Two Nights of Beckett at the Bike Shed

Last week I enjoyed two nights of Samuel Beckett plays at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter, part of a Beckett-centric season entitled, presumably with a certain amount of irony, Winter Warmed. The first evening brought together four works, two from the latter part of the 50s and one each from the 60s and 70s. Connections and common currents became readily apparent, and it was evident that the programme had been chosen with great care and well-informed consideration. The first half consisted of readings of or from two plays written for radio: All That Fall (first broadcast on 13th January 1957) and Embers (broadcast 24th June 1959). They were both performed by members of local company The Uncommon Players, who have brought their productions to all corners of Devon (and beyond) both inside and out for many years now.



The actors dressed in character but read from their scripts, so this fell somewhere between a stage performance and a recreation of the conditions of a radio recording. It was a rare opportunity to see these works on stage, and would have been all the more unusual (and unlikely) in Beckett’s lifetime. Always particular about the way in which his plays were interpreted (to the letter being his preference), he even turned down a request by Ingmar Bergman to produce theatrical versions of All That Fall and Embers in 1963. Bergman’s interest in them points to an intriguing connection between their work, and makes you wonder at the extent to which Beckett’s plays informed Bergman’s films at this time (Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence came out in 1961, 62 and 63), and influenced his progression towards a pared down, internally focussed modernism towards the end of the decade (Persona, Hour of the Wolf and especially The Rite).

Desmond Briscoe at the controls

The sound mixer played a most important part from his little corner, hunched over in the steely glow of his laptop. He produced the soundworld which is so central to these works. All That Fall in particular was instrumental in providing the impetus behind the formation of the Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, the establishment of which Daphne Oram and others had been working so hard to achieve. Having been asked by BBC drama producer Donald McWhinnie to write a piece for radio, Beckett became enthusiastic about the possibilities of sound carefully and consciously employed as an integral part of the overall texture and meaning of the drama. Studio engineer Desmond Briscoe was brought in to realise the sonic directions in Beckett’s script. He was familiar with the work of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry at the RTF (the French national radio) studios in Paris, and their creation of what they termed musique concrète from the recorded sounds of the world (be they train whistles, human breaths, saucepan lids, spinning tops or any other of the sounds they used in early pieces). McWhinnie had even gone over to the studios to meet the two pioneering engineer/composers in preparation for the recording of Beckett’s play, and Douglas Cleverdon, another drama producer, had a particular interest in concrète sounds, having broadcast one of the earliest concerts of the new music, recorded at RTF, on the Third Programme in 1955. Briscoe’s subtle manipulation of the sound sources in All That Fall give them a slight unreal quality, giving them a sense of being at a remove from objective reality, sounds perceived through (or perhaps generated from) the mind of the play’s protagonist Mrs Rooney. All That Fall proved a big critical success, and the evident delight displayed by an artist of Beckett’s stature at the potential of the studio to bring new dimensions to his drama significantly furthered the case for an electronic music and sound effects department being established within the BBC. The Radiophonic Workshop would open a year later in 1958, with Desmond Briscoe soon becoming its head.



In the short extract of All That Fall performed at the Bike Shed, we didn’t get to hear some of the more startling effects, such as the long anticipated arrival of the train at Boghill Station. In the original broadcast, its hissing exhalations of steam and screeching of brakes were amplified and sculpted with echo, delay and feedback until it sounded like some great beast heralding approaching disaster. We did get to hear the establishing rural sounds of chickens and other farm animals. However, actual recordings were used in this case rather than the Percy Thrower-style human impersonations which began the original broadcast, again setting our perception of the world slightly askew. There was also a snatch of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet, one of Beckett’s favourite pieces of music, which emanates from a run-down house which Mrs Rooney passes. She also cues the sound of a dove (‘leave me, listening to the sound of the ring doves’) which have previously gone unheard, once more suggesting that we are perceiving the world through the filter of her sensorium, and her mind, which occasionally retracts to experience a more inward reality. Gillie Stoneham, the actress playing Mrs Rooney, provides the heavy shuffling of feet which marks out her weary via dolorosa towards the station to meet her blind husband. The sound of effortful steps, measuring out distance and steady progress, recur in Embers and become the rhythmic focus of his late piece Footfalls.

Mrs Rooney is one of Beckett’s reflexive chatterers or self-dramatisers, like the half-buried Winnie in Happy Days, the similarly immobile Hamm in Endgame, and Henry in Embers. The latter is told that his daughter once asked ‘why does daddy keep on talking all the time?’ Unlike the relentlessly, defiantly cheerful optimism of Winnie, however, Mrs Rooney emphasises the negative to the point of positively relishing it. Her voluble suffering takes on a comical aspect, brought out particularly well in Stoneham’s performance, through its repeated and emphatic articulation, and later on (beyond the span of this extract) through her loud declarations of wounded dignity as she is manhandled like a piece of baggage or believes herself ignored. The physicality of existence is brought to the fore, as is its ongoing processes of erosion and decay. Christy’s cart piled high with dung which Mrs Rooney passes at the start of the play presents pungently earthy evidence of the trail of waste mounded up in the course of a life. She suggests he perch on top, mount his own dung throne from which he can be king of his own shitheap and survey the surrounding territory. Mrs Rooney’s struggle with her declining and ungainly physical form is both comic and tragic. It resembles a slowed down version of the battles with the intransigent matter of the everyday world which the great silent film comedians (Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy) would intently engage in at every turn. Indeed, there’s something Oliver Hardyesque about her, albeit in a female Irish incarnation. Beckett would go on to a rather uneasy collaboration with Buster Keaton in his 1965 film, reductively entitled Film, which made clear his debt at the same time as it demonstrated the unlikelihood of Keaton ever comprehending it. Mr Tylor’s bike, with its flat back tyre, and Christy’s stubbornly stationary hinny (the offspring between a female donkey and a male horse) are the first examples of the slowing down and disintegration of the substance of the world. Mrs Rooney encounters along them along her way to the station, and they can all be regarded as an extension of her own state. In the end, she joins with her blind, austere and miserly husband to retrace her steps back home. They become another of Beckett’s complementary pairings, abrasive but interdependent. They seem destined to retreat further inward, shutting out the world beyond their narrow twin orbit (‘we shall draw the blinds’, Mr Rooney says at the end) like Clov and Hamm in Endgame.

Buster Keaton in Film

Having had a mere morsel of All That Fall as a starter, we got to enjoy Embers in its entirety. This was another piece written for radio, once more produced by Donald McWhinnie for the BBC Third Programme and first broadcast on 24th June 1959, with Jack Macgowran in the principal role of Henry, and Patrick Magee providing the voice of the abusive music teacher. Macgowran and Magee were two of Beckett’s favourite actors and interpreters of his work. They appeared together in a 1964 production of Endgame, with Macgowran playing the servile Clov and Magee the dictatorial Hamm. Macgowran also played something of a Hamm-type character in Roman Polanski’s Cul de Sac, in itself a film greatly influenced by Beckett, Pinter and the theatre of the absurd, as the title makes clear. Macgowran’s 1966 LP of Beckett readings, which includes extracts from Embers and Endgame (and which I bought from the Exeter Oxfam music and art shop a couple of months ago) can be found on ubuweb. You can also hear his extraordinary performance in the original Embers there. It’s wrongly ascribed to Magee, and it’s true that Macgowran’s voice does indeed have the dolorous intonations of the Northern Irish actor here. Macgowran’s Henry speaks with an enervated whine, which makes it all the more shocking when he launches into a raw and full throated holler worthy of Captain Beefheart. The Uncommon Players’ Martin Reeve (who also directed both Embers and All That Fall) voiced Henry with a rather more forceful and bitter tone, his changes in register coming across as an amplification of his simmering resentment.



The sound in the original broadcast was again created by Desmond Briscoe, now as part of the Radiophonic Workshop a year after its opening. He gives the constant background susurration of the sea a burnished electronic aura. It sounds like the rising and falling hum and drone of electricity substations or pylon cables in the wind, producing an analogue imitation of human respiration. It gives an impression of a haunted half-world, a shore on the dividing line between life and somewhere beyond, the conscious and the unconscious mind. Henry feels compelled to tell the imagined shade of his dead father ‘that sound you hear is the sea’, going on to add ‘I mention it because the sound is so strange’. The Bike Shed engineer restricted himself to a more straightforward, unprocessed (unradiophonicised?) recording of waves breaking and receding along a pebbled shore. This continued throughout, occasionally asserting itself with a rise in volume before dying down into the background once more.

Footsteps here are lent a brittle reverb by crunch of shingle on the beach. In this production the sound was created live by Reeve, who shuffled his feet in a trayful of cat litter, or some such aggregate. This had the effect of pulling back the magician’s curtain and allowing us to see how the illusion was made. This literal disillusionment did offer an insight into the world of the foley artist, but, having noted it, it proved more effective to close one’s eyes after a while and recreate the original conditions of the radio (sounds coming out of the dark, as Beckett put it). Reeves’ Henry also followed his own barked out stage directions and stood or sat as ordered (‘down’ or ‘on’). The dramatic element was largely extraneous, although unavoidable in such a context.

The steady continuum of the waves’ inhalation and exhalation was contrasted by the odd intrusion of clattering hooves. These were cued by Henry, who raised his voice in a commanding, directorial manner. As with Mrs Rooney and her doves, this suggested a reality constructed within the mind as much as externally perceived. They sharply and unforgivingly delineated the passing moments with a succession of short, non-resonant sounds, Henry at one point wondering of a horse if it would be possible to ‘train it to mark time. Time and mortality is thus set against the eternal, the unceasing waves from which voices of the past emerge. From this ocean, both internal and external (the circulating tides of sea and blood) emerges Ada, Henry’s dead wife. She is voiced with distanced frailty by Gillie Stoneham, much palpably present than she was as Mrs Rooney in All That Fall. She sat at the back to the left, far apart from Henry, who was positioned slightly to the right of stage front centre, and the two never met each other’s abstracted gaze. Her voice was drained of all colour and tonal variation, sounding as if it were weakly tuned in from the aether, the signal likely to fade out at any moment. Beckett’s script specifies that she is to speak in a ‘low remote voice throughout’. She is one of the earlisst of a series of ghosts which inhabit Beckett’s twilight worlds. They are locked into repetitive actions and circumscribed orbits, raking over old memories indelibly stained with guilt. We were to encounter another such spectral figure, dressed in a nightshirt winding sheet, in A Piece of Monologue, and they also manifest themselves in late works like Footfall and Ghost Trio. The idea of souls trapped in purgatories or hells, inhabiting moments from the past in looped repetition is also found in Play (in which they are encased in large urns), which reflects Beckett’s lifelong love of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Breath, from 1969, was originally written as ironic introit to Kenneth Tynan’s revue Oh Calcutta, his celebration of the decade’s sexual liberations which loudly promised plenty of onstage nudity. Beckett fell out with Tynan over what he saw as a failure to respect the integrity of his stage instructions. Since then, it has been seen (if at all) extracted from the specific context for which it was created. It bears some relation to the contemporaneous conceptual pranks of the Fluxus artists, or indeed of the Dadaists in the early decades of the century. In its paring down of the elements of theatre to their absolute bare essence, it is the most extreme of his works, and bears comparison with John Cage’s 4’33, the ‘silent’ piece which in fact comprises the sounds which fill silence and demonstrate its impossibility. It probably takes longer to read on the page than it does to witness. It begins with what Beckett describes as ‘an instant of recorded vagitus’. This means the cry of a newborn baby. The word derives from the Roman deity Vagitanus, the protector of the newborn who brings forth their first cry as they enter the world. The baby’s cry is immediately conjoined with a long indrawn breath and subsequent exhalation. It’s a concise encapsulation of the span of a life, a brief arc of birth, growth, decline and finally silence, and acts as a reductio ad absurdum of Beckett’s themes and preoccupations. Language is erased, completing the processes of editing and simplification to which he’d subjected in previous work, and expanding the pauses and silences which were a regular punctuation until they engulf everything else. The ‘miscellaneous rubbish’ scattered across the stage is a further instance of the material detritus which litters Beckett’s plays (and which Hamm discards at the conclusion of Endgame). The fading up and back down again of the theatre light (a naked bulb suspended above the audience in this case) reflects the importance of light and darkness in the plays. This is carried through into the next work, A Piece of Monologue, with its fading down of the light moments before the end, and also takes us back to the dying firelight of the dimly glowing coals in Embers. The birth cry morphing into the ascending inhalation of life and the declining exhalation leading to death also finds expression in the fist line of the Monologue, ‘birth was the death of him’.



The stage set up for this Breath followed Beckett’s instructions that there should be ‘no verticals’. This is the randomly accumulated junk of an unplanned life and should be inherently disordered (even the appearance of disorder requires conscious ordering). It looked like the kind of art installation which gets accidentally cleared away by the cleaners. Brown ribbons of magnetic tape were strewn around like drab or time-stained bunting. This was presumably a reference to Krapp’s Last Tape (which has been performed previously at the Bike Shed) and the medium through which its protagonist listens to his filed and indexed memories, recorded on spools which have here been unravelled and effectively erased. The silence following Breath was punctuated by a few disbelieving titters and tentative applause, which goes to show that it still has the power to provoke both ridicule and surprise. Its very brevity, and the greater amount of time which went into the preparation of its short span on the stage and its subsequent clearing away, made this a pointed and soberingly poignant 40 seconds or so.

A perhaps mildly disgruntled audience was obliged to file out after Breath had expired, having only just come into to hear its initial amplified filling of the lungs. When they returned (I’d sneakily remained lurking in the shadows at the back) the clutter was gone, replaced by a single dim globe of light in the centre of the stage. A man stood to the front left corner of the stage and began uttering the tattered sentences of his monologue. This was Les Read, a retired drama lecturer from Exeter University who was here putting his academic expertise to practical use. He took on the not inconsiderable challenge of performing the solo Piece of Monologue, which Beckett had first written for the English actor David Warrilow in 1979. The isolated narrator remains stock still throughout, the audience’s attention focussed directly upon him and away from the central globe of light which dimly casts its glow over him. He is a man who has retreated to the shadows at the margins, and that is the territory into which we are led.

The Monologue finds another spectral figure marking out the boundaries of a confined space, going through repetitive rituals involving the lighting and extinguishing of a wick-burning lamp. This unnamed character is a ghost fixed upon its unvarying track, and it’s possible that the grave he repeatedly recalls seeing is his own. The clearing away of Breath’s detritus can almost be seen as a thematic preparation for this piece. Our narrator talks of facing a blank wall from which pictures have gradually been torn to be left strewn over the floor in a shredded drift. They are memories stripped away to reveal the underlying blankness, and the complete isolation of the narrator’s ghostly half-life. As in Endgame, there is a window which looks out from the confined space of the room onto a world beyond. But it is an inaccessible world, mysterious and dark, ‘that black beyond’. The world has itself become immaterial, ghostly, and all is now compressed into this small room, life reduced to the habitual movements which are enacted within it. The concentration on the details of daily (or nightly) observances has a compulsive aspect to it which seems to be an attempt to block out painful recollection. Hence the repeated phrase ‘he all but said of his loved ones’, a drawing back from emotional articulation or specific memory. An intriguing extra element inadvertently introduced on this night was the intrusion of the prompter on the odd occasion when Reed came to a halt (and aside from these few instances, his performance was exemplary). This was understandable, given the dense, repetitive nature of the language, composed of short phrases with few definite articles and laid out on the page in a solid block of text. Whilst his presence was obviously a matter of practicality, the prompter became a voice from the outer darkness penetrating the narrator’s isolation, prodding him on to continue when he showed signs of fading. A semi-divine force or perhaps just an attempt at human contact, its gentle Devonian accent suggested a benevolent attempt to break through. This definitely positioned it as an invasive presence in Beckett’s universe, a sentimental element which he would never have allowed. With the dying of the light at the end, the evening came to a close.

Endgame with Patrick Magee

The following night, the Uncommon Players returned under the directorship of Anthony Richards to perform Beckett’s 1957 play Endgame, one of the two works (alongside Waiting for Godot) for which he is best known. This takes place within another confined and circumscribed world, a featureless room with two windows at the back which might be a bunker sheltering its inhabitants from a post-apocalyptic world, or might be the cavern of a skull, with twin sockets gaping outwards. The attachment of specific meaning in terms of character, place or metaphorical meaning is not encouraged. At one point Hamm, one of the characters, tentatively enquires ‘we’re not beginning to…to…mean something?’, which raises a brief laugh from his companion (other half?) Clov, and a dismissive ‘ah that’s a good one’. Hamm also offers a few pieces of pre-emptive auto-criticism throughout, remarking that ‘this is deadly’, and later hopefully observing that ‘things are livening up’.

The main two characters, Clov and Hamm, are another of Beckett’s double acts, complementary foil who are also inseperable halves of a symbiotic whole. Clov is ostensibly the servile, active aspect, although his mobility is pained and effortful in the standard Beckett manner. His derivation from the old silent comedians is to be found in the repeated comic business which requires him constantly to shuffle back and forth, reaching his destination before having to return and retrieve forgotten stepladders or spyglasses. He was played by Philip Robinson with an end of tether edginess. But there was also an underlying pitifulness, a broken quality which suggested that his resentment at his servility would never be translated into actual rebellion, no matter how many times he might say ‘I’ll leave you’. Hamm is the intellectual aspect of this dual character, blind and immobile in his moveable chair (not moveable by him, however, as several attempts demonstrate). His is a dictatorial mentality (his chair a director’s seat) given to endless questioning and speculation. As played by David Watkins, he was curt and rude (often amusingly so) with an aristocratic assumption of superiority. But he also had a wheedling side which acknowledged his total dependency on Clov. His manner reminded me a little of Jim Broadbent in the films of Mike Leigh. In this production, he sat in an armchair mounted on a pallet, like a makeshift dais, which gives him an air of wasteland regality. Clov and Hamm are both stained with filth. Clov wears an extremely grubby white vest, and Hamm begins with blood and god knows what else stained handkerchief shrouding his face. Both have the look of decay about them.

Taking physical and mental decrepitude to an even greater extreme are the two other characters, initially hidden, Nag and Nell, Hamm’s ‘accursed progenitors’. They appear, faces dusted a deathly white, from two cylindrical rubbish bins (battered oil drums in this production) in which they mostly remain sedately ‘bottled’, resting on their stumps. Nag appears most often, and is reduced to a creature of simple appetite, calling for his ‘pap’. Their vagueness (reminiscent of Henry Crun and Minnie Bannister in The Goon Show) resolves into sharper focus only when familiar memories or oft told stories are rehearsed once again. As played by Jan Hookway and Eddie Holden, they were touchingly frail and half-present, more ghosts living in reiterated fragments of the past. Nell and Nagg’s confinement, stuffed into their bins with the lids screwed down, is similar to the fates suffered by other Beckett characters: Winnie buried up to her waste (and in the second half, her neck) in Happy Days, and the three protagonists of Play, stored in large urns from which only their heads protrude. Beckett’s love of Dante once more comes through in such purgatorial images of entrapment.



Nell and Nagg’s bins shrink the boundaries of the world to an even narrower circumference. The idea of confining cylinders or other hollow, imprisoning forms, is a recurrent one in Beckett’s work, and was evidently one which played on his imagination. Similar set ups can be found in his stories The Lost Ones, in which 200 people live in a cylindrical silo, Ping, in which one person lives a monadic existence in a small white cube, and All Strange Away, which features a white rotunda in which two people lie back to back. Rod Serling used a similar idea in the Twilight Zone episode Five Characters in Search of an Exit, whose title clearly alludes to the theatre of the absurd and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. Here, five archetypal characters – a ballerina, an army major, a clown, a tramp and a highland piper – awake to find themselves inside a towering cylinder with no doors. They have no memory of who they are or why they might be here. A fantasy rationale is provided in the end (not a very comforting one, however), but the atmosphere throughout is redolent of Beckett and the theatre of the absurd (as indeed are a good many other Twilight Zone episodes). Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 science fiction film Cube, in which 6 characters wake up to find themselves in a structure comprising interlocked cube-shaped rooms primed with a variety of deadly traps, is similarly Beckettian in its premise, and remains true to such influences by refusing to offer any concrete rationale which would place this netherworld within a fixed moral or political framework.

The room in Endgame is thoroughly explored, and the world beyond observed at regular intervals. Hamm insists that Clov takes him on a tour ‘right round the world’, and he is heaved from one wall to the other on his portable pallet before being parked back in exactly the same central spot from which they had set out. The windows look out onto a wider universe, one affording a view of the earth, and one of the ocean; one the realm of waking life, the other the depths of the unconscious. Such a clear division is open to any number of symbolic interpretations – or none at all. As Clov repeatedly explains, both are equally devoid of life or motion (no waves rippling the surface or winds blowing the dust), the world having sunk into an entropic flattening out of form in preparation for its final fading away. The Bike Shed proved the perfect place to stage Endgame. Its vaulted, underground space needed little adaptation to give it the feel of Hamm’s bunker, and a back wall with windows was there ready to use. Bright lights shone directly through them gave an impression of arid lifelessness beyond with the simplest of means. The fact that the small theatre was tightly packed with a capacity audience added to the sense of airless claustrophobia generated by the play – rather too effectively, in fact – I was glad to get out into the cold night air afterwards. It was a fine production by the Common Players, and it was great to see it attracting such a wide and appreciative audience. The Bike Shed continues to go from strength to strength. Long may it continue.

Maddalena Fagandini

Maddalena Fagandini, who died last week, was one of the more unsung of the pioneering women producers and composers who developed the techniques and sounds of electronic music in the early days of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. There’s some confusion about the precise dates of her residency in Room 13, the Workshop’s hideaway within the big barn of the Maida Vale studios. This is indicative of the fairly flexible inter-departmental structure of the BBC at the time. Studio Managers in the Workshop were appointed on a short-term basis and came and went at regular intervals. Fagandini was one of the first, but was also called away for other production duties. This was partly due to her bilingual fluency in English and the native Italian of her parents, which made her particularly indispensable during the coverage of the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Desmond Briscoe and Roy Curtis-Bramwell’s book The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, published in 1983 to mark its 25th anniversary, records her tenure as spanning the years 1960-63. The recent BBC4 Workshop documentary Alchemists of Sound extends it to 1966 and has it beginning in 1959. Louis Niebur’s book Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop makes it clear that she worked on the TV programme Outside and the theme for the World Service radio programme Science and Industry in 1959. It seems fair to assume that her most creative period lasted from 1959-1962, the latter year being the last in which examples of her work appears on the 2008 double CD overview BBC Radiophonic Workshop: A Retrospective. This also provides a pleasing sense of continuity with the two most famous of the Workshop’s female composers. Daphne Oram had left in 1959, year after the Workshop opened, having tirelessly campaigned for the formation of an electronic music studio within the BBC along the lines of those operating on the continent; and Delia Derbyshire would join in 1962, becoming one of the most celebrated of the composers in what is often thought of as the Workshop’s tape-tangled and early synthesiser experimenting golden age. Fagandini was working in the formative years, and as Louis Niebur notes in Special Sound, ‘was one of the Workshop’s most prolific and creative early composers’. She was therefore instrumental in developing the distinctive soundworld for which it would become known.

Fagandini’s relative obscurity partly stems from the nature of the Workshop’s initial remit. It was intended as a studio to provide sounds for drama and documentaries rather than to create independent pieces of music, as was the case in the state radio studios in France, Germany and Italy. This was one of the major reasons for Daphne Oram’s precipitate departure. She’d envisaged something more along those lines, and felt that such strictures wouldn’t allow her enough leeway to pursue her own compositional path. Fagandini had visited the Italian National Radio’s Studio di Fonologia in Milan, where the likes of Luciano Berio, Bruno Maderna and Luigi Nono created modernist electronic music, and where John Cage put together his Fontana Mix in 1958-9, the period of the Workshop’s launch. She was therefore familiar with the variety and possibilities of modern studio techniques and the uses to which they were being put by ‘serious’ composers. She had worked on the technical side of production at the BBC (having first been employed as a typist) but had a musical background (largely self-taught), which made her ideal for the creative laboratory of the Workshop. Compositions were anonymously attributed to the department rather than the individual, however. It was only with the release of ‘pink’ Radiophonic Workshop LP in 1968, which marked the 10th anniversary of its creation, that some of its composers received their due. Fagandini, who by this time had moved on, wasn’t one of them however (the album showcased the work of Delia Derbyshire, John Baker and David Cain). It wasn’t until the Radiophonic 21 LP, released in 1979 (marking 21 years of the Workshop), that a small selection of her pieces became generally available. Those tracks were all included on the 2008 Retrospective CD. Because much of her work was carefully integrated and ingrained into the programmes for which it was created, programmes which are not repeated (or in some cases have been wiped), its impact and importance has faded with time. But what remains indicates how much her compositions fed into later developments.

She worked on the 1959 drama Outside with Desmond Briscoe, who would go on to become the head of the department, which was the first TV programme to use the Workshop. The extract on the Retrospective collection begins with the rattling of keys and opening of a clanking metallic door familiar from the beginning of Porridge, and then goes on to represent the bewilderment of a released prisoner venturing out into the world once more through a sonic manipulation and estrangement of everyday sounds, ending with the resonant clang of a gong, which sounds like some dazing (or perhaps clarifying) mental blow. It’s a fine example of the way in which electronic music can embody subjective states and interior landscapes. She also worked with Phil Young on the signature tune for the World Service programme Science and Industry (for which she is not credited on either the Radiophonic 21 or Retrospective releases). This strikes an interesting balance between and musique concrete and purely electronic sounds. The percussive metallic hammering seems to point to a past of heavy industrial labour, whilst the electronic element points to a rapidly approaching future in which the machines will take over. The proto-sequencer pulsations also demonstrate the strong rhythmic component of Fagandini’s music.

This came through particularly clearly in her interval music. These were composed for the intervals which still existed between programmes at the time, small self-contained pieces of the music which were designed to engage the viewer whilst they waited. They often incorporated an element of marking the passing moments, expressing the passage of time, which was also evident from the clock on the screen, in a mesmeric fashion. Fagandini’s Interval Signal, included on the Radiophonic 21 and Retrospective collections, was designed to be congruent with the sweep of the screen clock’s arm which eliminated the second dots one by one. It’s constructed from simple woodblock clops given a little added echo, which sound like the steady splashes of fat drops of water. With its gradual additive accumulation of layers (followed by a retrograde stripping away), looping repetitions and rippling phasing effects, it resembles the early minimalist music of Steve Reich (the first section of Drumming), Philip Glass or Terry Riley. There’s something inherently organic about its regular patterns, the building up and slow release of musical mass like the drawing in and letting out of breath. It also sounds a little like the mechanistic pattering of The Playful Drummer, one of the pieces on Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds For Baby records, which would be released in 1964, electronic music designed to engage or tranquillise toddlers. The other interval signal piece included on the Retrospective is Time Beat, which has a similarly elastic rhythm, more skittering this time and lightened by buoyant reverb. A low key underlying drone provides a sense of unchanging continuity beneath the changeable surface, the constant hum of blood, nerves and synapses. As Louis Niebur points out in Special Sound, this started off in October 1960 as Music for Party Political Conferences, and incongruously jaunty attempt to make people believe that watching TV coverage of the ritualistic annual seaside gatherings would be exciting and fun. It then progressed to a more appropriate use as an interval signal.

It was in this context that it caught the ear of George Martin, who heard in it potential for a novelty beat record along the lines of a Joe Meek production. He got a music publisher to sort out the rights, came up with an accompanying arrangement to flesh it out and make it more palatable to a pop audience, and released it in 1961 as a single on Parlophone Records, which was given the title Time Beat. The Workshop’s policy of maintaining corporate anonymity led to a pseudonymous credit, and the overall attribution to ‘BBC Radiophonics’. For the composer, Martin came up with the name Ray Cathode, clearly wanting to highlight the electronic music aspect of the record. He recognised the interest such novel sounds had amongst the public, an interest fuelled in no small part by Fagandini and the Radiophonic Workshop. Of course, he would later play around with studio tape effects in a pop context with The Beatles on Revolver and Sergeant Pepper, and Paul McCartney in particular would take a keen interest in developments in electronic music and the goings on at the Workshop. Fagandini also came up with a ragged, offbeat melody with rough-edged sawtooth wave sounds for the b-side, Waltz in Orbit, with Martin laying some jazzy Brubeck-like block chords behind (It’s A Raggy Waltz – In Space). It offered a light-hearted sketch of a slightly battered and clunky satellite propelled in a spinning dance around the earth, a more jerry-built Sputnik. Although it was hardly a hit, it was reviewed on Juke Box Jury, so Fagandini did produce an authentic pop single, albeit inadvertently. The BBC documentary Alchemists of Sound makes play with the mystery of the anonymous composer, and Fagandini sportingly joined in, stating ‘I am not Ray Cathode’. But she was.

Further electronic sounds were produced for the BBC stand at the 1962 Ideal Home Exhibition in a piece which hovers around half-expressed nursery melodies in a distracted, dreamy manner. The manipulation of the xylophone notes on tape to create a spacious sound and springy rhythm anticipates the work of John Baker, whilst the tinkling bell sounds at the end (title Ideal Home Exhibition on the 21 and Retrospective collections) look forward to the more playful side of Delia Derbyshire’s music. The 1962 piece The Chem Lab Mystery, composed for the closing titles of a TV serial, is pure electronic music, appropriately enough. It’s burbling oscillator sounds are suggestive of reactive processes in arrays of test tubes and flasks, whilst glittering descending glissandi produce that otherworldly sound that only electronic music can, inducing cool ‘thrill of science’ shivers. In 1961, she created the music and sound design for an adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s modern recasting of the Orpheus and Eurydice story to fit his own mythology of self, Orphée, which was produced as a play in 1926 and then turned into a film in 1950. In an ironic bit of synchronicity, she was wholly dispensing with George Auric’s original score for the film whilst Daphne Oram was working with him to produce the haunting electronic atmospheres for The Innocents. Fagandini drew on Greek scales for her music, mixing short harp figures with pure, singing sinewave tones, and for the Princess (Death) tape-reversed piano notes, reflecting her origins from the benighted world beyond the mirror. The scenes in which Orphée tunes into the poetic signals from the other side on his radio are accompanied by plucked notes which are lent the hazily blurred shimmer of dreams through tape fiddling. The violent chorus of the shrieking furies who tear Orphée apart in a Bacchanalian frenzy is edited and layered together into a frighteningly intense sound collage which calls to mind Berio’s work with Cathy Berberian in Milan. Unfortunately, only short extracts of the drama are available to hear (via the examples included with the Special Sound book), the rest buried somewhere deep in the darkness of the BBC vaults of doom.

In Desmond Briscoe and Roy Curtis-Bramwell’s history of the Radiophonic Workshop, Fagandini also mentions having enjoyed working on a drama called Rhinoceros, for which she created the sounds of the lumbering beasts from scratch. She talks of the unnerving time she had conjuring up sounds for a series of real life ghost stories for the series Things Which Go Bump In The Night in the early hours in the deserted, shadowy and eerily silent Maida Vale Studios. She also provided the sound design for a 1960 production of Czech playwright Karel Capek’s beast fable Insect Play, an ideal subject for radiophonic treatment.

Fagandini’s time at the Radiophonic Workshop was an interlude in her career, and she didn’t pursue her music after she left in the early 60s. This is a shame, and another reason whey she remains a relatively obscure figure. But she went on to other fruitful and very useful pursuits as a producer in radio and TV, involving herself wholeheartedly in projects which were equally creative in their own way. She made many programmes offering an accessible and intuitive way to learn foreign languages, bringing together various different media (TV, books, cassettes and latterly CDs) and doing her not inconsiderable bit to make Britain a bit more linguistically (and by extension culturally) cosmopolitan. She also produced the landmark TV history of the blues, The Devil’s Music. Evidence of her contributions to the history and development of electronic music in Britain through her formative work with the Radiophonic Workshop may be a bit thing on the ground, but her role was nevertheless a vital one.

Berberian Sound Studio

WARNING: I give away a fair few plot details here - although as it's not a particularly narrative-driven film, it probably doesn't matter too much.

Peter Strickland’s film Berberian Sound Studio begins with a scene in which the protagonist, Gilderoy, a small, neat and quietly self-contained man (played with great subtlety by Toby Jones) walks along an anonymous, institutional corridor. It could be the entryway into a hospital, council offices or the exit from a small airport. In fact it leads to the sound booths of the dingy Italian film studios in which he will be incarcerated for the foreseeable future. The melancholic, descending scale on the soundtrack, its lonely, echoing notes plucked on an autoharp and drawing on the Broadcast song I Found the F from their Tender Buttons LP (Broadcast provide much of the music for the film) sets the mood of isolation and dislocation which will predominate throughout. Then, Julian House’s extraordinary title sequence explodes upon our senses, letting us know the kind of film whose post-production Gilderoy has stumbled into. Its roughly outlined, silhouetted images imprinted upon a scarlet background spatter across the screen with discomforting, eyeflashing rapidity. It’s like a kaleidoscopic, monochrome slide show of the cover art which House produces for the Ghost Box record label, which he also co-runs and records for under the alias of The Focus Group. The skeletal facades of ruined abbeys, a watching horseman on a hill and jagged, blasted winter trees resurrect memories of films such as Roger Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia (with its ruined abbey and colour-saturated scenes of psychedelic disorientation), Mario Bava’s Black Sunday (also partly set in the hollowed shell of a church), and Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (the title sequence of which begins with a zoom in on Vincent Price’s witchfinder watching the results of his visitations – the hanging of a witch – from horseback, the background then filtered to a benighted blue). This is the title sequence of the film The Equestrian Vortex, for which Gilderoy is to assist in the recording and mixing of the sound, and it is all that we will ever get to see of it (in objective form, at least). The titles suggest an English gothic sensibility at work, the kind of horror which blended with a pastoral romanticism and was typified by Hammer films in the 50s through to the early 70s. But what we glean from the sounds we hear throughout and the minimal plot details which are provided (both to us and to Gilderoy) suggests a film far more rooted in the Italian exploitation genre of the 70s – less restrained, more heavily stylised and self-consciously cinematic, and graphically, even gloatingly violent. In fact, just the kind of film which supplanted Hammer’s more traditional fare in the mid-70s period in which Berberian Sound Studio is set. The disjunction between the images of gothic romance presented in the titles and the graphic, hardcore violence which they presage embodies the cultural, temperamental and moral divisions which run throughout Berberian Sound Studio.

The horseman on the hill - Vincent Price is The Witchfinder General

Sound design is obviously absolutely central to Berberian Sound Studio. There is a close visual focus on the means of sound production; the analog equipment with its rows of faders and bobbin-like dials, its revolving reel to reel recorders, undulating oscillators and glowing, coloured buttons and switches. It’s all visually fascinating, right down to the spiral op-art graphics on a tape box, which could almost be part of a graphic score, suggestive of a particular sound and pitch. The equipment makes its own music, comprised of hums, clicks, the fluttering of unspooling film and the flicker of running off tape reels. Gilderoy’s recording charts, which the camera pans across at various intervals, with their grids and columns patterned with blocks and occasionally circles of colour, like some rigorously abstract work of art, codify and categorise the sounds of violence. They too are like graphic scores, the kind produced by experimental and avant garde composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman – instructions and intuitive guidelines for a music of coloured sound which transcends conventional notation. The screams and their electronic transformation provide a sonic expressionism, as do other sounds which permeate the film. The sibilant sighs which accompany Gilderoy along the corridor during his arrival recall the insistent whispers of ‘witch’ which punctuate Goblin’s soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria, and the hissing of the doors which open to thrust her out of the airport into the teeming rain upon her arrival in Munich.

This haunting sonic quality is given an added dimension for fans of Broadcast when Gilderoy plays the actress Silvia Teresa’s song, the wistful melody which her character sings. The voice we hear is immediately recognisable as that of the late singer Trish Keenan, crooning a gorgeous lullaby as if soothing herself on a dark, lonely night. The tape loop which spools around on its repetitive circuit seems to capture the voice in the way that radio waves travelling through the aether were supposed to pick up spirit voices in the early twentieth century. I found to be a quite heartrending moment, which felt like a conscious tribute on Peter Strickland’s part. He had paid tribute to her in his Sight and Sound interview about the film, stating that ‘speaking purely as a fan of the band, Trish’s passing is a huge loss. It’s not an overstatement to say she was one of the most remarkably gifted musicians of my generation’. There is a further dedication to her in the credits at the end. Broadcast’s music perfectly captures the sound of the era whilst remaining recognisably their own. The music of Ennio Morricone and other Italian soundtrack composers had after all proved an important formative influence. There is some swirling gothic horror organ of the kind used in Roger Corman’s Poe movies; pastoral synth flutes similar to those found on the Witch Cults of the Radio Age and Mother Is The Milky Way records; some rolling jazz drums and bustling harpsichord; and looped and treated vocals which recall Trish’s live improvisations. Further musical or sound design contributions (if there is a distinction to be made between the two) are provided by the Bohman Brothers, Steven Stapleton and Ghost Box artist Roj Stevens, a former Broadcast band member from the early Work and Non Work period. Strickland’s own Sonic Catering Band, whose long experience of producing musique concrete from the recorded sounds of cooking and food preparation must have proved particularly useful. An extract from a Luigi Nono piece adds a little period authenticity, as someone who worked in the Italian radio studios in the 60s and 70s.

Haunting sound design

Some of the musicians we glimpse on the recording stage look like avant garde refugees or moonlighters from the self-same studios, highlighting the fluid traffic which flowed between European experimental and conservatory traditions and the worlds of film soundtrack composition and recording. A moody fellow in a dark cloak is glimpsed bowing groaning metallic sounds from a pendant gong, and the Vangelis-like sound recordist is seen and heard playing sepulchral melodies on a walnut-encased synthesiser, the kind of music which might seep up from dank torchlit catacombs. The unconventional playing of and electroacoustic sculpting of sound from gongs also recalls Stockhausen’s Zyklus and Mikrophonie I pieces, in which their presence (or that of tam-tam gongs) is central. You can imagine the musicians bringing the ideas from these pieces into the film studios. Their sounds, unsettling in their newness and unfamiliarity, their rejection of conventional tonality and sound colour, proved ideal for horror soundtracks, adding to the atmosphere of disorientation and sensory derangement. Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire provided electronic arrangements and sounds for The Innocents and The Legend of Hell House and Tristram Cary created unsettling electronic pulsations for Hammer’s film of Quatermass and the Pit. Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting gains a great deal of power from its disturbing sound design, created by BBC Radiophonic Workshop co-founder Desmond Briscoe, filling its eerie house with a full spectrum of noises ranging from booming crashes to bending creaks and whispered exhalations. It’s like a further cinematic variation added on to Pierre Henry’s musique concrète piece from the previous year, Variations Pour Une Porte Et Un Soupir (Variations for a Door and a Sigh).

The Studio di Fonologia, Milan

Modern composition was incorporated into horror films in the 60s and 70s, with the music of Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai and others for Italian movies blending pop and avant garde styles, and The Exorcist using extracts from pieces by Penderecki and George Crumb (the brief movements of whose Black Angels could have been specifically designed as a sampler for use in such movies). A decade or so before, Toru Takemitsu’s spare score for Kwaidan, which mixes traditional music, musique concrète and modern composition, was uniquely unsettling, especially in the black hair sequence. And Bernard Herrmann’s much-imitated score for Psycho is very Bartokian in its savage and stringent use of strings. Stanley Kubrick would later use part of a Bartok piece, Music for Strings Percussion and Celeste, in The Shining, to disorienting and vertiginous effect. Jarring dissonance and scrabbling, stridulent strings are now almost generic clichés. The vocal performances also recall some of the electronic music which came out of the state-funded RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane) Italian radio studio (the Studio di Fonologia in Milan) in the 60s and 70s. The composers who worked there often produced pieces deriving from the voice, with Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio in particular favouring vocal works. The groans and inhuman creaks and barks emitted by the actress playing the awakening witch sound like they could have been extracted from Cathy Berberian’s epic psychodrama Visage, an electronic piece created in the Milan studios in 1961 with her then husband Luciano Berio (and it is evidently Berberian who lends her name to the titular studio of the film). An astonishingly powerful piece and performance, this has passages which are genuinely alarming, and seem to put the listener uncomfortably at the centre of a disintegrating psyche. The witch’s vocalisations also bring to mind Mercedes McCambridge’s remarkable vocal work on The Exorcist, begging the question as to whether these performances could be considered as musical themselves. Trevor Wishart’s remarkable Red Bird is another related piece, with its superbly realised transformations of the screams of a political prisoner into the cries of a flock of birds flying overhead – an escape from torment into an Edenic landscape of the mind similar to that which Gilderoy will effect at a moment of unbearable emotional stress. The ‘dangerously aroused goblin’ who records in the sound booth (its only male occupant) begins with a low sustained growl which sounds like the rumbling split tone bass chanting of Tibetan monks before working itself up into a full improv gibber; the sort of vocalisation practised by singers like Phil Minton, Maggie Nicols and Julie Tippetts and sound poets like Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing and Ernst Jandl.

Kafka's immaculate secretary

Gilderoy’s experiences of the Italian studios are and remain throughout those of an outsider. He is excluded by language, and also by the deliberate slights, subtle and not so subtle bullying and rude rebuttals and rebuffs which he buts up against each and every day. It is a Kafkaesque environment for him, with the simplest requests met with deferrals, redirection, aggression and ignorance. An absurdist plot thread which runs through much of the story concerns his attempts to claim expenses on his flight costs. He is treated as a tiresome intrusion by the coolly immaculate secretary, whose smoothly rounded orange phone seems more a fashion accessory than a means of contacting the relevant people. Rows of small wooden drawers are arrayed up against the wall behind her, and look like they could have stood there for decades, remaining unopened in all but the most extraordinary circumstances. When Gilderoy brings up the issue of his flight expenses with the tyrannical director, Francesco Coraggio, he is treated as if he were a mercenary money-grubber, somehow dishonourable in his request for payment, and is told that there are many who would die for a chance to work on the film for nothing (a statement which runs counter to his later exhortations towards unquestioning professionalism). During his introduction to the film’s monstrously egotistical producer and presiding creative ‘visionary’, Giancarlo Santini, Gilderoy is asked if he has everything he needs. He mildly suggests that a piece of recording equipment needs servicing, and is immediately berated by Coraggio for his unforgivable rudeness in being so negative upon his first meeting. Such inexplicable social blunders and traversals of obscure manners seem to be a component of his every encounter, despite his scrupulously polite demeanour, and they lend proceedings the air of an absurdist drama. Finally, like Kafka’s prospective employee in The Castle, Gilderoy’s very existence is brought into question, with the blank denial from an anonymous official at the end of the line that there ever was a flight from Heathrow at the hour of day he claimed to have travelled.

The director of the film, Coraggio, is like a 70s period Peter Wyngarde character, with wide and gaudily patterned ties, sharply cut suits and a lengthy, looping, neatly trimmed moustache. But there is no trace of Wyngarde’s oily charms in his dessicated and humourless manner. He is a joyless bully, the actresses in particular bearing the brunt of his misogynist contempt. Silvia, who plays the central character of Teresa in the film within the film, is curtly told to keep her opinions on giving nuance to her character to herself and to just do what she’s told. The women are frequently confined to the soundproofed cell of the recording booth where they are required to scream and scream again. These screams become a recurrent punctuating sound motif of the film, a counterpoint to Gilderoy’s temperamental inability to answer back to the workplace bullying which he suffers, and to the pulsing red Silenzio sign which fills the screen at various points. The other male figure of power in the studios is Santini, the self-regarding producer who enthusiastically constructs his own legend. When Gilderoy nervously confesses that he’s never worked on a horror picture before, Santini affects a look of wounded hurtfulness. ‘This is not a horror film’, he explains, as if it is self-evident. ‘It is a Santini film’. Perhaps there are hints of grandiloquent figures such as Andrej Zulawski and Alejandro Jodorowsky here, whose cult messes Possession and Santa Sangre most certainly are horror films, albeit of a singular kind. Santini comes up with the kind of justifications for the lingering scenes of violence against women which he presents which are familiar from European directors of the period, when levels of explicitness grew exponentially in the post-60s liberal climate (this liberality ironically put to illiberal use). Most notorious was Dario Argento’s response to accusations of misogynistic violence in his films. He stated that he found the death of beautiful women more emotionally affecting, or indeed arousing, taking a Berlusconiesque approach to sexual politics (‘I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or a man’.) An honest response, if hardly likely to assuage his critics. Santini is more hypocritically evasive in his response, claiming to ‘hate what is done to these women’, and to be representing historical reality in his inquisitorial sequences (shades of Ken Russell and The Devils). There is a certain amount of questioning of the nature of the more extreme 70s horror material, then, but this, along with the unseen film, is essentially and incidental, background element of Berberian Sound Studio. It’s what happens in front of the screen which engages our attention.

Dario Argento's Suspiria

Producer Giancarlo Santini is smooth and assertively charismatic producer, well aware of his own charms, with his neatly controlled, affluent beard, its grey flecks giving a permissibly minimal hint of maturity, and his Clooneyish good looks, enhanced by a relaxed but expensive sense of 70s style (open-necked and wide-collared shirts and casually chic jackets which project a swinging self-image). Both Santini and director Coraggio’s modish dress (the kind of thing we would expect of studied 70s retro chic) contrasts with the plaid overcoat, woollen cardigans and knitted ties which Gilderoy wears for most of the film. These are clothes which speak of unglamorous but cosy post-war British comfort – practical anti-fashion for a cold and wet island climate, and for drab and austere times. They suggest that Gilderoy is more of an old-fashioned product of the 50s and early 60s than of the liberated 60s and 70s of official retrospective portrayal (that liberation in fact contained within a fairly restricted social compass). He breezes in with his dog at widespread intervals, asserting his ownership of the film and generally acting like a cut-price mogul, demanding obeisance. His initial charm assault, with its instant arm around the shoulders intimacy, swiftly wears off on Gilderoy, who ends up watching his unsubtle advances on favoured actresses with weary indifference. There is an absolute male and female divide within the studio. Although the studios bear a female name (Berberian referring to the singer Cathy Berberian, who recorded some incredible contemporary electronic and vocal music in the Italian radio studios) it is a wholly male environment. The men greet each other effusively in the morning, embracing warmly and joking amongst one another. The women are treated as dumb creatures, however, objects to be coerced into providing what is needed from them. They are frequently isolated within the imprisoning padded cell of the sound booth, a confined space within a confined space, a box within a box.

Gilderoy becomes a part of the women’s world, excluded from the Mediterraenean male camaraderie. A man more in touch with his feminine side, he’s tender-hearted and wholly lacking in aggression. He is far more at ease with Silvia than with the men alongside whom he works. When he wanders out from his room at night, he meets Silvia and talks about his longing for home, expressed through the feel and, more particularly, the sound of autumnal twigs beneath his feet. She in turn confides in him, and tries to help him by suggesting that he needs to be more aggressively and loudly assertive if he’s to get anything he wants. When he tries this approach in his continuing pursuit of his flight expenses, the role is clearly a painful and upsetting one for him to adopt, however. Corragio and Santini talk about Gilderoy in his presence with a contempt disguised only by the fact that he can’t understand their language. When Santini brings in his dog, which ruins a recording with its barking, Coraggio is indulgent of his inconvenient intrusion, recognising his subservient position in the studio’s power structure. He says he’ll allow him in as long as he doesn’t do its business on the floor. ‘What, him or the dog?’, Santini jokes, with a nod of the head towards Gilderoy. As with the women, there is little difference in status, with the dog generally afforded more freedom. Gilderoy is even subjected to the kind of sexual harassment which Sylvia suffers from Santini. When he hears of his desire to leave, Santini confronts him alone in the recording studio and engages upon what amounts to a seduction in order to convince him to stay – perhaps the only approach he is capable of. Feeding him a roundly plum-like fruit, he tells him that ‘here we swallow the seeds’. Without wishing to resort to stereotypes (a statement which is obviously a prelude to doing precisely that), there is a hint of suppressed homosexuality to Gilderoy’s character. He lives at home with his mother, with whom he enjoys a close relationship, as his regular letter writing reveals; and he finds the company of women more comfortable than that of blokish or gruffly taciturn men, without exhibiting any signs of desire towards them. He is also genuinely appalled by the violent treatment of the women on the screen, and by the aggressive way in which Silvia and subsequently Elena (her successor in the role of Teresa) are addressed and directed. At any rate, these aspects of his personality, along with his failure to conform to the overdetermined and overtly displayed masculinity which predominates in the studio might be interpreted in such a way by Santini and the others, who have a fixed and narrow view of gender characteristics.

Gilderoy is a largely passive protagonist, subject to the direction and will of others, but there are hints of indirect resistance. When Silvia finally decides that enough is enough, that she has taken all that she can stand, she comes to Gilderoy to tell him that she is leaving, and that, like the vengeful witch in the film, she will cast her own parting malediction on Santini, Coraggio and the others. Gilderoy responds to her angry despair and pain with a tentatively compassionate ‘can I help you?’ The next morning, the mixing room is strewn with tape, and all of Silvia’s vocal parts have been wiped, with a gloating message left telling Santini exactly what she’s done and why. It’s all done so thoroughly and efficiently that it appears she’s had the assistance of an expert. With Gilderoy’s permission and help, she enters the sound-proofed booth to let out one final, cathartic scream – this time of her own volition, rather than at the relentless behest of a cruel director (who treats requests for water for raw throats as if they were an unwarranted intrusion upon his valuable time, a sign of inherent female feebleness). The banshee wail can be an expressive release of pent-up sound, as with the uninhibited vocal flights from decorative melodic constraint of singers like Patty Waters, Yoko Ono, Cathy Berberian and Christina Carter of Charalambides. The last sight we have of Silvia is of her receding within the frame of the booth against the blank void of the empty screen, swallowed up in the darkness, her mouth open in an expressionist scream. Eventually, the square of illumination which is the light of her burning self disappears, like the picture on an old TV screen compacting into a white dot of potential colour before flickering off. It is an act of self-erasure, the only possibility of defiance for the utterly powerless; the passive aggressive revenge of self-annihilation.

Vangelis - the studio engineer's double

Gilderoy falls apart somewhat after Silvia’s departure. His dress becomes shabbier and more dishevelled, tie abandoned and shirt left unbuttoned with the tail flapping loose. The distinction between inner and outer worlds becomes less clearly defined. There is a certain metaphysical division of space within the claustrophobic interiors in which the film takes place. There is the divide between the sound recording stage and the ‘backroom’ mixing booth which reflects a distinction between direct participatory involvement and the distanced observation of passive recording. Gilderoy’s natural domain is this backroom, but he is soon coaxed out onto the recording stage. When he first arrives, he is taken in there and watches as squelchy sound effects are added to a gore-drenched scene. ‘My God, what are they doing to her?’, he asks as vegetables and fruits are hacked to pieces alongside him, melon flesh standing in for human meat. When this frenzied orgy of organic food abuse is over, Gilderoy is offered a remnant quadrant of water melon by the towering, hirsute figure of the chief mutilator (who bears a certain resemblance to the Vangelis of Aphrodite’s Child days). He turns it down with squeamish politeness as if it were a dripping pound of raw flesh. The film could, in an allegorical sense, be viewed under an alternative title of The Temptation of Gilderoy. Even his name has a certain chivalric air, like something out of an Arthurian romance – the gilded king come to the Castle Perilous of the sound studio, in which the distressed damsels are besieged within the tower of the sound booth. He is drawn into direct participation in the recording stage area and told not to question the nature of what he sees up on the screen, but just to do as he’s directed, like a professional – to just obey orders. But when it comes time to provide the sound for a scene in which a witch tortured by the Inquisition is violated by a red-hot poker (a sound produced by the associatively disturbing means of sizzling cooking oil in a skillet), he refuses, finding that he cannot accept the degree of congruence with what he sees up on the screen that such an action would constitute in his mind.

The issue of complicity and identification is a perennial one in horror movies, particularly those which invite a vicarious sharing in the perspective of the perpetrators of sexualised assault and murder. The black gloves associated with the anonymous killers in Italian giallo films (essentially convoluted and ultra-violent whodunits) are seen here at various intervals switching on the projectors and turning the dials which start it up and set the flickering celluloid images into violent life on the screen. The troubling figure of Argento once more comes to mind here (troubling in part because he’s a director of such evident stylistic bravura rather than a mere seedy exploitation hack). He once more muddies the moral waters by insisting on wearing the black gloves of the killer himself in his films, often in scenes of studiedly sadistic and sexualised murder. When Gilderoy suggests that it might be best for him to leave, that he doesn’t have the stomach for this kind of material, Santini entices him to stay with a plum popped into his mouth, the fruit of temptation which he is not given the option of refusing. When the film (through its protagonist) enters its final dream fugue state, Gilderoy himself becomes the victim onscreen, the revenant witch attacking him with a knife. But he turns her over and, after initially defending himself, asserts his strength and turns defence into relentless counter-assault. This move towards complicity culminates with Coraggio ordering him to wring a scream of more authentic terror from Elisa, the nervous new ingénue actress playing Teresa, in her booth. He assumes that he will do it in the manner that he has on previous occasions, by going in there and shouting at her, intimidating her in a space which dictates uncomfortable proximity. But he does so indirectly, in the way he knows best, flooding her headphones with a painful sonic assault of piercingly shrill white noise. It’s an electronic analogue of a scream, perhaps Gilderoy’s own expression of his simmering anguish and unhappiness. Elisa, whose innocence mirrors that Gilderoy upon his arrival, doesn’t scream but throws her headphones down and strides out of the booth, out of the studio, and off the film, refusing to be subjected to such abuse. It’s a decisive gesture which Gilderoy himself has never been able to make. But his own electronic scream has acted as a warning to Elisa of what she can expect in the Berberian Sound Studio, and has driven her away. In an odd and scarcely intentional way, he proves her saviour. Out on the sound stage, Coraggio slams the table in angry frustration with his fist, his absolute power broken. A length of heavy chain slithers noisily to the floor, link by clanking link. It’s a symbolic casting off of the confining chains of servitude (workers of the world unite etc.) for Elisa and for Gilderoy himself, his cathartic electronic scream the catalyst which allows them both to walk free.

Gilderoy's room - the interior space

If the mixing room and sound stage are the spaces which mark the divide between passive observation and active complicity within the sound studio, the spaces of Gilderoy’s bedsit room (and we never see it situated in any particular external space, defined by exterior shots) and the studio mark the division between the private and public life, inner and outer perspectives, and the amateur and the professional. The film’s confinement to claustrophobic and shadowy spaces (the studio has no windows onto the outside world and Gilderoy is only ever seen in his room at night) reflects the interiority of the story. The red light which demands Silenzio pulses with the beat of blood pumping around the body. The fruit and vegetable matter used to create the sounds of bodies being cut open or shattered is also left to fester in a pile which, shot in slow-moving close-up, begins to disturbingly resemble glistening viscera, making us reflect on the vulnerable organic softness of our insides. Later, when the mixing room is vandalised, we will also see the guts of the machines, ribbons of brown magnetic tape tangled and twisted on the floor. A lingering pan across the fanned green surface of a savoy cabbage, destined for the production of a dry cleaving sound, renders it strange, its wavering rills and ridges like the folds and contours of a brain, imprinted and made complex through experience and repetitive reinforcement. Gilderoy’s room, a night space to which he retires, represents the internal, mental realm, a place for reflection, dream and imaginative exploration. It’s set apart from the social space of the studio, where he is obliged to interact with the violent images onscreen and with the involved and self-aggrandising play of human behaviour and politics which surrounds him and with which he collides with bruising regularity. Many of the musicians who worked anonymously for the Radiophonic Workshop used to stay after hours in the studio, using the dead hours to corral the equipment they needed and, perhaps more importantly, find the personal time to explore their new worlds of sound without interference from studio managers.

The boundaries between these two spaces, the interior and the exterior, which Gilderoy endeavours to keep separate, become confused for the viewer at an early stage, she or he made aware of the beginning of a perceptual shift of which Gilderoy himself is not yet cognisant. There are several cuts which immediately take us from one space to the other. We get a shot of a screaming mouth, tongue and tonsils quivering with the shrillness of the sound which Gilderoy is diligently recording, to an overhead close-up of a whirling blender mixing a red tomato sauce, which he is making on the kitchen surface in his room, simultaneously recording it to provide the sound of a chainsaw. It’s as if the sound analogy has occurred to him as he goes about his private routines, the space of the studios, with its associated perceptual state, leaking through into this personal, internal space. He has brought his work home, effectively. He forgets to put the lid on the blender, however, and is liberally spattered with this home-made Kensington gore (the affectionate name given to Hammer’s vividly bright concoctions of stage blood), crude make-up to accompany the sound effects. Gilderoy’s soaking in this appropriately Italianate form of culinary grue visually suggests that prolonged exposure to the images he is watching every day on the screen is affecting him, that he is being drawn into the world of the studio and its inhabitants, becoming increasingly infected with and complicit in its worldview. There’s something a bit Philip K Dickian about this process, with one consciousness being encompassed and absorbed by another, whether individual or collective.

Gilderoy resists being drawn into or overwhelmed by this world as best he can. But in the latter part of the film, as he increasingly enters a state of dream fugue, the two spaces become increasingly directly connected. He begins to walk through the doors of his wardrobe to emerge through those of the studio. Figures from the film itself begin to invade his room, his interior space, and these scenes are then instantly transferred to the screen in the sound studio. The only film we actually see on the screen, then, is the one playing out in the projecting room of Gilderoy’s skull, which cuts in elements of The Equestrian Vortex which has been incorporated into its subconscious unspooling, spliced together with his personal fears and anxieties. The fusion of the real and the screened is suggestive of the way in which film (and by extension art in general) can become a part of an individual’s interior landscape, and can bring features of that landscape into sharp relief, revealing parts previously hidden – ruptures and quakes throwing up new peaks and opening deep chasms. The psychic disruptions of horror films, with their direct connection with fear responses, can be, for good or ill, particularly effective in provoking the awakening of suppressed feelings. The spaces of The Equestrian Vortex mirror those of Berberian Sound Studio, the film in which it is invisibly embedded. The Academy which is its chief setting (we gather) is undermined by a dank, forgotten subterraenean corridor which marks the spot where witches had been tortured, executed and buried centuries before. The house of rationality is erected upon a dank labyrinth of primitive and violent impulses, long locked away but never really dispelled. Gilderoy’s full transition into the studio space, the equalisation of his inner and outer worlds, is marked by his sudden ability to speak Italian, an indication that he is approaching an understanding of the studio mindset. He becomes a different character in a different film, dressed in a dark and businesslike suit, watching himself up on the screen assaulting the witch. He repeats the words he first uttered in the studio (‘my God, what are they doing to her?’) but his time it is his projected self who is committing the onscreen atrocity. When the slice of melon, source of the sounds of terrible mutilation, is offered to him, he accepts, and takes a bite of its dripping pink flesh. His temptation would appear to have been fulfilled, the forbidden fruit of self-knowledge swallowed.

FC Judd - garden shed inventions

Further binary oppositions and polarities run throughout the film, fundamental differences which invite misunderstanding and mutual incomprehension. Little capital is made out of the cultural clash between English and Italian customs and sensibilities, which could have taken the film in the overfamiliar direction of the comedy of national stereotypes - a kind of Carry on Dario caper. There is a tension between Gilderoy’s intuitive approach to work and the ‘professionalism’ expected in the studio which echoes the difference between the inspired amateurism of British electronic musicians and sound designers and those in the state-funded radio studios of the continent and the commercially driven TV and film worlds. The British myth of the garden shed inventor is an enduring and attractive one – the idea of the maverick pioneer who cobbles together their own unique junk-sculpture instrumentation from wartime surplus oscillators and motors and whatever objects can be unearthed from the recycled detritus of the past, with clunkily mechanical tape machines to record and transform the resultant magical sounds. Gilderoy very much conforms to this type. He carries a picture with him of his garden workshop back in England, which is indeed housed in a shed. He has previously mostly worked on children’s programmes, which brings to mind the Radiophonic Workshop’s sound and music for Doctor Who, Blue Peter’s Bleep and Booster cartoon, and LPs for music and movement classes, as well as F.C.Judd’s soundtracking of the early 60s SF puppet series Space Patrol. It also summons up fond memories of Oliver Postgate, a benevolent inventor, film-maker and children’s storyteller who also worked out of his garden shed, which was converted into a makeshift animation studio, with equipment knocked up as need demanded. At one point, during a powercut in the studio, Gilderoy captivates the gathered cast and crew with a pure, gently wavering ‘UFO’ sine wave, created with just a light bulb and a wire letter rack. Shades of the magic sound conjured by the likes of Delia Derbyshire and John Baker from lampshades and wine bottles. By the warm, kindly glow of the candlelight, the atmosphere becomes enchanted, the sinister piles of fruit on the table props in a tableau from a Renaissance or Dutch painting. Gilderoy becomes a conjurer, and a different, more generous working environment, and film, momentarily seems possible. Then the electricity snaps back on and the spell is broken. This is the one time when Gilderoy’s own wordlview, the childlike magic of the incidental and the everyday as he perceives it, is briefly conveyed to his hosts, and wholly absorbs them. But power demands efficiency, the ‘professionalism’ and concomitant obedience to his will which Coraggio is always demanding.

The highly visible and audible electronic machinery which blinks, clicks and whirs into action throughout is also set in opposition to the vegetable world produces the sounds of the violated body, and also to Gilderoy’s reverence for the natural world. The hard and mechanical contrasting with the soft and organic. The machine world of the studio extends to the mechanical behaviour of its male engineers and overseers, and is contrasted with the ‘feminine’ world of natural form, and the women whose presence in the studio is seen as an alien one. To Coraggio and Santini, people are just another component, soft extensions of the machinery. They flick their switches, turn their dials and expect them to run in perfect synchrony every time, giving them a swift kick if the prove recalcitrant. Gilderoy bridges the two worlds, rather like the exquisitely bored secretary in the linking corridor outside, the guardian of the interzone, with her wooden shelves and rounded orange phone blending the mechanical with natural form and material. He shows Silvia a circling tape loop from which her own voice repeats a simple melody (marked Teresa’s Song) and demonstrates how he can alter the sound with various filters (the conjurer’s hand waving passes). She is fascinated, regarding him as if her were a sonic alchemist, producing aural illusions to delight her. A connection, if not exactly a friendship, is initiated. This is the benevolent, playful use of machines, toys and tools which are expressive on an innocent and very human level. Later on, Gilderoy will use the same devices to create a torturous assault of painful white noise, and unbearable and inhuman expression of pitiless mechanistic violence.

Box Hill - Gilderoy's pastoral heart

At one point in the film, the machine world of the studio in which Gilderoy toils is torn apart to reveal his English pastoral soul, which lies beneath the surface of his modernist tinkering. The celluloid image bubbles and burns, combusting in a similar way to the apparent conflagration of the film itself in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, or the nova which engulfs the final frame of Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop. Gilderoy’s Box Hill heart is laid bare, as we look down on the Surrey countryside spreading out below its commanding ridge. Vaughan Williams’ Lark Ascending takes over the soundtrack, the ultimate expression of yearning English pastoralism. The sight of this expanse of green fields, woodlands and downland slopes is almost overwhelming after the gloomy, claustrophobic interiors of the sound studio, tinted with the red of the recording warning signs and the baleful reflections from the blood-soaked screen. Vaughan Williams’ emotive piece also provides a burst of traditional orchestral music as a pointed counterpoint to the expressionistic electronic soundworld in which Gilderoy has been immersed. The talismanic presence of the Bohman brothers, Adam and Jonathan, purveyors of a playful variety of musique concrète and improvisatory sound-making in the lineage of post-war garden-shed inventors, on the brow of the hill, positions a different stream of music within this quintessentially English landscape. They are like more parochial Caspar David Friedrich wanderers surveying distant vistas from the heights they’ve scaled, or idealised rustic types on the Edenic Darenth Valley hillsides of a Samuel Palmer landscape. Electronic and experimental music can be human and expressive of a non-technophile present with an awareness of tradition, as witness the artists on the Ghost Box label, who create their own versions of plangent electronic English pastoralism. A collage of details from Ordinance Survey maps detailing Box Hill and its surrounds outline the contours of Gilderoy’s heart, the archaeological treasures lodged within.

Persona - the burning screen

This pastoral vision is also reflected in his reverence for nature. Alongside his work for children’s TV, we learn that he has also produced the sound for a variety of nature programmes. He’s a patient observer and recorder of the soundscapes of the natural world in the manner of Chris Watson, Bernie Krause or Dan Gibson. In his room, a spindly spider wanders several times across the desk he’s working at. Each time, he carefully picks it up with a piece of paper and carries it to the window, depositing it gently outside. On one level, this can be seen as a symbolic gesture, an assiduous casting aside of the more sinister and predatory aspects of his psyche (the spider being one of gothic horror’s emblematic creatures). But it also represents his refusal to accede to the demands of the studio, to adopt their ethos. As the film progresses and his persona begins to show signs of strain, distress cracks spreading, we await the moment at which he will break and slam his fist down on the delicate creature. But he never does. He associates nature with sound, as indicated by the nostalgia evoked by the snapping of dry branches beneath his feet. Amongst the mementoes of home which he brings with him are some of his recordings of local soundscapes, labelled and categorised with a naturalist’s taxonomical mind. The use of natural produce to create sounds analogous to those of exaggerated violence is therefore something of a desecration of his semi-Pagan reverence for nature, and his sensitivity to its soundworld. Gilderoy’s Pagan sensibilities (a kind of deep Englishness) in themselves go against the grain of the Catholicism which at least nominally presides in the studios, as signified by the crucifixes, with figures of the suffering Christ attached, which hang on the walls of the mixing room and of Gilderoy’s bedroom – his two spaces. This underlying Catholic element might in itself hint at the greater tolerance of the Italians for images of suffering and pain, of prolonged, expiatory martyrdom.

The letter which Gilderoy exchanges with his mother focus on the progress of a nest of chiff-chaff chicks brooded on the side of his creative garden shed. As he begins to unravel in the studio, the news from home also darkens. The chicks are all killed by what his mother assumes is a magpie, their torn bodies thrown out of the nest and left torn and ragged below (a scene recalling the defenestration of one of the female students at the academy earlier in the film, the sound of her breaking body provided by a ripe melon dropped from a stretching height). Nature seems to be imitating art, or perhaps there was an element of truth in Santini’s claim that his representation of brutal violence is an honest expression of the harsh way of the world. Gilderoy certainly doesn’t want to believe this. It disturbs his sense of pacific harmony, like a needle suddenly and clumsily lifted and scratched across an LP of the Lark Ascending, creating an ugly and disruptive aural tear. It could also be seen as an assault on the very cradle of his creativity, his shed, with the chicks possibly just collateral damage. There is a sense of guilt, that the senseless tearing apart of the chicks happened because he wasn’t there to protect them. There is a parallel sense that something similar might happen to the new actress Elena (the second Teresa) if her were to leave the studio. The connection is made between Elena and Gilderoy’s home, and in particular his mother (mother is home) when she reads to him from her script. The words are those his mother wrote to him in her last letter, expressing her distress at the bloody slaughter of the chicks, and her bewildered supposition that it must have been the work of a magpie. Gilderoy is horrified at what the supposed magpie has done. But could the magpie in fact be seen as his own self, or has his drift towards moral complicity with the violence onscreen, itself an assertion of greater natural or assumed male power and strength, summoned the malevolent bird? In creating an identification between Elena and his mother, and with her distress and evident sense of isolation, Gilderoy’s sonic assault on Elena (albeit insistently directed by Coraggio) is also a lashing out at his mother, adding a further Freudian element to this climactic drama.



In the end, Gilderoy reaches an understanding both of the impulses which underlie the film, and of the presence of such impulses within himself. Having committed his act of violence, and having done no harm, indeed inadvertently having helped the object of his assault, he reaches a state of calm self-awareness, and consciously rejects the lure of the studio and its reductive worldview. Like Elisa, he walks out of the machinery. He stares at the blank screen and a small circle of white light begins to glow, pulsate and expand. It’s as if Elisa’s disappearance into the void in her framing capsule of light (the light of life) is being reversed, and she is returning in a blaze of radiance – a redeeming Marian figure. The dot expands until the screen can hardly contain the blinding whiteness. The blood-red and black images which have been projected onto it (including the title sequence we saw at the start) and into Gilderoy’s tender psyche are wiped clean. Standing before the screen, his figure, face raised upwards, is outlined against the light pouring out into the studio until the high contrast background results in his being wholly absorbed into it, indistinguishable from the all-pervasive illumination. In a positive reversal of Silvia’s self-erasure, in which she was swallowed into a void of deep darkness, he disappears into and becomes light. In a sense (and bearing in mind the crucifixes in both the mixing room and his bedroom, his interior and exterior spaces) he redeems her, having asked if he could help her. We imagine him transported back to his Box Hill Eden, beginning the walk down the hill and across the fields to home, saying hello to mother before heading straight for his garden shed.