal value for the performance of musics. 

Thurston’s publishing imprint Ecstatic Peace Library will have copies of the  complete and bound facsimile of the magazine, featuring a foreword by Steve Beresford and an Introduction by David Toop.