Newcomers interested in exploring experimental music's maze of genres should start with David Toop's latest book and CD, Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory (Serpent's Tail). A crash course in the current scene, Haunted Weather profiles dozens of significant sound artists--including Evan Parker, John Oswald, Christian Marclay, autechre, Chris Watson, and Oval--and probes how silence, space, memory, and technology exert an inextricable influence on plunderphonics, soundscape composition, glitch, generative music, sound installations, free improvisation, and poésie sonore.

As in his fine 1995 book, Ocean of Sound, Toop rhapsodizes and roams widely, connecting his segments with quotes from novels, scientific treatises, personal anecdotes, and reflections on the famous tales of 20th-century music such as John Cage's visit to a soundproof anechoic chamber. Haunted Weather's highlights range from the concise example of "stochastic resonance" to examining Bernard Schulz's work with infrasound to Toop's dead-on description of electronic music as "a field haunted through its history by the deathly consequences of unlimited order, reason and control."

The companion double-CD compilation, Haunted Weather (Staubgold), is stuffed with standout tracks licensed from the scene's leading labels. I particularly liked the buzzing chimes of Fennesz's "Caecilia"; Chris Watson's ponderously creaky field recording "Vatnajökull"; the tumbling theremin tones of Kaffe Matthews' "Clean Tone Falling"; and Alvin Lucier's crackling "Sferics," heard locally as the theme of James Wood's yet-to-be replaced radio show The Outer Limits on KCMU (now KEXP) in the mid-1990s.

To his credit, Toop makes no pretensions to completeness. I wish Haunted Weather had touched more on lowercase sound--Bernhard Günter, Francisco López, and Steve Roden emerge but briefly--yet swimming in Toop's sea of erudition is a good start. Essential reading and listening for anyone interested in adventurous music. CHRISTOPHER DeLAURENTI

chris@delaurenti.net