David Toop (born 1949) is one of the more adventurous and intelligent music critics of the late 20th century. He is coming to the Argos center (Werfstraat 13 rue du Chantier) in Brussels next Wednesday at 20:30. I hope I can make it. I’ve never heard him lecture. Here is an excerpt from his intro at Argos.arts.

“Seeing comes before words. The child sees and recognizes before it can speak.” These are the first two sentences of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. Berger defines sight as the primary human sense and introduces the idea that we find our place in the world through seeing. What this premise ignores is the fact that sound comes before seeing, and the child listens before it looks. In this lecture David Toop will investigate the position of sound in the realm of the senses, the relationship between hearing and seeing, between silence and not seeing. What did Marcel Duchamp mean when he proclaimed “one can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing”? Are we living in a visual age, as the cliché goes, or rather in an aural world? What can words and images tell us about sonic absences and hauntings? What are the challenges sound artists, who work in the domain of visual arts, are confronted with?” —argosarts.org

Here is Toop interviewing Bjork @ Youtube.