Solarference present Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde at Exeter Phoenix

Solarference are a duo, Nick Janaway and Sarah Owen, who make electronic music which uses traditional folk song as its familiar source and emotional anchor. The resulting hybrid, which the name poetically evokes, successfully casts both forms in a new light. It reflects both the rural character of their Westcountry background and the experimental musics which they encountered in the course of an art school education in London. This blend of musical traditions follows an oral lineage back through the generations and introduces an exploratory use of new technologies, drawing on paths forged in the era of post-war modernism. Such a superimposition of old and new raises the spectre of hauntology, that awkward academic term which has been applied to certain kinds of music and graphic design invoking the ghosts of memory inhabiting a post war period which ended with the onset of the 80s. These ghosts are also often imbued with more ancient layers of time and folk memory, reflecting the fascination with the deep history of Britain which was prevalent in 1970s culture. It has to be said, the term often seems to function largely as a label which its supposed practitioners can reject or express bewilderment as to the meaning of. Whatever terminology is applied, however, the drawing together of the old songs, which seem to rise with uncanny familiarity from some collective strata of the unconscious, with electronic sounds and digital concrète manipulations redolent of an age super-saturated (and perhaps sated) with technological magic, produces a bewitching and very powerful effect.

This fusion of old and new was lent a further dimension on March 9th at the Phoenix in Exeter when they provided a live, semi-improvised accompaniment to the 1920 film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of hubristic scientific alchemy and the duality of the human soul, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The digital projection was taken from a poor quality print, the shadows and fog of the gaslit London street scenes rendered even more murky and obscure by the abrasion and chemical erosion of time. This made for an interesting disjuncture with the duo standing to the side of the stage beneath the screen, their studiously intent features illuminated by the megabyte glow of their lectern-perched laptops. The impression of eras facing one another across a century’s gulf, analogue and digital interpenetrating in some interstitial zone beyond normal temporal bounds, was reinforced by the Victorian/Edwardian casual garb which the two musicians wore for the occasion.

The film, with John Barrymore in the dual lead role, was the most prestigious of three versions made in 1920, and really served to establish the portrayal of the Jekyll and Hyde personae, and set the accepted tone of the story, in the popular imagination. Jekyll is upright and observant of conventional Victorian middle-class social etiquette; Hyde is bent into a devolved, simian stoop and is amorally intent on sating any of the sexual appetites of venting any of the violent urges which define his being. This idea of Hyde as the embodiment of the repressed side of the superficially noble and respectable Dr Jekyll which physically manifests itself as an ape-like monster was first put forward in J.R.Sullivan’s 1887 theatrical adaptation. It was not an interpretation which pleased Stevenson himself. But his creation was soon developing into something beyond his control. The film drew on this sensational and highly successful stage version, and the transformation scene became the central dramatic moment, a testing challenge for actor and special effects artist. There is a definite aura of the limelighted stage suffusing the 1920 film Another faultline between the ages is evident here – the grand world of the late Victorian theatre suddenly fixed on the screen in the new global medium of the movies.

In this instance, it is a rather less successful conjunction. Many of the drawing room scenes are stilted and dull, and John Barrymore’s broad gestural acting can come across as the most overcooked ham in the unforgiving close-up glare of the studio arc lights. His transformation scene in particular raised unfortunate titters and snorts of derision. He mugs frantically, grasps his throat and seems to throw himself bodily about before finally taking a spectacularly melodramatic dive onto the laboratory floor. His performance as Hyde is at times memorably flesh-crawling, however. His lank hair is clammily pasted to his temples and his skull disturbingly distended (a phrenologist’s dream, or nightmare) in the shape of a coconut husk or a bulbous spider’s abdomen. There is indeed one truly horrific fever dream sequence in which a giant, hairy spider with Hyde’s leering face at its head clambers stiffly up onto the four poster bed in which Jekyll restlessly sleeps, crawls over his body and settles down to merge invisibly into it. The figure who then wakes up is, of course, Hyde.

Solarference draw on the wide folk ballad repertoire which mournfully tells of false love and tragically thwarted romance to accompany the scenes involving the ‘pure’ object of Jekyll’s repressed affections and the musical hall artiste (played by Nita Naldi, the future co-star of Rudolph Valentino in some of his biggest pictures) who falls prey to Hyde’s unsubtle and ruthlessly calculating advances. Many of these ballads have appeared on the death-haunted late 60s albums of Shirley Collins (The Sweet Primeroses, The Power of the True Love Knot and Love, Death and the Maiden), on which she was often accompanied by the hauntingly fragile piping of her sister Dolly’s home-built portative organ. It’s possible that it was here that Solarference discovered the songs – a fine source if so. They certainly create a cohesive, melancholic mood which emphasises the female aspects of the story’s tragic trajectory. Barbara Allen and The Sweet Primeroses are both songs of false and violently opposed love. The latter has a verse which begins with the line ‘So I'll go down to some lonesome valley/Where no man on earth shall there me find’, which is used for some of the darkest parts of the story. The words are cut and repeated, creating a truncated echo which makes it seem as if we really have descended into that deep, desolate valley. Barbara Allen, a tale of love scorned and mocked by its object, is particularly appropriate for the scenes in which Hyde taunts and dismisses the musical hall artiste whom he has reduced to his domestic drudge, and whom he later encounters in the opium den. Go From My Window also has the highly apposite line ‘oh the devil’s in the man that he will not understand, he can’t have a harbouring here’. Solarference have evidently chosen these songs with great care and attention to detail.

Black Ships Ate the Sky

They also use the old Charles Wesley hymn tune Idumea to stunning effect. Its opening question, ‘and am I born to die, to lay this body down/and must my trembling spirit fly into a world unknown’, once again highlights the tragic nature of the story, its inexorable progression towards a fatal conclusion. But it also points to the spiritual anxieties which underlie Stevenson’s stories. The concern for the state, or even the existence of the soul in an age of scientific breakthrough – of the telescoping of time into geological millennia, and of psychoanalytical and evolutionary theories which began fundamentally to change humanity’s perception of itself and its position in the scheme of creation. The song was also incorporated into the eschatological worldview of David Tibet and his Current 93 project. It was sung by a number of people on the Black Ships Ate the Sky album, one of whom was Shirley Collins.

Much of the soundtrack was created on the fly from numerous ‘concrète’ sources, sounds recorded and instantly transformed by a powerful and swiftly responsive sound-editing programme. Comb teethe were thumb-raked, miniature music box handles cranked, the bodies of glass bottles chinked and their mouths breathily blown across, Chinese-sounding flutes piped, paper slowly torn and a dulcimer plucked. The resultant noises were expanded, multiplied and dispersed into rich and colourful fogs of sound. The principal source was the human voice, however, the vast potential of which was used to produce whispers, clucks, slurps, sighs, shhhhhs and grunts. These sometimes lent the sequences they accompanied an inner soundtrack, as if they were sounding out the film’s subterranean layers of meaning. For the scene in which Hyde enters the Limehouse opium den, for instance, the recorded voice was atomised, replicated and scattered. This expressed both the fragmentary, partial nature of Hyde’s persona, and the dislocated dreams drifting up from the squalid pallets of the dazed pipe smokers. For the dinner party scene in the Victorian parlour, we heard a layered swarm of sibilant whispers. They were somewhat akin to the susurrus of inner voices heard by the angels in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire as they watch over the readers in the Berlin State Library. This parlour whispering was interspersed with slurping, sucking and the smacking of lips, suggesting that this was a milieu in which the appetites for food and gossip were indistinguishable.

Luciano Berio and Cathy Berberian

The extended vocal techniques, subsequent electronic transformations and their expression of inner states brings to mind the 1960s and 70s collaborations between Italian composer Luciano Berio and his then wife, the soprano singer Cathy Berberian. Her extraordinary vocal performances on Visage and Sequenza III take the listener on an intense, kaleidoscopically shifting voyage through a dizzyingly fragmented mirrorworld of psychological moods. It feels discomfortingly at times like experiencing a monumental breakdown from the deep interior of an individual psyche. Berberian also sang Berio’s more straightforward Folk Songs suite, which gathered together folk melodies from various countries (and included the modern standard Black Is The Colour of My True Love’s Hair), providing a further parallel with Solarference’s blending of the experimental and the traditional. Berio would have created his vocal collages through a thousand cuts and splices of tape, of course. A modern artist who has used less fiddly and laborious (although in their own way equally painstaking) digital means to make music from the isolated, compacted and stretched sounds of the human voice is Oneohtrix Point Never (aka Daniel Lopatin), whose latest album, R Plus 7, is another point of reference. The isolation and reproduction of fragments of human utterance also served to create syllabic rhythms, which provided a propulsive sense of momentum to some of the film’s more dramatic moments.

In the second part of the evening, Solarference returned in modern day civvies to play a small selection from their album Kiss of Clay (the chilly phrase deriving from the haunting graveside song Cold Blows the Wind). The record is, perhaps understandably, more solidly song-based, with the experimental elements restricted largely to creating background colour and atmosphere. Live, however, those elements came to the fore, and the songs were allowed to stretch out into more unusual shapes before returning to their melodic harbour. It was a genuinely thrilling and innovative balance of the traditional and the experimental. The harmonies were lovely in themselves, particularly on the bilingual Welsh song which they ended with, Ei Di’r Deryn Du. This is a fusion music which really works in exciting ways, without sounding remotely contrived or forced. It manages to unite the seemingly alien and irreconcilable worlds of Xenakis, Stockhausen and Pierre Henry with those of Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs. The folk tunes and the tales they tell form the human heart, the familiar core, but they are moulded into all manner of new and strange configurations, whilst never losing their essential character.

After the final song, we were invited to come and look at the technology involved, and ask any questions which might occur. Looking at the sound wave patterns and the shadowed sweeps which gathered selected splinters up to transform them, it became evident how intuitive and visually cued the process was (once thoroughly learned and absorbed, of course). This is sonic painting or sculpting in real time, a digital development of the ideas of drawn sound synthesis which Daphne Oram in Britain and Eduard Artemiev in the USSR experimented with in the 1970s. This invitation to come and talk and see how things were done pointed to a real desire on the artists’ part to reach out and communicate their own excitement about their music and the ideas behind it. It was an excitement and daringly exploratory spirit which came across forcefully in the committed and immensely enjoyable performances they gave at the Phoenix in Exeter.

Electronic and Experimental Music at Oxfam, Exeter

The Oxfam Music and Arts shop in Exeter recently received a huge donation of records from the University Music Department, who were moving to smaller premises (a sign of the times, alas). I immediately set to trawling through and soon dug out some real treasures of electronic and avant-garde music. The collection would seem to have been put together during the 70s, at the high point of musical modernism and experiment. The thick and undisturbed patina of dust which covered the plastic sleeves protecting these LPs spoke eloquently of the extent to which this exploratory spirit has faded; or at least found other, more fertile ground beyond the academy. We shall be putting these records out in the shop this weekend, and there’ll be some striking covers on display, from the reflective silver sheen of the Philips 21eme Siecle series (no sign of the Electronic Panorama box set, unfortunately) to some eye-dazzling op-art patterns and psychedelically oversaturated colours. This actually says quite a lot about the way that this music reached beyond a classical or academic audience and connected with listeners who had explored the wilder shores of rock, whether in the form of the Grateful Dead, Zappa, the Soft Machine, Can or The Beatles (after all, Stockhausen was one of the faces peering out of the Sergeant Pepper sleeve – Paul’s choice, of course). It also shows how these records were marketed with such an audience in mind. It’s interesting to discover that the sleeve notes to one of the John Cage records we’ve got, Variations IV (released in 1965), has sleeve notes by Joseph Byrd. He would go on to form The United States of America, a group which pioneered the blending of electronic and concrète sounds into a rock context. Little appreciated at the time, they were later to be a huge influence on bands like Broadcast and Stereolab. Indeed, this kind of music is still most highly valued by those operating on the margins, blending popular and experimental forms. A wide selection of electronic music from the 60s and 70s (including Pierre Henry’s Cortical Art III, which we’ll come to later) has been released on the Creel Pone reissue label (which may or may not be curated by the modern electronic musician Keith Fullerton Whitman) with these kinds of listeners in mind.

Modern electronic music could really be said to have started in Paris in the Studio d’Essai (the experimental studio) of the ORTF, the Office of National Radio-Television. It was here, that Pierre Schaeffer, a studio engineer, began to experiment with making music from discrete blocks of recorded sound, which were contrasted with each other and manipulated in various ways to create what he thought of as ‘a symphony of noises’. He called this new music of sounds musique concrete, and set about creating a theoretical system which would codify its various elements. The first piece he created in this style was the Etudes des Bruits (Study in Sounds), produced in 1948. It consisted of five sections, each centring on its own signature recorded elements. The best known of these is Etude des Chemins de Fer (Railway Study), which blends the noises of steam engine whistles, screeching brakes, carriage doors slamming, wheels clattering over rails and other train sounds recorded at the nearby Batignolles Station or dug out of the radio library. This hugely significant piece was made using records cut on the studio’s own lathes. Locked grooves served to create repeating cycles over which further sounds could be layered. A year later Schaeffer composed Symphonie Pour Un Homme Seul (Symphony For A Man Alone, or A Lonely Man?) with his new assistant and musical collaborator Pierre Henry. Henry brought an imaginative musical mind to their work together, Schaeffer always being more of the analytical engineering type. This symphony of sounds was the first piece of musique concrète to be performed in a concert hall when it was unveiled (or unspooled) on 18th March 1950. In some ways a landmark to place alongside the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, although electronic musicians would later try to find more appropriate and stimulating environments than the traditional concert venues in which to air their work.

Pierre Schaeffer in the studio

By now, the two Pierre’s were using the newly developed recording medium of magnetic tape, which offered greatly expanded possibilities for editing and sound manipulation, and was considerably more easy to work with than the records used for Etudes des Bruits. Presumably, these were also transferred to tape for subsequent performances and recordings. Tape became the defining medium for creating concrete music, its splicing, joining and looping giving the process a physical, craftsmanlike aspect, involving much peering and fiddly work at close quarters. Schaeffer attracted a group of followers, young composers who were excited by the creative potential of this new musical form and the expanded soundworld it brought with it. At first known as the Club D’Essai, after the studio they met and worked in, they morphed into the more soberly titled Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète in 1952, which was soon streamlined into Groupe de Recherche Musicales (GRM). It was a change in name which suggested an analytical, scientific approach rather than the enthusiastic amateurism suggested by a ‘club’ – the classic image of the lab coated musical technician wrestling with crackling capacitors, twisting serpents of tape and oversized recording reels. Actually, a good deal of fine and innovative electronic music would be made by amateur enthusiasts over the years. They had less concern for theoretical compositional rigour and more for the bewitching quality of the sounds made on the equipment they cobbled up at home. But at this stage, most of the electronic music ‘laboratories’ were funded by state radio, universities or technological companies such as Philips (who set up a studio in Eindhoven in Holland) or Sony (whose studio was located in Tokyo).

With funding from the RTF, Schaeffer and his cohorts set up the first studio expressly designed to produce electronic music and further develop the technologies which made it possible. The GRM was officially incorporated into the RTF in 1958, coincidentally the same year that the BBC established its own electronic music and effects studio, the Radiophonic Workshop. The studio heads there, in naming it thus, evidently felt there was a certain artisanal quality inherent in the production of electronic music, although it took them a while to fully realise that the art which was also there. BBC producer Donald McWhinnie had visited the GRM studio in 1956, and his enthusiasm for its work, particularly as it related to radio drama effects. This enthusiasm was conveyed in a report written by several hands (including Daphne Oram) later that year which looked at the viability of establishing a similar set up in London.

We have a musique concrète LP released on the Vox label in 1969 which gathers together a selection of music recorded at GRM, mostly during the 60s. It begins, naturally enough, with a piece by Schaeffer himself. His oeuvre is actually quite sparse, since he devoted more time to putting together a theoretical framework for his initial discoveries than he did to composition. Objets Liés (bound objects) is the second part of his 1959 suite Etude Aux Objets, an he recorded a new version of it for this LP. François-Bernard Mâche’s Terre de Feu (1963) constrasts glacial creaking, icy tinkling and watery trickles to create a primal, frozen soundscape which seems at odds with the title (fiery ground). Michel Philippot’s Etude III (1962) juxtaposes stacatto pinging sounds with clock chimes twisted and warped out of shape – the sound of a grandfather clock going cuckoo. François Bayle’s L’Oiseau Chanteur is the third part of his Portraits de L’Oiseau-Qui-N’Existe-Pas (portraits of the bird which doesn’t exist) from 1963. Oboe, horn and clavichord are seamlessly blended with electronic sounds which often approach the condition of birdsong. Electronic music is particularly good at imitating the complex sonorities of birdsong. The songs of certain birds, in turn (I’m thinking of the bird of paradise in particular here), sound as if they are being produced by electronic rather than natural means. There is humour in Bayle’s music, too, with the occasional goofy chuckle bubbling through like an anthropomorphised woodpecker. The sprightly clavichord and rapid melodic and harmonic leaps and turns, combined with this humour, give it something of a Zappaesque flavour at times. Luc Ferrari’s Tête et Queue du Dragon (head and tail of a dragon) mixes hissing, dry rattling and wet slithering sounds with heat-hazed drones to create a sinister portrait of the beast in question. It’s a monster movie for the ears. Serbian-born Ivo Malec’s Dahovi (which means breathing in Serbo-Croat) from 1961 is dark and ominous, with low rumbling tones and distorted vocal sounds suggesting sinister goings on in some dank, torchlit crypt. Bernard Parmegiani’s Danse (1962) sprinkles tinkling showers of glassy sound droplets over a white noise waterfall before conjuring a swarm of tropical bird and insect sounds. It then quietens into more pointillistic dots of discrete sound before launching into a scurrying frenzy reminiscent of Ligeti’s manic harpsichord exercise in perpetual motion Continuum.

Pierre Henry went his own way, leaving the confines of the GRM in 1958. He wearied of Schaeffer’s doctrinaire approach, and wanted to explore his own musical directions, whether they be concrète or electronic. He was also keen to reach out to audiences, and to collaborate with like-minded artists in other fields. One such was the dancer and choreographer Maurice Béjart, whom he met at the RTF studios in 1955. Henry created many electronic ballet scores for him over the years, some of which are collected on the LP Mass For the Present Time. The best known of the pieces here is the titular suite, which comprises the electronic components of a ‘ceremony in nine episodes to the memory of Patrick Belda’, a dancer in Béjart’s troupe who had died in a car crash. A more full title of this suite, which acknowledged that it was only a part of the whole, was included on the original French release: Les Jerks Électronique de la Messe Pour le Temps Présent. Michel Colombier arranged a driving garage rock backing, ornamented with the odd woodwind flourish or emphatic tubular bell clangour, and Henry sprayed colourful splurges of electronic sound over the top. If Pysché Rock sounds familiar, it’s because it was loosely adapted to form the theme music for Futurama (Matt Groening being a huge enthusiast for esoteric music). This was certainly a long way from the academy or Schaeffer’s austere lab. It moves electronic music towards the realm of popular music, where it would find a welcoming and fertile home. Henry would collaborate on another electronic ‘mass’ in 1969, this time with the rock group Spooky Tooth. Other pieces on the album conform more to type. The extract from The Voyage comes from a longer piece which evokes the afterlife journey towards rebirth as depicted in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It’s a subject matter which it shares with an even longer electronic work by a French composer, Eliane Radigue’s superb Trilogie de la Mort. The sounds are built up from feedback, and are appropriately dark and ominous, conjuring up an unsettling, spectral interzone. The Green Queen was another ‘spectacle’ thought up with Béjart, with death and transfiguration a central theme once more (the psychedelic cover begins to make more sense in this context). The rock instrumentation was absent this time, however, the music being a purer distillation of Henry’s concrete and electronic sounds. Variations for a Door and a Sigh (1963) is essentially just that. A concrete piece which uses a sigh and the creaking of a door recorded in a granary as its source material. Henry is using sounds which are almost not there, creating a piece on the threshold of audibility. As such, it seems to open a door into some other place. It was given its premier in the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in Paris on 27th June 1963, the setting adding to the sense of tuning into the beyond.

Cortical Art III couldn’t be more different. It was recorded in public during the inaugural concert of the 8th International Congress of Electro-Encephalography and Clinical Neuropsychology at Marseille on 5th September 1973. A tough crowd, very analytical. Henry collaborated here with Roger Lafosse, who had devised a machine which translated brain activity into electrical impulses, which Henry could then transpose into electronic sound. This was live electronics, then, in effect a duet between brain and musical interpreter and mixer. The result is ferocious, a squall of electronic sound which makes no concessions to the professional crowd, unleashing a veritable brainstorm. It’s exciting stuff, particularly given its in the moment creation. You can imagine Henry wrestling with those encephalographic waves etching their patterns across his oscilloscope, trying to mould them into some coherent form. If this is the sound of a mind, then it would seem to be a rather turbulent and troubled one. Marvellously, the assembled neuropsychologists break into polite applause when the electronic storm finally subsides.

Other national radio stations followed the RTF’s example in setting up electronic music studios. The Westdeutscher Rundfunk (West German Broadcasting, or WDR) established theirs in 1951 in Cologne under the directorship of Herbert Eimert. The Cologne studio adopted a very different approach to the RTF, placing emphasis on sounds generated through electronic means rather than on recorded sounds. Under Eimert’s watchful eye, these were to be organised along the lines of the total serialist music then considered the way forward for the Western classical tradition. This involved the arrangement of all musical elements (pitch, timbre, duration, rhythm etc) according to rigorously worked out formulae, creating an intensely ordered music. A new kind of distanced classicism, in effect, taking the reaction to the lush late Romanticism of the early 20th century to its ultimate conclusion. There was a fair amount of hostility between the French and German studios, or at least between some of their more doctrinaire inhabitants. Schaeffer and Eimert were certainly very fierce and a little dictatorial in promoting their particular manifestos for the new technologies and the way they felt they should be used. The belief in artistic freedom and the possibility that a multiplicity of approaches was permissible and even desirable seemed ideas which were alien to them. With time and the spread of electronic music beyond these national fiefdoms, such divisions became irrelevant and seemed a little foolish in retrospect.

The best known composer to have worked at the Cologne studios was Karlheinz Stockhausen, although his first electronic Etude was created at GRM in 1952. Stockhausen ended up taking over the directorship of the WDR studio from Eimert in 1963, and held the post up until 1977, at which point he devoted all his energies to his monumental Licht cycle of music theatre pieces. We have several of the electronic pieces which he made at the Cologne studios during the 60s. Stockhausen definitely began in the serialist camp, and was always keen to point out the theoretical structure of his music – offputtingly to listeners who subsequently felt they lacked the expertise to hear the work ‘properly’. He soon moved beyond serialist strictures into more freely expressive territories, however, whilst never losing the musicological verbosity. Kontakte (1958-60) was an electronic piece which could stand on its own or be combined with a part for piano and percussion. We have the Vox release from 1969, with its use of that signature material of the period, Perspex, on the cover. The contacts of the title refer to the points at which the tape and the musicians collide or graze against each other, the sounds contrasting or converging. Sometimes the electronics seem to be a reverberant shadow of the instruments, and sometimes the instrumental performers seem to be reacting to or recoiling from the electronic sounds. These are two worlds which come into close proximity and occasionally make contact, but remain fundamentally divergent. At the centre of the tape piece is a long descending note which slows down in frequency whilst maintaining a steady pitch, stretching out to reveal its constituent beat cycles. The effect is rather like watching a slow lightning flash descent until it is finally grounded. Stockhausen used his electronic sounds to create a sense of space, and of movement within that space, building an artificial environment which the listener could inhabit and explore. To help mould this sense of sonic topography, he recorded the sounds he produced on four microphones place at cardinal points around a rotating table on top of which the speaker was placed. In live performances, he could mix the sounds around a hall which has speakers placed in all four corners, sending them spinning around the audience’s heads. I saw him doing just that in 2005 at the old Billingsgate Fish Market in London. After his customary technical introduction to the musicological mechanics of the piece, he advised us to close our eyes, hold on to a sound and follow it around. ‘Enjoy your trip’, he said with an informality, bolstered by the comfy orange cardy he wore, which belied his reputation for forbidding intellectualism.

Mixtur (1964-7) followed on from Kontakte’s combination of electronic and instrumental forces, this time transforming the sounds of sections of an orchestra with the use of sine wave generators and ring modulators. Ring modulators were used again in Mantra (1970), a piece for two pianists who each had one of the devices to hand to splinter the notes they were playing on the keyboard. The ring modulator essentially splits a tone apart into its upper and lower frequencies, eliminating the mid-ranges. It creates a jagged, harshly metallic sound (Stockhausen would use it with metallic percussion in his Microphonie I). This was put to perfect use by Dick Mills and Brian Hodgson at the Radiophonic Workshop, who distorted the human voice to produce the monotone, mechanical shouting of the Daleks in Doctor Who. Mantra was based on a 13 note ‘formula’, reiterated across 13 sections, with each note the centre of its own particular part. The ring modulators emphasised those focal notes, surrounding them with their own wavering aura.

Telemusik (1966) is on the same Deutsche Grammophon LP as Mixtur. It’s worth pointing out that Stockhausen bought up his entire back catalogue of Deutsche Grammaphon recordings, which he proceeded to release on his mail-order only Stockhausen Verlag label. This gave him complete control of his work, from the cover design and sleevenotes to the mix. The old LPs are thus the only way to hear these works as they were originally recorded and mixed. Telemusik takes the form of short wave radio signals, tuning into the world and catching half-heard echoes of its global musics. These range from the ancient Japanese Gagaku court music (the piece was written while Stockhausen was staying in Osaka), to gamelan and Saharan singing. Stockhausen paid attention to his dreams, and this was his first attempt to realise his dream vision of a ‘music of the whole world’ which united all cultures and dissolved national boundaries. The swooping, fluttering and spiralling high-pitched tones which sound like short wave signals are generated electronically here. Stockhausen clearly liked their timbre and dreamlike drift, however, and would go on to use short wave radio tuning in his 1968 pieces Kurzwellen and Spiral.

Telemusik’s implied panglobalism reached its apogee in Hymnen (1967), a vast work which, at almost 2 hours in length, demonstrated that electronic music could be used for longform compositions as well as for shorter studies and instrumental contrast. It also definitively broke down the divide between electronic and concrete sounds, freely using both without any resultant explosion. Hymnen unfolds gradually across four ‘regions’, giving the feel of a journey across a mapped out space, one both geographical and interior. The concrète element comes principally in the form of vaguely perceived national anthems, which are subject to tape transformations and absorption by electronic sound (including more shortwave drift). Stockhausen himself presides over the seamless sonic voyage around the world, acting as some kind of cosmic croupier. He blandly but authoritatively announces various colours, as if to cue a shift in the predominant palette of our imaginative backdrop. A brief section in which the tape is sped up to a cartoon canter has a (presumably unintentionally) comic feel, and again brings to mind the Zappa of Lumpy Gravy. The final region in this landmark piece is a noplace, the invented utopian state of Hymnunion in Harmondie under Pluramon, which has its own imagination anthem. Stockhausen seemed to be pointing to the potential for this new music to affect a transformation of the world, or at least a change in the consciousness of those who experienced it. Unfortunately, like so many utopian dreamers, he ended up disappearing into his own ideal worlds, replacing the real and tangible with ever more elaborate self-created or semi-appropriated mythologies. These became largely impenetrable and were frequently foolish, but by now no one could criticise Stockhausen, who believed utterly in his own unassailable genius. He became his own self-igniting star – bright Sirius, burning a very long way from Earth and its mundane human concerns.

The other major European electronic music studio was the Studio di Fonologia in Milan, attached to the Italian National Radio station (Radio Audizioni Italiane, or RAI). Italian composers Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono were central figures here. Nono was a committed Communist, and often contrasted electronic elements with sung texts through which he could voice his political views. La Fabbrica Illuminata (1964) has a chorus and a soloist singing or speaking over a musique concrete tape which uses recorded factory noises as its source material (much as Edgard Varèse had done in the electronic interludes of his 1954 piece Déserts). Y Entonces Comprendio (and then he understood) from 1969-70 sets six female voices and a chorus against a tape part, and its revolutionary intent is made clear by its dedication to Che Guevara. Como Una Ola de Feurza y Luz (like a wave of strength and light) from 1971-2 is on the same Deutsche Grammaphon LP as the previous piece. It contrasts soprano and piano with their distorted mirror images, wrenched into strange shapes through tape manipulation. These electronic sections are interspersed with stormy orchestral passages, again in a fashion similar to Edgard Varèse’s Déserts.

Luciano Berio didn’t share Nono’s abiding political commitment, but he was no less radical in using electronic musical materials and extended technique to crack apart the old received notions of what instruments and ensembles should sound like, and what they should do. The principle instrument he was interested in was the most flexible and wide-ranging of them all – the human voice. He was married to the soprano Cathy Berberian between 1950 and 1964, and she was a great inspiration for him. She interpreted the dramatic and expressionistic vocal works he wrote for her (both during and after the marriage) with fearless dedication. Many of these used elements of electronic manipulation to stretch the vocal sounds even further, imbuing them with spectral and special qualities which wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. They often create the impression of travelling inwards, into some interior, psychological state. The alteration of the human voice always has an initially disorienting and potent effect, making the intimate and the familiar alien and strange. The 21 minute tour de force Visage (1961) puts Berberian’s voice through any number of variations, but her remarkable performance remains central, as it does in the shorter Sequenza III for Woman’s Voice (1965). I’ve written more about these pieces before, in the context of Peter Strickland’s film Berberian Sound Studio, whose backdrop draws on the Studio di Fonologia set up. We have Visage on tow LPs: one on CBS coupled with the more conventional (and thus more frequently performed) orchestral work Sinfonia; the other a Turnabout LP of electronic music which also includes the electronic elements from John Cage’s chance piece Fontana Mix (1958), recorded at the Studio di Fonologia; and Turkish-born Ilhan Mimaroglu’s 1965 piece Agony. This was recorded at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Centre, the major locale for electronic music production in the US at the time. It had been established in 1958, emerging from the Columbia Tape Music Centre set up at Columbia University in New York in 1951. Mimaroglu’s piece used electronic means to create a sound analogue for the fiery reds, blazing yellows and burnt browns of the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky’s violently expressionist 1947 work Agony, which is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Berio also wrote pieces which combined and contrasted instrumental, orchestral and electronic elements. In Différences (1958), a motley chamber group consisting of flute, harp, viola and cello play over a tape which manipulates the sounds they make and throws them back at them. Laborintus II (1965) is a work of musical synthesis composed for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth which incorporates electronic sounds alongside jazz, operatic, choral and spoken word elements, all coming together to form a theatrical whole. The recording is inevitably a poor substitute for a staged performance, but is a never less than interesting melange, anyway.

The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis wrote, or constructed, a good deal of electronic music, and was also an early user of computer technology for musical ends. He set this technology to calculating the parameters of his ‘stochastic’ pieces. The word stochastic refers to a pattern or group whose behaviour or movement is calculable within certain limits of probability, but is never precisely predictable. It all sounds dryly mathematical, a matter of plotting points on graphs and working through calculus with little thought of musical form, an impression deepened by the use of formulaic titles: ST (for stochastic) followed by numbers which indicate instrumental forces, the number of times these forces have been used, and sometimes even the date of composition. Hence ST-10-1,080262, which we have on an EMI disc, coupled with Polla Ta Dhina. Or, rather more concisely, ST.4, coupled with Atrées. These pieces actually have a very organic feel, which is not at all difficult to absorb and comprehend. The talk of rigorous mathematical order which Xenakis’ music tended to trail in the 60s and 70s was rather offputting, but the music needn’t be heard as a cerebral exercise. Its impact is visceral and instinctively felt, and cumulatively very powerful. The stochastic processes create a sense of semi-chaotic motion with a deeper order evident below the turbulent surface. These are the shifting patterns of swarming or flowing, flocking or flickering found in the natural world and in the play of the elements. The long, gliding notes and clusters (glissandi) which are characteristic of Xenakis add to this organic impression. Xenakis himself expressed the primacy of the aesthetic aspects of his music over their technical methodologies in an interview which he gave to Brian Morton for the Wire magazine in 1988. ‘If I see a beautiful sunset’, he said, ‘I might afterwards go on to ask and explore why it has happened – planetary movement, orbit, the diffraction of light – but to begin with I simply say, how beautiful’.

Xenakis composed a number of electronic works at Pierre Schaeffer’s GRM studios, which he first visited in 1954. Four of these are included on the Erato Xenakis box set we have. Diamorphoses (1957) uses clashing and cranking industrial sounds given a cavernous reverberation and set at a spatial remove. It sounds like some immense subterranean factory, or the hub of a busy lunar space port, all viewed from a safe distance. The slowly rising background noise is like a launch being prepared, whilst the quicksilver ascending and descending glissandi trace arcing flight paths in and out. Messiaen, who had taught and encouraged Xenakis, commented on Diamorphoses in terms which once more voice the idea that the music transcended any formulaic mathematical bases it might employ: ‘The preliminary calculations of these huge spider-webs are transformed into a musical delight of the utmost poetical nature’.

The Philips Pavilion, Brussels Expo 58

Concret PH was produced for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Expo of 1958. Xenakis was a trained architect and worked for the arch-modernist Le Corbusier. He worked on the preliminary plans for the Pavilion with him, at which point Le Corbusier left to supervise another project in India, leaving Xenakis in charge of the actual construction. There is little doubt that the building was a collaborative effort, but Xenakis didn’t receive the acknowledgment which was his due. This contributed to his decision to leave Le Corbusier’s employment and concentrate on his music. The PH in the title refers to the hyperbolic parabaloid, the mathematical shape which gave the pavilion its remarkable form. The sweeping curves rising to twin peaks are like Xenakis’ gliding glissandi given concrete form. Xenakis’ piece was placed between repeat playbacks of Edgard Varèse’s Poème Electronique, the sound distributed across 325 speakers arrayed around the interior of the pavilion, a further 25 setting the floor rumbling with low bass frequencies. Xenakis built his piece up from cut up recordings of burning charcoal – tiny flickering sparks of sound. These are gradually built up until we get the impression of a glinting crystalline mass, expanding and shearing off shattering shards. It must have been quite something to have been immersed in this ever-growing cloud of thousands of tiny sounds whilst gazing around the interior curvature of a hyperbolic parabaloid.

Orient-Occident (1960) begins with sonorous bell tones which give way to a blasted ground of harsh feedback screeches, sounding like bowed metal percussion. Later, there are more wooden percussion sounds, discrete and spaced apart, as in Japanese Noh theatre accompaniments – the Orient of the title perhaps. A tropical jungle chorus emerges, as it did in Bernard Parmegiani’s Danse, Xenakis creating an abundant and noisome natural soundscape. Bohor (1962) was dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer, an acknowledgment of how much his time at the GRM studios had meant to Xenakis. Unfortunately, Schaeffer was none too keen on the results, and was never one to hold back from voicing his opinion, so the gift was effectively rejected. The piece opens with echoing percussive pattering on what sounds like saucepan lids. A ratcheting, descending slash of sound cuts through at regular intervals, sounding like a stick being run along the loose, reverberant railings of a metal fence, or the strings inside a piano. These elements grow more dense, creating another expanding sound mass. The semi-random, stochastic order gives the impression of drops of water falling onto the surface of a pool in a large subterranean cave, with something larger occasionally plunging in, skimming across or leaping out. It’s a little like Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band’s field recording of their percussive interaction with cave water run-off on the record Troglodyte’s Delight, only more loud and intense.

Perhaps the pinnacle of Xenakis’ electronic music, and certainly its most epic and lengthy expression at just under an hour in duration, is the 1971 piece Persepolis. This was commissioned by the Shah of Iran and was first played in the ruins of the Palace of King Darius I at Persepolis, the heart of the old Persian Empire in the pre-Christian era. The audience invited to the performance on August 26th 1971 wandered through the columns, doorways and along the paths of the old corridors, moving between one of six listening zones, each with eight loudspeakers distributing the eight channels on which the piece was recorded. The music itself is massive - ritualistic, dense and overwhelming. You simply have to allow yourself to be engulfed in its roiling maelstrom of sound. A high-pitched field of sparkling sound is constant throughout, an unobtrusive and unchanging continuum above the everchanging forces below. It seems to represent the stars glinting above the ruins on the Persian Plain, which are open to the night skies. If the shifting surface of the music embodies the forces of geological and historical time, this glittering patina points to a more eternal plane, or at least one which exists on a more cosmological timescale. The climax feels like the Earth tearing itself apart, Xenakis’ glissandi like thick gobbets of magma thrown into the sky before plunging back to score the ground. It’s immense, stunning, the precursor to all subsequent noise music. The performance also incorporated the choreographed use of light: lasers, arc-lights, moving stage lights, bonfires, flaming torches and pin-point spotlights played across the mountain rising in the background. It must have been an extraordinary spectacle.

Xenakis wrote a number of pieces which incorporated light effects of one kind or another into the performance, their placement and movement designed to be synchronised with the music. Polytope de Montreal for example, composed in 1967, was written for four recorded orchestras and ‘electronic flashes’. Xenakis was concerned with presenting music as a spectacle rather than just something to sit and respectfully listen to in a concert hall. He wanted the audience to feel like they were participating in the performance. This extended to the spatial as well as the visual elements. Electronic music could be distributed around space through multiple speakers, but Xenakis tried to do something similar with instrumental and orchestral pieces as well. Thus, in Persephassa (a variation on the name Persephone) from 1969, also first performed in Persepolis, the six percussionists who perform the piece stand in a ring around the audience, surrounding them with multi-directional sound. In the orchestral piece Terretektorh (1966), the members of the orchestra leave the stage and position themselves at various points around the hall. These spatial reorganisations, along with the light effects, produced what Xenakis called ‘space-sound kinematics’.

Xenakis’ life before becoming a composer was quite remarkable. He fought for the Greek resistance against Nazi occupation during the Second World War. After the Nazis had been driven out, he then joined a resistance cell which opposed British and American efforts to stave off a Communist takeover and impose an authoritarian rule which would better serve their interests. It was a fragment of a British shell which tore through one side of Xenakis’ face towards the end of 1944, very nearly killing him, destroying an eye and leaving him permanently scarred. He recovered, and persisted in his active opposition to the new regime. He was finally forced to flee the country a few years later, a death penalty hanging over his head. The political instability in Greece culminated in the military coup which installed the fascist rule of the ‘colonels’ in 1967. When their hubris led to their downfall in 1974, Xenakis’ death sentence was finally lifted. So many of the pieces discussed here were composed over a period during which, had he returned to his native country, he would have been executed. This was not something he talked about, however. Nor was there any overt political content in his music, as there was with Nono (although Nuits was dedicated to political prisoners). These startling facts only became public knowledge in 1980, when Nouritza Matossian published her biography of Xenakis, for which he gave her an honest and revealing interview.

The Swedish composer Bengt Hambraeus also composed pieces which amassed great blocks of sound. This was fairly easily achieved on his favoured instrument, the organ. Interferences (1961-2) shows the influence of Messiaen’s organ pieces. It’s incredibly loud in parts (quite regular parts at that), with some foundation-shaking bass chords and flashing clusters in the upper regions. But Hambraeus also creates unusual sonorities which approximate to the sounds more usually associated with electronic music. Gyorgy Ligeti does something similar with his extraordinary organ piece Volumina, which we have on Candide and Wergo Heliodor LPs. This gives credence to the oft-made observation that the organ is the synthesiser of the pre-electronic age, driven by complex mechanics and controlled air pressure rather than variable currents and circuitry. Hambraeus was the first Swedish composer to explore the possibilities of electronic music. He studied at the Darmstadt summer school from 1951-5 before working at the WDR electronic music studios in 1955. It was here that he completed his electronic piece Doppelruhr II, which used organ sounds as a source material.

Constellations II was put together at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan in 1959, and organ sounds were once more the base material. It took the elements of a previous piece for organ called Constellations and subjected them to electronic transformations. He would go on to write two further Constellations pieces. Constellations III overlaid more organ parts above the tape of part II, and IV combined that tape with percussion. The electronic transformation of the organ sounds turns them into something alternately glinting, crystalline, unearthly and impossibly massive. It also allowed Hambraeus to realise ‘an old dream of mine of a fantastic space organ beyond all limitations’. The organ sounds and their altered shapes and warped, expressionist shadows could be projected throughout a particular space, with no evident point of origin. In his manipulation of the higher fluting and shimmering sounds of the organ, Hambraeus also came to realise that he was unconsciously recreating the sounds of nature which he artistic mentor Olivier Messiaen had more consciously incorporated into so much of his music. Once more, electronic sounds approximated the condition of birdsong. Hambraeus talked of ‘the inexpressibly gripping choir of birds on an early spring morning. That rapturous constellation of untamed natural force, space (the cosmos, the universe, the heavens) and an all-encompassing playfulness. It’s this cosmic tonal experience, then, that became (at least for me personally) the unforeseen result’.

More organ sounds, of the directly electronic variety this time, come in the form of Terry Riley’s Persian Surgery Dervishes. This is a glimpse into one of his all-night flights, lengthy improvisations on the organ which use loops and tape delay effects to allow him to play over fading shadows of previous phrases or set up grounds over which he can continue to play. It’s a further example of the incorporation of electronic effects into live performance which we previously encountered through Stockhausen’s Mixtur and Mantra. Riley’s music for Joel Santoni’s 1972 film Les Yeux Fermés is a more studio bound affair, using multi-tracking to build up polyphonic layers of improvisation. This allows for a greater range of sound textures, with different keyboards used for each new layer. It closely resembles his 1969 LP A Rainbow in Curved Air in that one side comprises of keyboard improvisations, whilst the second has him playing on a delay-echoed saxophone, unwinding Indian-inflected lines over his own ‘phantom band’.

The Italian Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza also improvised using electronic instruments on Credo, the final track of their 1968 Deutsche Grammaphon LP Improvisationen. The group were founded in Rome in 1964 by Franco Evangelisti, inspired by the example of the New Music Ensemble in California, who created improvised pieces with no prior preconceptions or structures. All the players were composers, and they aimed for a certain compositional form to emerge from their improvisations, based on a knowledge of each other’s styles and musical temperaments. No one player was supposed to overshadow any other, the ensemble partaking of a wider ideal of egalitarian democracy. Jazz and Indian influences were evident, the former in the trumpet playing of Ennio Morricone, here enjoying a freeform experimental breather from his prolific film scoring. For the electronic track, portable instrumentation was used, including self-built models in the Hugh Davies mould such as the ‘phonisint’ and the ‘sintek’. This atypical electronic piece (they generally stuck to conventional instruments, unconventionally played) was recorded at the Laboratorio Ellettronico di Musica Sperimentale in Rome, a place which sounds like it was tremendously exciting. Incidentally, ignore that man reflected in the laminated cover.

John Cage was also employing elements of chance in the 60s, partly drawing on his interest in Zen Buddhism. His Music of the Changes (1951) used the coin-tossing divination method employed by some to read the I-Ching, the ancient Chinese book of cryptic wisdom. In line with the book, this was a way for composer and performer to find release from conscious choice and create a pattern of sound which is entirely of the moment, and thus somehow connected to the universe as it is unfolding in that moment. The Variations pieces meanwhile used graphic scores drawn on transparencies which are laid on top of each other in a randomly chosen fashion to create variable patterns, which are then interpreted by the performer on whichever instrument they choose. In the recording of Variations IV (1964), this is Cage’s regular collaborator David Tudor, playing the piano. According to Michael Nyman in his book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, this process of semi-random selection extended to the performance space as well. Lines were drawn out from a plan of the hall, and the sounds created from beyond the usual orchestral stage.

Composers didn’t always turn to electronics to find new sonorities and crack open the old systems of equal temperament and harmonic transposition. Harry Partch abandoned tempered scales as far back as 1923, and began to build up new scales which allowed for greater variation within the octave. He eventually came up with a 43 tone scale, and began building his own instruments in order to play it. Sometimes, these used the new sounds produced by new synthetic materials, such as the strengthened glass of pyrex from which he fashioned his cloud bowls. These instruments were musical sculptures of great beauty, and took their place on the stage in the musical theatre pieces which he created as a synthesis of visual art, music, drama and the spoken word. On the short pieces included on the New World LP he shares with John Cage you can hear such unique instruments as; adapted guitar, diamond and bass marimbas, adapted viola, gourd tree, new harmonic canon, quadrangularis reversum, eucal blossom (a large marimba), ektara, boo II, cloud chamber bowls and chromelodeon. The latter is an organ which Partch retuned to his own scale, rather as Terry Riley retuned his electronic organs to just intonation. Both rejected the rigid order of the equal temperament in order to pursue more natural harmonies.

Finally, Basil Kirchin’s Worlds Within Worlds is a truly individual work by a maverick composer who worked outside the protective walls of any supportive institutions. He produced library music and wrote film scores, including The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), for which he provided the mannered jazz of Vincent Price’s tragic doctor’s mechanical dance band. The two Worlds Within Worlds records (of which we have the second, released in 1974) were intensely personal projects. The first mixed free improvisation from Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler, Derek Bailey and others with Kirchin’s musique concrète, with the second concentrating on the latter element (Bailey makes a brief contribution), thus arguably making it a more pure distillation of his work. The second volume of Worlds Within Worlds takes us from ‘Emergence’ and through ‘Evolution’, the first having begun with ‘Integration (non-racial)’ before branching out into ‘The Human Element’. There’s definitely some sort of progression going on here. For Worlds Within Worlds parts three and four, Kirchin blended solo and chamber drone passages using low instruments (flugel horn, alphorn, woodwind, arco bass and organ) with concrete sounds drawn from the natural, human and industrial worlds. He recorded animals at London zoo, including a gorilla and some flamingos, and the spirited play of the autistic children his wife Esther was teaching at a school in Switzerland. These unfolded into further contrasting sounds such as jet engines passing overhead and the industrial clamour of the docks at Hull (the whole record was recorded and mixed at a studio in Hull) – worlds opening into other worlds. Few paid much attention to these records at the time of their release, although Brian Eno, ever the attentive listener, wrote a sleevenote endorsement on the second volume. ‘Within the first couple of minutes’, he wrote, ‘it became obvious to me that Basil had not only discovered a whole new area of sound, but had exploited it with extreme skill and sensitivity, producing beautiful and evocative music as well’. It no doubt had a great influence on Eno’s subsequent development of the idea of ambient music, particularly on the On Land record. It was also influential on future experimental musicians, and was a big favourite of Broadcast. Jonny Trunk championed Kirchin, re-releasing many of his recording on Trunk Records (although not, thus far, Worlds Within Worlds) and allowing him to realise new ideas before he passed away in 2005.

Finally, I include this record, split between British composers David Bedford and Thea Musgrave, largely because of its great cover, whose images are very much reminiscent of Julian House’s work for the Ghost Box label. Bedford was another modern composer who, like Pierre Henry, was happy to make connections with the world of pop and rock music. He worked with Mike Oldfield and other Virgin Records stalwarts on several records which blended modernist orchestration with rock instrumentation, and he also provided arrangements for some of Roy Harper’s 70s LPs (including his epic song suite Stormcock). Never a dryly academic or analytical in musical outlook, he gave his work colourfully poetic titles, such as the Blakean Albion Moonlight here, and on another record we have, the very proggy Tentacles of the Dark Nebula. Elisabeth Lutyens was a major, if rather neglected, British composer of the 20th century, although I know her best for her film scores. Surprisingly for a composer known for her modernist music, she produced scores for Amicus horror films like Dr Terror’s House of Horrors and The Skull, and Hammer psycho thrillers like Paranoiac and Never Take Sweets from Strangers, as well as frankly b-grade fare such as the entertaining The Earth Dies Screaming and the slightly grubby Circus of Death. You wouldn’t catch Pierre Boulez doing that.

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.