In 1780, an Italian physician named Luigi Galvani (hence, galvanism) conducted an experiment during which he touched the severed legs of a dead frog with a scalpel. The frog lay on a metal mount and Galvani was startled to see its leg twitch and spark when touched. He believed he had discovered innate animal electricity. The experiment’s dalliance with primal forces projects us forward to the early 19th century, to Mary Shelley who read of Galvani’s reanimated frog during the famous Swiss holiday in which Frankenstein’s monster first came to her in a ‘waking dream’.¹ Then again, like an electrical pulsation from deep time, the experiment projects forward to the 1960s, to Nam June Paik’s danger music and to the electromagnetic machines of Takis.²

Born Panayiotis Vassilakis in Greece, Takis discovered the potential for magnetism as a sculptural element in the late 1950s. During a period of research, in which he investigated the electromagnetic fields used by radar to detect the proximity of metallic objects, he realised the power of magnetism as both generator of movement and disruptor of gravity. Takis believed in the autonomy of materials, and his obsession with energy verged on mysticism. In a sense, he searched for his own hybrid creation, one that could articulate the vibrations of the cosmos. He became associated with kinetic sculpture, an art of movement whose practitioners included Liliane Lijn, Pol Bury, Julio Le Parc, Len Lye and Jean Tinguely. In 1965, by then based in Paris, he developed sculptures that made sound. Musicals (or Musicales) he called them – thin metal rods, like large needles, suspended close to a taut guitar string. These elements were activated by magnets, causing the needles to strike and bounce against the horizontal wire. A loudspeaker was embedded in the board on which the assemblage was mounted, amplifying unpredictability. By combining variants of these sculptures in his espace musicales environments, Takis created a dense forest of noise that enveloped those who entered. These were not human rhythms; they were ‘raw music’, speaking as if from some inchoate source.

Perhaps it was this embrace of a greater force that also attracted Nam June Paik. Both artists shared an interest in Zen Buddhism; both looked up to John Cage, whose study of Zen and Daoism had opened a door to listening. Silence was a new way to think about music. The composer need no longer be the controlling arbiter of all that happened. Instead, they could be the instigator of a process in which chance was given space to determine the nature of the work. ‘The emptiness or the nothing of Zen Buddhism is therefore not a simple negation of beings, nor a formula for nihilism or scepticism,’ writes philosopher Byung-Chul Han, ‘rather, it represents an utmost affirmation of being.’³ Paik had spent half a year in a Zen monastery in 1949, when he was 17 years old, subsequently applying what he had witnessed to his practice. His performance of Zen for Head, for example, performed in Wiesbaden in 1962, was an adaptation of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 (to Bob Morris), an instruction to ‘draw a straight line and follow it’. Paik dipped his head in ink and dragged it in a more-or-less straight track along a strip of paper laid out on the floor. Paik claimed he had seen a monk painting with his head during his stay in the monastery, an act that may have influenced this performance.

John Cage’s ideas resonated with Takis in the 1960s. As he said in one interview: ‘[He] composes like a musician, even in his incidental sounds.’⁴ Paik felt a similar sense of liberation through Cage’s work. Observing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s technical mastery, he had decided that this was impossible for him: Paik thought it was better to be a ‘stupid’ artist rather than striving for complete control over materials. Cage, on the other hand, gave him what he jokingly called a license to kill – in other words (James Bond style), he felt free to do whatever he liked. What was important for both artists was the integrity of ideas rather than technique. Both were provocateurs, working somewhere between science and shamanism. As psychoanalyst and political philosopher Félix Guattari suggested to Takis during a 1993 conversation: ‘I’ve noticed that there’s something rather paradoxical to your oeuvre: it involves a kind of research one might call machinic and therefore modern, electronic, informatic, based on science but which, at the same time, is also a sort of instrument with which to re-found the past, even the most archaic past.’⁵ The same could be said of Paik’s television pieces or his prepared pianos. They were radically contemporary and yet between them they tapped into worlds of folk knowledge and mediumship, Korean shamanism, ancient Greece, Egyptology and cosmology. This gave them both a grounding in more universal concerns.

On 20 June 1979, their differences and mutual resonances converged in an installation/performance called Duett. Held at Cologne’s Kölnischer Kunstverein, the event was recorded by composers Klarenz Barlow and Walter Zimmerman, then released in a limited vinyl pressing of 200 signed and numbered copies. Although the medium of distribution was familiar, the ‘music’ was not. This was a ‘paradox event’, as Zimmerman has called it.⁶ There were antecedents to be found in electronic music, free improvisation and other avant-garde genres, but Paik was adamant he ‘must renew the ontological form of music’.⁷ Some sense of what that means is evident in the recording of Duett. Paik plays piano and harpsichord, often humming to himself as if alluding both to Greek Orthodox chants and Glenn Gould’s notorious involuntary humming. He begins with Chopin, Waltz No. 9 in A-flat, then continues with Bach’s Invention 7 in E minor. His playing is educated but inexact. This rapid journey through Romantic, Baroque and the Middle Ages echoes the concert programming of so-called classical music, in which multiple eras of musical history are tightly compressed into a single evening’s entertainment. If the styles of many centuries can be crushed together in this way, then why not also embrace the noise produced by Takis’s mid-20th century electromagnetic artworks? This is exactly what happens. Paik’s erratic recital is disrupted (though seemingly untroubled) by crashing and clanking from the Takis sculptures.

As an auditory event the effect is perplexing. Though held together within the reverberant, near-empty space of the gallery, Takis’s increasingly sporadic interventions inhabit a parallel world to Paik’s increasingly wayward playing. For the recordists there was an extreme discrepancy of sound levels: ‘a harpsichord’, says Zimmerman, ‘which is very soft by nature compared with the huge metal bolt thundering down on Takis’s ship propellors, with loud noises. We had to take the loudness and softness at once into our recording.’ Added to that, the instruments were far apart so Paik had to walk between them; this may account for some of the silences. Human movement and machine movement influence the course of events but so does silence, by now a fully established component in the creation of sound work.

At this point in history, embedded as we are in what Byung-Chul Han calls ‘smooth objects’ – lacking in negativity, distance and critical thought – the dynamic yet often barely functioning objects made by Paik and Takis possess a magnetism that is both futuristic and antique. ⁸ They speak of an intense materiality, a world in which objects are so productively entangled with human desires, capacities and physical presence that they are almost human themselves. From a future now utterly transformed beyond recognition, their twitch and spark is raw, noisy, enthrallingly dangerous, monstrous even.

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David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, workshops, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, instrument making, sound art installations and opera. It includes nine acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Inflamed Invisible: Writing On Art and Sound (2019) and Two-Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr. John's Gris-gris (2024). Briefly a member of David Cunningham’s pop project The Flying Lizards in 1979, he has released fourteen solo albums, from New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975) and Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) to Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016) and Apparition Paintings (2021). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, John Butcher, Elaine Mitchener, Henry Grimes, Sidsel Endresen, Luke Fowler, Thurston Moore and Ryuichi Sakamoto. He is currently working as a duo – Moreskinsound – with butoh dancer Ania Psenitsnikova. Sound art exhibitions he has curated include ‘Sonic Boom’ at the Hayward Gallery (2000). He is Emeritus Professor at University of the Arts London.

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¹ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (introduction by the author), Wordsworth Classics, 1999, p. 4
² Danger music was a term associated with the Fluxus movement, notably Dick Higgins and Nam June Paik. Both artists devised pieces involving the physical destruction of instruments or, in the case of Paik’s Danger Music for Dick Higgins (1973), instruction pieces involving impossible tasks.
³ Byung-Chul Han, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, Polity Press, 2022, p. 32
⁴ Takis in conversation with Maïten Bouisset, in Guy Brett and Micheal Wellen (eds.), Takis, Tate Publishing, London, 2019, p. 117
⁵ ‘Takis and Félix Guattari in conversation’, Honey Luard and Elaine Tam (eds.), Companion 4, White Cube, 2024
⁶ All quotes by Walter Zimmerman in this essay issue from an unpublished exchange with the writer, March 2026.
⁷ Nam June Paik, ‘Postmusic’, The Monthly Review of the University of Avant-garde Hinduism, Fluxus, 1963.
⁸ Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, Polity Press, 2018, p. 1