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Jeff Noon & David Toop: Needle In The Groove (Sulphur)

Ian Penman, The Wire, June 2000

AT A CERTAIN point in my journey through Jeff Noon and David Toop's shapeshifter alliance — an ingeniously treated setting of Noon's latest novel — I suddenly realised I wasn't listening to this as 'a spoken word record': things had unrolled otherwise into a slippery heart of darkness. Voodoo chill. Noon's words become sinuous mood buoys and Toop's scrapbook sound works up a clammy articulation all its own: they place you in this allegory like a dream or hallucination more than a dutiful exercise.

Total word count of piece: 854

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