A Sound British Adventure

The Unit Delta Plus studio

A Sound British Adventure, broadcast at the very domestic hour of 11.30 in the morning on Radio 4, the optimum time for the unwitting absorption of deceptively experimental sound, was a brief scan of the development of electronic music in these isles in the 50s and 60s. It was presented by the comedian Stewart Lee, who introduced himself as ‘the only friendly e-list celebrity they could find who’d been to a Stockhausen concert’. In fact, he’s eminently qualified for the gig, having displayed a long-term, wide-ranging and well-informed interest in the esoteric borderlands of music. He wrote the Wire Primer on The Fall, won Celebrity Mastermind with a specialist round on the free improvisation guitarist Derek Bailey, produces short reviews for the Observer of albums by the likes of Matana Roberts, Boris, Trembling Bells, Epic 45, Muhal Richard Abrahams alongside the Fingerbobs soundtrack, wrote the introduction to a biography of free improvisation saxophonist Evan Parker, who he also included in an evening of free improv he curated for the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, and took part in a performance of John Cage’s chance-based composition Indeterminacy (he read the texts which form part of the piece). His recent shows, in which he played a Krautrock selection including Kraftwerk, Neu and Amon Duul as interval music, ended with a Carpet Remnant World transformed into a model utopia, the tubular discards becoming dream towers shining with cheerful points of light, all set to the gorgeous, deliquescent electronic melodies of Ghost Box artist The Advisory Circle’s Now Ends the Beginning, the opening track from their brilliant recent album As The Crow Flies (also reviewed by Lee in The Observer).

The programmed anchored the early development of British electronic music in the experiences of war, making the point that much of the technology used was army or navy surplus equipment. Tristram Cary, whom we hear in an archive interview from 1972, was an ex-navy man who perceived the musical possibilities of electronic sound whilst listening to the whistling undulations of short wave radio signals. Desmond Leslie (a collection of whose eccentric experiments was released on Trunk Records a while back), another electronic music ‘hobbyist’, was an ex-Spitfire pilot and UFO enthusiast who, like Cary, cobbled together his apparatus from redundant forces’ equipment and whatever else could be put to use. The amateur status of these early pioneers is emphasised, and comparison made with the electronic composers on the continent, who received state funding to make ‘serious’ works of art at the studios of French station ORTF (the Office of French National Radio-Television) and West German National Radio in Cologne. Over here, Daphne Oram was producing electronic music to sell washing machines and OMO washing powder, and the largely unsung Fred Judd (whose very name conjures up an unpretentious, artisanal approach to sound creation) was producing the first all electronic score for the ITV puppet-based children’s science fiction series Space Patrol in 1963 – the same year that Dr Who first appeared on the nation’s screens with its Radiophonic Workshop produced theme music and sound effects. The story of the Radiophonic Workshop and its involvement has been told on several occasions already, and this programme, after an essential acknowledgment of its massive contribution, turns its attention elsewhere.

Would early British electronic music be so well-loved were it not for its utilitarian, semi-amateur status? Probably not. It certainly wouldn’t have been heard by so many people had it taken the European route to subsidised art music. After all, the likes of Stockhausen became a byword for unlistenability amongst the general public in the late 60s and 70s, even turning up as the butt of jokes in Man About the House. Some of the British composers did feel frustrated at the limitations imposed upon them by commercial or soundtrack requirements, however, and yearned for the artistic freedom afforded their continental counterparts. Peter Zinovieff, the co-founder of EMS (Electronic Music Systems) and inventor of one of the earliest successful models of synthesiser in the 60s, admits that he was ‘rather snobbish’ and was far more interested in the possibility of Stockhausen visiting his Putney studios than in Paul McCartney and all the other pop stars parading through in the late 60s, wanting try out his new instruments. Tristram Cary is cited as being another of the real progenitors of British electronic music, and he was capable of producing both abstruse modern classical music and popular, accessible film soundtracks. His music for the 1955 radio play The Japanese Fisherman, a little of which is played on the programme, was the first electronic score to be commissioned by the BBC, and evoked the solar burst of the first atomic bomb. In the same year, he produced his darkly sardonic score for the Ealing comedy of post-war seediness and decline The Ladykillers, which seemingly had little in common with such electronic experimentation. Although it could be argued (at a considerable stretch) that the sounds of the trains which are a constant sonic presence in the film call to mind Pierre Schaeffer’s early work of musique concrete Etude Aux Chemins de Fer, built up from the recorded sounds of steam locomotive. Trunk Records have released an excellent compilation of Cary’s music, It’s Time for Tristram Cary, which includes the collage-style soundtrack, mixing electronic, jazz and light styles, that he produced for Don Levy’s fascinating 1967 promotional short Opus (which you can find on the bfi COI – that’s Central Office of Information - collection A Portrait of a People).

Peter Zinovieff is one of a number of people interviewed for the programme, others including Radiophonic Workshop composer Brian Hodgson, Portishead’s Adrian Uttley (who also featured in the BBC4 Radiophonic Workshop documentary Alchemists of Sound), Radiophonic Workshop archivist, historian and composer Mark Ayres, and senior lecturer Dr Michael Grierson, the director of the creative computing course at Goldsmiths College who also looks after the Daphne Oram archive held there. Zinovieff is brusquely frank about the productions of his past, dismissing his alliance with Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire in Unit Delta Plus as having created ‘terrible music’. His offhand manner, which displays a disinclination to temper raw opinion with tact or politeness, leads to refreshingly unvarnished recollections. He makes no pretence at having liked Daphne Oram, or of having enjoyed any kind of professional relationship or sense of shared artistic principles or interests. ‘I found her rather dull’, he says, ‘a bit schoolmarmish’. There’s a hint of disgruntlement at the attention she has received recently, and the central position that she and her Oramics machine have been granted in the story of British electronic music as told in the Science Museum’s Oramics to Electronica exhibition. He dismisses the Oramics machine (which derived its sounds from photographically reading waveform shapes drawn onto slides) as a ‘completely wild idea from someone who wasn’t very scientific’. Zinovieff was evidently a musician for whom science and electronic music creation were inseparable, with composition taking on the quality of semi-mathematical, machine-aided calculus favoured by his idol Stockhausen. He liked nothing more than to retreat into his EMS studios in Putney to work, playing with the possibilities of sound generation and developing the next generation of synthesisers. He proudly pointed out that the money from the sales of EMS synths, which became very popular with the likes of The Beatles (he even sold one to Ringo and gave him a few lessons) and Pink Floyd, was all channelled back into the studio.

Brian Hodgson’s view of Daphne Oram was a little more generous. He described her as ‘a lovely lady, completely eccentric’, and praised the Oramics machine as being a revolutionary idea, with potential ‘unmatched ‘til the Fairlight’ (the first real fully integrated computer music system), and an idea which worked on a practical level at that. Michael Grierson played an unnamed piece from the Oram archives which documents her first attempts at producing sound from her newly constructed synthesiser – the first tentative steps towards a new music. Hodgson is also a little kinder on the brief lifespan of Unit Delta Plus, citing the music which they created for two Shakespearean productions at Stratford (Macbeth and King Lear) and for a production of Medea at Greenwich Theatre. Electronic music was evidently better suited for tragedies. He also recalls the White Noise LP An Electric Storm in Hell which he made with Delia Derbyshire and David Vorhaus, and the 1967 multi-media ‘happening’ the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at the Roundhouse (which predated the better known 14-Hour Technicolor Daydream at Alexandra Palace by three months) to which Unit Delta Plus contributed, along with Paul McCartney. His Carnival of Light, a 13minute improvisation with tape effects produced with input from the rest of the Beatles, was made especially for the event. McCartney had paid several visits to Zinovieff’s Putney studio, once more demonstrating that he was the Beatle most interested in avant-garde and experimental art and music beyond the comforting bounds of rock at this time.

The adoption of electronic music, and the EMSVCS3 synthesiser in particular, by rock and pop musicians in Britain really rounds the programme off. By this time, it had entered the musical mainstream, adding interesting new colours and providing expanded possibilities for sound creation. The pioneers’ work was done. As Lee points out, electronic music is now ubiquitous, its means of production accessible to a far wider range of people via PCs and laptops. New tools tend to lead to new music, as Adrian Uttley points out. But, as Zinovieff adds, making good music still ‘depends on your imagination’. The tools may change and become more sophisticated and easier to use, with a bewilderingly vast palette of potential sounds, but the roots of inspiration remain the same. The programme is available to listen to for another week or so over here.

Oramics to Electronica at the Science Museum - The Second Phase

The Radiophonic godmother - Daphne Oram presides over her magical musical machine

During a trip to London last weekend, I took the opportunity of visiting the Science Museum to take a look at the expanded Oramics to Electronica exhibition. The last time I had seen this (and I wrote about it in a previous post), only Daphne Oram’s remarkable Oramics drawn sound synthesiser had been in place, with accompanying information points and film extracts. There was also the obligatory interactive element, a touch screen programme which allowed you to draw waveforms and adjust their sound envelopes and frequencies to create your own Oramic piece. The Oramics machine is still the central marvel around which the exhibition arranges itself, a grand structure which is offered as an ideal if slightly rickety form, an embodiment of a certain self-sufficiently inventive way of doing things. Its construction from bits and pieces which might otherwise have been destined for the scrapheap, such as the wooden bedside cabinet which houses the oscillators, is a testament to individual ingenuity and expedient pragmatism. The five further display cabinets are all smaller in size than the large glass box reliquary housing the Oramics machine and cluster behind it in ancestral entrainment. Radiophonic Workshop composer Dick Mills, one of those involved in defining the aims of the exhibition and helping putting it together under the aegis of the Public History Project, pointed to this sense of ancestry when he affectionately referred to Daphne Oram, who had left the Workshop by the time he joined, as his ‘Radiophonic Godmother’. A magical fairy in tweed and twill, with refined and perfectly modulated RP tones to give her an added air of authoritative seniority. The curious contents of these extra cabinets take their cue from Oram’s cobbled-together machine, with the focus firmly on non-academic or non-institutional mavericks, oddballs and garden-shed inventors.

Leland Oscillator with Crystal Palace capacitative fader behind

The Radiophonic Workshop was, of course, part of the BBC, a monolithic institution of long-standing. But the composers (or ‘producers’ as they were officially known to keep them from developing rebellious notions of creative autonomy) tended to evade direct or prescriptive management, which they saw simply as interference. Working at the periphery of the cumbersome BBC bureaucratic and institutional structure, and keeping unofficial, late night hours, they ghosted through the monitoring channels to achieve a significant degree of freedom. In the Radiophonic Workshop cabinet there is a small piece of flat metal attached to a capstan with the words ‘Do Not Fiddle With’ neatly printed along its length. This was a part of a spring-loaded tape loop stand knocked up by the Workshop’s chief engineer from 1963 up until 1976, Dave Young. It was a simple but immensely useful alternative to the expedient use of whatever milk bottles or pencils were lying about to spool varying lengths of tape loop around. The terse instruction was aimed at ‘outsiders’, visiting BBC producers who would frustrate the Workshop team by poking around with a proprietorial air and upsetting work in progress in the delicate disorder of the studio set up. Another of Dave Young’s devices on display here is the Crystal Palace capacitive fader, which allowed 16 separate sounds to be combined in chorus, thus saving a great deal of recording and fiddly synchronisation and assembly. It gained its name because it was housed in a Perspex box, as if Young wanted its simple elegance and functional ingenuity to be on display for all to see, an engineering feat of utilitarian sculptural beauty. Young used to rummage through the junk markets of Portobello Road (long since migrated to other parts of the city) before coming into work each day, and would often uncover objects which could be put to unconventional uses undreamed of by the stallholders who sold them to him. The Crystal Palace, for example, was driven by a motor torn out of an old grammaphone player. Workshop head Desmond Briscoe and Roy Curtis-Bramwell, designer of many a classic BBC LP sleeve, wrote of the years in which Young presided as engineer in chief in their 1983 history The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years (which you can find in the Exeter library stack). They refer to the pre-synthesiser era of the 1960s as the Glowpot Days, a reference to the mixing desk constructed by Young, who used light-sensitive transistors and small lightbulbs. It was christened the Glowpot Desk, which made it sound like something to be found in Oliver Postgate’s animated children’s series The Clangers.

Hugh Davies' suitcase of sonic flotsam, Speak and Spell tweaked and electric kitchen sink lyre

The scavenging and putting to use of whatever could be found (which the Clangers, and Postgate, certainly would have approved of) is a key element of the story of early British electronic music being told in the exhibition. It is an ethos which finds its focus in the ‘Make Do and Mend’ cabinet. This shows how other musicians have carried on the tradition of lo-fi, inexpensive invention and the cannibalisation and idiosyncratic re-use of pre-existing materials. There is a portable case full of the tools and jumbled up electronic flotsam accumulated by the elecroacoustic improviser and composer Hugh Davies to put together what he called his Shozygs. These were lo-tech electronic sound producers, whose small, intimate scale and nature fitted in well with the reflective side of the British improvisation scene springing from the AMM group and its offshoots (including the Music Improvisation Quartet with which Davies played). The rather sweetly ‘alien’ name Shozygs derives from the bracketing alphabetical indices on the spine of a volume of an encyclopedia, the cover of which was used to house some of Davies’ devices. In an interview in David Toop’s book Haunted Weather, Davies talks about how he started putting contact mics on found objects, including ‘a quartet of combs mounted in holders, and an upturned tea tin with several small springs stretched across a wooden “bridge”’. You could scarcely have a more British instrument than one casually fashioned from a spare tea tin which happened to be lying around. Davies also used magnetic pick-ups from old telephones to amlify the sound of egg slicers, having observed the composer and improviser Annea Lockwood contact mic’ing this lyre of the kitchen draw (I have often found myself strumming the four ‘strings’ of my mother-in-law’s egg-slicer, which do indeed make a pleasing sound). There is an egg-slicer with contact mics on display here, perhaps one of Lockwood or Davies’ mini-instruments. There’s a very Cageian approach to music making at play here, finding fascination in the isolation and juxtaposition of everyday sounds. It’s also, in its very smallness and domesticity, a humble and humorous corrective to the bombastic, conspicuously virtuosic use to which electronic instruments were increasingly put to use in the 70s. Also on display in the Make Do and Mend cabinet is a Speak and Spell educational toy which has had its internal circuits bent. Transistor wires and capacitors stick up from the keyboard like beaded bristles. This adaptation of the cheap and disposable, as exemplified by the likes of the Modified Toy Orchestra and the ZX Spectrum Orchestra (mostly the same musicians, with different means at their disposal) acknowledges the ubiquity of preset electronic sounds in the modern world and moulds and warps them to its own creative ends. As with Davies’ use of electronics to amplify the ordinary, thus rendering it into something remarkable and worthy of scrutiny, an element of humour co-exists with an underlying philosophical ethos which deliberately (or perhaps partly as a result of economic necessity) turns its back on technological sophistication. Also on display is a Roland Bassline TB303, a small computer-driven synth and sequencer produced in 1982 which was adapted, distorted and tweaked beyond the intentions of its designers to create the corrosively viscous sound which drove Acid House and other dance styles which followed in its wake (see Peter Shapiro's Primer on the Roland 303 in May 2009 issue of The Wire to find out more).

The Mijwiz - playing and recording

Back in the Radiophonic Workshop cabinet, there are a number of objects which were used as sound sources in the days of tape-based musique concrete. Dick Mills, ever ready with his own brand of pithy, Wildean eprigammatic wit, summed up the magic of this era as involving the creation of ‘sounds that people didn’t like for programmes they didn’t understand’. An assertion made with a certain amount of pride, which in retrospect makes it seem like something of a golden age. They might not have initially understood, or even liked these strange sounds, but they left a lingering impression which for some never went away. Amongst the objects here there is a double-reeded Arabian pipe called a Mijwiz (according to Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell’s book). Daphne Oram can be seen vigorously blowing into this strange instrument in an accompanying photograph, with the first Radiophonic Workshop engineer Richard ‘Dickie’ Bird (alas, not the legendary Yorkshire cricket umpire twilighting in an intriguingly different second career) looking on with wry amusement from behind. He is adjusting the controls of what looks like a bulky old ceramic cooker, but is in fact one of the unwieldy ‘Motosacoche’ tape recorders installed in the studio, a state of the art piece of equipment for the time. Workshop composer Brian Hodgson talks about these behemoths in the Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell history. ‘The deckplate was one-and-a-half inches of steel’, he says, ‘and instead of the tape being pulled away from the heads, the heads were pulled away from the tape. When anything went wrong, we would press the button and the decks of these giant machines would gradually go up in the air; we would put in four safety pegs, and walk underneath with a spanner and adjust them. Just like servicing a car’. Perhaps most excitingly, however, is the green metallic lampshade which Delia Derbyshire used to create the source sounds for her beautiful, dreamlike piece Blue Veils and Golden Sands, one of the masterpieces of electronic music to come out of this ostensibly merely functional sonic factory (and I’ve written about this in a previous post). I confess to feeling a little awestruck by this artefact, the first time I’ve been (and probably the last time I will be) emotionally affected by a piece of desk furniture. Apparently I’m not alone. In the accompanying information, Dick Mills remembers being asked to walk on stage at a 2009 concert at the Roundhouse in London holding the lampshade before him. He sardonically observes ‘I walked on with this…well, you’d think it was the second coming’.

Holy relic - the legendary lampshade

The Radiophonic Workshop cabinet mainly concerns itself with the days of directly generated electronic or concrete sound and tape editing. There’s a Ferrograph dual speed tape recorder and a tape cutting and splicing block, the hands-on tools of the trade. Indeed, there was a definite artisanal aspect to the creation of music at this time, with a physical craftsmanship involved in putting things together which required great care and finicky precision. In the film introducing the exhibition on the Science Museum website, Peter Zinovieff, founder of The Electronic Music Studios (EMS) talks of the tactile nature of the process of building instruments and making music with them. Martin Swan, another participant in the Public History Project which came up with the ideas behind the exhibition, cleverly encapsulates its trajectory with an epigrammatic ‘it’s digits to digital in a way’. Physical tinkering, other than the pushing of a mouse with a couple of fingers, is no longer required when all is a matter of setting parameters and inputting sound information into computer music systems.

The EMS VCS3 Synthesiser

The Radiophonic Workshop cabinet also houses an EMS VCS3 modular synthesiser (the VCS standing for voltage-controlled synthesiser) designed by David Cockerell. This points the way towards the supplanting of tape-based composition in the Workshop by the development and adoption of synthesisers. EMS had been founded by the composer Tristram Cary and the composer, inventor and employee of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Peter Zinovieff. Both men had connections with the Radiophonic Workshop. Cary regularly produced scores for BBC programmes, and had worked on two Doctor Who stories in the 1960s: the original Daleks serial and the later Daleks’ Master Plan (in addition to the music he produced for the unused pilot of The Unearthly Child, included on the dvd release). Both of these soundtracks made extensive use of electronic sounds and brought him into contact with members of the Workshop. Zinovieff had been given a tour of the Radiophonic Workshop’s Maida Vale studios in 1964 in his capacity as a Canadian Broadcasting Company employee, and he later formed Unit Delta Plus, an independent electronic music studio, with Workshop renegades Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. Hodgson and Derbyshire had both used prototype VCS synths from as early as 1967, lugging them backwards and forwards between the Radiophonic Workshop and Unit Delta Plus studios. Finally, Workshop head Desmond Briscoe arranged for a demo of the EMS VCS3 synthesiser, which took place in February 1970, and the following month one was purchased for the knock-down price of £300, and installed as the Workshop’s first official synthesiser. The VCS3 was a modular instrument, which housed its different components in a walnut cabinet with neat compactness. The wooden casing partially disguised its technological nature with a homely appearance of the hand-crafted, perhaps in acknowledgement that the days of 60s futurism were at an end. It also differed from other synths (and in particular from the Moog) in its use of a 16x16 matrix board of holes into which pegs were inserted in order to link the various modules within, such as the oscillators, ring modulators and envelope shapers. It gives the VCS3 something of the appearance of a game of battleships in progress. It did also make things a lot tidier than other synthesisers of the era, whose patchboards tended to trail tangles of intertwining wires like exposed conductive entrails.

EMS gets a cabinet to itself, following naturally on from the Radiophonic collection, to which it is symbiotically attached. Surprisingly, having crashed in the late 70s, in the dying days of analogue electronics, it is still in existence today, operating out of a barn near Truro in Cornwall. You can still get some of its classic instruments, a pick up a few spare patch pins at £3.50 a piece. Most of the instruments and components on display here were designed by David Cockerell, drawing on the pioneering ideas of Peter Zinovieff (and was there ever a more perfect surname for a proponent of electronic music in its experimental lab technician phase). There’s a ring modulator built for Tristram Cary in 1969. This was a device which served to split an instrumental sound into a twinned spectral corona of the source signal. Such a device was used by Karlheinz Stockhausen in several 60s and early 70s pieces involving the live use of electronics, including Mixtur (1964), where it creates a prismatic diffraction of the colours of the orchestra, Mikrophonie II (1965) for choir, Hammond organ, electronics and tape, and Mantra (1970), in which it splinters the piano chords into harshly glittering shards. There is a Synthi-K keyboard on display, an attempt to create a touchplate approximation of a traditional piano keyboard, the keys roughly outlined in silvery metallic filaments. Less than 30 of these experimental prototypes were manufactured, and they were soon superseded by the Synthi-KS keyboard, which refined and improved upon its design. These had a built-in sequencer (and there’s a separate 128 event model from 1970 on display here), which proved very popular with British rock groups of the early 70s, and was prominently used by Pink Floyd and Brian Eno in his Roxy finery.

Prototype Synth-E - a synth in a suitcase

A prototype Synth-E instrument from 1974 has its components crammed into a sturdy attaché case, making it ready to instantly pack up, transport or store away. These low cost synthesisers were partly designed with the idea of bringing electronic music into the schoolroom. They would offer children an overarching, all-inclusive approach to music-making which they could play with in an intuitive and exciting way. The EMS ad at the back of the case, which shows Peter Zinovieff’s children let loose in the EMS studio, suggests how much fun could be had conjuring strange sounds from these tactile, hands-on machines. Another ad, produced as a company Christmas card, has a Synthi in its case hung on the post at the foot of a child’s bed in lieu of a stocking or sack, with the byline Every Christmas Needs a Synthi. This was one of series of ads EMS ran in the 70s with variations of the Every … Needs a Synthi slogan. In the case of the studio picture with on display here, it was Every Dream Needs a Synthi, rather touchingly suggesting that EMS synths could give access to the deepest levels of the human imagination, reconnecting its users with a childlike state of innocent wonder. A picture of the best known of these ads, Every Band Needs a Synthi, with a brass band playing on a sandy shore, a child’s ball on floating on a pool in which they are reflected, is on the timeline wall beyond the cabinets. Others in the series can be found on the EMS site, including the Every Picnic Needs a Synthi one, shot on a beach on the Isle of Raasay between Skye and the Scottish mainland, and the surreal Every Nun Needs a Synthi shot of a Sister in full habit no doubt wrangling some earth-trembling, Messiaenic sounds out of her keyboard.

The Fairlight - the future, for a time

The Radiophonic Workshop entered the digital age when it invested in a Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) in October 1981, one of which is on display in the ‘Sonic Frontiers’ cabinet. One of its features was a light pen which could draw and edit waveforms on a monitor screen, which in a way brought it round full circle to the principles of drawn sound upon which the Oramics machine was constructed. There is a certain amount of evangelism for this new purchase and its potential in Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell’s 1983 history. The grandiose banks of the EMS ‘Delaware’ Synthi 100 and its smaller brethren are consigned to the realms of the obsolete in very dismissive terms. A ‘simplified description of the Radiophonic Workshop’s basic function and facilities’ written at the time is cited, stating that ‘the synthesiser only produced only produced electronic sounds and the use of concrete sources diminished as using them involved all the old time-consuming classical techniques. Consequently electronic music began to sound rather boring, even at the Radiophonic Workshop…The acquisition of the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument has made a tremendous impact on the work of the department, speeding up conventional techniques and allowing development of new ideas previously out of the question because of the pressures of time. The computer-based digital synthesiser is perhaps the most exciting development in electronic music since the invention of the tape-recorder’. Desmond Briscoe reinforces this dismissive view of the Workshop’s 70s synthesiser music elsewhere in the book, asserting that ‘in the past, electronic sound has tended to be dehumanised and boring, because it was created from very basic waveforms. Natural sounds have much more information in them. They are warmer and more interesting than synthesised sounds; using the Fairlight’s ability to provide the composer with a means of playing real sounds is a return to the early days without all the disadvantages of tape manipulation’. All of which tends to greatly undervalue the inherent qualities of analogue electronic sound, which has its own particular set of rich sonorities. These sounds have proved enduringly popular in a way that the bright digital sounds of the 80s have singularly failed to do. For all its merits, the work of later Workshop composers such as Roger Limb, Peter Howells, Elizabeth Parker and Jonathan Gibbs simply hasn’t caught the public imagination in the way that their forebears did. Which is not to say that, for example, Elizabeth Parker’s music for The Living Planet or Peter Howell’s for the Doctor Who story Kinda isn’t fine in its own way. It’s perhaps not surprising that the ‘official’ history of the Radiophonic Workshop trumpets the Fairlight as the herald of a new dawn, and by implication the emergence from the long night of the primitive pre-digital age. It was hugely expensive, costing around £30,000, a significant outlay for the Workshop. By this time, it was under the supervision of Brian Hodgson, who had risen up from the ranks of the creative staff, and he was able to persuade the powers that be that it was a good investment. It would simplify and speed up the composer’s work, given its much-touted ability to incorporate all aspects of music making and sound recording in one integrated system. At such a price, it was affordable only to well-funded institutions and established artists such as Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, both of whom enthusiastically took to exploring its potential.

The WASP - sounds from the Dream Plant

The Fairlight is displayed in a cabinet adjacent to one which charts the democratisation of electronic music making in the late 70s and 80s and beyond, enabled by digitisation, FM synthesis and the development of affordable home computers. The Fairlight represents the elite end of the process, when such means of sound production could only be dreamed of by the majority. Rather more compact and affordable was the neat little black and yellow WASP synthesiser produced in 1978 by a company with the Philip K Dickian name the Electric Dream Plant. This was an early example of a digital/analogue hybrid, with sound generated by digital oscillators and played via a touch sensitive keyboard (you can some of those sounds demonstrated here). It was relatively cheap and pointed the way towards a decade filled with readymade, pre-programmed Casio and Yamaha keyboards. Such instruments might be viewed as little more than toys by professional musicians, but if so, then they were educational toys which offered an attractive and instantly rewarding way into music at little expense. The Stylophone was indisputably a toy, endorsed by Rolf Harris and a step up from his customary wobble board. It’s shown here as a piece of cheap equipment not unlike some of those which Hugh Davies made. It was mass-marketed in the 1970s and brought electronic music (albeit of a limited and swiftly irritating kind) into many households for whom names like Stockhausen and Varese might as well have been varieties of foreign cheese or wine. A grey MIDI cable is an unspectacular exhibit, but serves as an indicator of the way in which digital technology enabled the integration of all aspects of music making, connecting instruments together and bridging the digital/analogue divide. The very ease and simple utility of the resultant set ups allowed for the rise of the bedroom producer, a further move towards the democratisation of music making and recording (if not distribution). Its linking of all into a central interface, and creation of perfectly sequenced synchrony perhaps also stands for an ironing out of idiosyncracy, a creation of a sheen of surface perfection which often lacked a readily definable human element – in short, the music often had no soul. Technological sophistication had become an end in itself, and the music often got lost in the process. The greyness of the cable is apt, and was possibly even chosen for its symbolic resonance.

Generative futures past or yet to come

The inventive musician could always make something out of the new technologies, however, and find new uses for them. Back in the Sonic Frontiers cabinet there is a copy of the SSEYO KOAN software which Brian Eno championed in the mid-90s. It sits alongside a boxed copy of his own Generative Music piece (presumably on a floppy disc) which he created with it. The idea of generative music, of a system in which the ‘composer’ set certain parameters (scales, timbres, harmonies, pitch ranges and tempos etc.) as musical seeds forming the basis of an otherwise randomly calculated sequence of sounds, goes back to John Cage’s ideas about introducing chance into the compositional process. Such systems, by partially removing intention, reveal a certain order and structure inherent in the nature of things. KOAN formed the basis for the music in several of Eno’s installation pieces in the 90s and early 2000s, such as his Music for the Civic Recovery Centre, included in the Sonic Boom exhibition of sound art curated by David Toop at the Hayward Gallery on London’s South Bank in 2000. In one of the ‘Swollen Appendices’ to his philosophical diary A Year (published in 1996), Eno observes of the state of music that ‘from now on there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music’. He goes on to suggest that one day ‘it’s possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say “you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?”’ It’s not caught on yet, but it’s an intriguing and potentially revolutionary view of a possible future in which music making and listening becomes more participatory, less of a passive consumer option. Perhaps its time will come. It sits next to a copy of Wired magazine with Bjork on the cover, pictured at the time her recent Biophilia projects were released on all manner of technological platforms. Both indicate the way that electronic music has always tinkered and played around not just with the material means of making sound, but with the very notion of what music can be, and the ways in which it can be produced and presented, and made available to a wider variety of potential musicians. The exhibition inevitably focuses primarily on the past, but in the end, it still sets its gaze on the future with wide-eyed anticipation of further wonders to come.

Daphne Oram at the Science Museum

It was quite a thrill to see the Oramics machine enshrined in its glass display case up in the hushed surrounds of the second floor of the Science Museum in London. It seemed like a long overdue official recognition of Daphne Oram’s restless, exploratory spirit, a validation of her unending search, not just for a new form of music but for a new, accessible and democratic way of creating it. The technology didn’t exist to realise the ideas she had long nurtured of creating sound from drawn pattern (reversing the manner in which and oscilloscope screen projected the shapes of the sounds produced by oscillators) so she and her engineering friend Graham Wrench devised and built it themselves. This pioneering spirit, the creation of the mechanical means to translate the ideal into the material, makes them worthy inhabitants of these halls hallowed to the progress of human rationality. However, Dan Wilson’s recent article on Daphne in the Wire magazine, outlining her interest in occult and new age philosophies, suggests that her presence here may have a heretical edge. She was no mere dry rationalist, and was open to intuitive forces and inspirations, all of which gave her work an emotional resonance beyond the sound-by-numbers of some electronic music. Indeed, as Wilson points out in his article, Oram was keen to pursue the idea of using Oramics in a therapeutic sense, nurturing mental health through sound and music rather than regulating it with pharmaceuticals.

The central principle of Oramics was that of drawn sound, of imagining music visually. A similar idea had been realised in Russia with the ANS synthesiser, which the composer Eduard Artemyev used for the soundtrack of Andrei Tarkovky’s film Solaris in 1972. The machine itself is a classic piece of English garden shed Heath Robinsonry. The main body rests within a frame of meccanoesque metal struts, and contains the main scanner and the ten loops of film strips which passed over it. These strips set up the various basic parameters of the sound (pitch, reverb, vibrato, envelope, amplitude) which could be further refined at a later stage. The patterns interrupt the light source and therefore vary the voltage output, which is sent on to various oscillators and filters. As has been pointed out, this is, in monumental form, remarkably similar to the computer music systems such as Cubase, with their graphic user interfaces via which the waveform and its various parameters can be manipulated in an intuitive fashion. Indeed, the parameter controls of the Oramics machine are digital, using an on/off language, and as such are remarkably prescient. The signal from the scanner is sent to a separate component of the machinery, a light box fashioned from an old wooden commode (a small table and cupboard). It has to be said that the rather ramshackle nature of the Oramics machinery favours practicality over any aesthetically pleasing dimension. Perhaps future incarnations might have refined the design aspect a little. This was always something of a prototype. The commode contains a number of cathode ray tubes and oscillators. A series of shapes on glass slides can be slotted in to mask the light output and further modify the sound. Eventually, the whole is sent on to a multi-track recorder connected to speakers, and the sound output can be tweaked and toyed with from thereon in. There’s an interactive screen to the side of the Oramics machine itself which allows you to gain an impression of the way that the layering of drawn patterns could be used to shape music in real time. You can manipulate your own fat, wormy waveforms on virtual film strips, creating your own particular sound.

Like many true pioneers, Oram suffered from a good deal of neglect in her own lifetime. Jo Hutton, in her talk for the Wire Salon at Café Oto earlier in the year, talked about Daphne’s sense of resentment about being effectively written out of the history of the Radiophonic Workshop. She felt that she had been sidelined by Desmond Briscoe in his book 1983 book The Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years, in which it is Douglas Cleverdon who is credited as being the ‘prime mover’ for its creation, sharing the honours with Briscoe himself. Daphne fails to get a mention in the ‘Personages of Much Importance’ chapter, which allowed others to step out from the Workshop’s institutional anonymity. The BBC4 documentary on the Radiophonic Workshop broadcast a few years ago also gave Oram short shrift. This was particularly galling, since it was through her tireless efforts and refusal to take no for an answer that the Workshop was finally set up in 1958, with herself as its first studio manager. The Francis Bacon quote from The New Atlantis (‘wee also have sound-houses), which has become so inextricably associated with the Workshop, was Dapne’s discovery, and it was she who posted it on the door in the early days. She was arguably the first person to make what came to be known as radiophonic music, since it was her striking sounds for Frederick Bradnum’s ‘radiophonic poem’ Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, broadcast in October 1957, which heralded the first use of the word. This poem was written specifically with sound in mind. So, the scripted lines ‘I fall through nothing/Vast empty space/Still falling, falling/But slower now’ are paralleled by sound descriptions; ‘A comet-like shriek/acoustic change/pulsating beat/descending scale/a developed sound like a cry’.


The Workshop was attached to the drama rather than the music department because Oram was well aware, through her own frustrating experiences, of the latter’s fusty conservatism. She had been hugely inspired by a visit to the 1958 Brussels Worlds Fair at which she experienced Varese’s Poeme Electronique blasting out of the 400 speakers around the Philips Pavilion designed by le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. Other composers of electronic music such as Stockhausen, Herbert Eimert, Henri Pousseur and Pierre Schaeffer, all of who were working out of the well-equipped radio studios of Paris and Cologne, were also a big influence. When Jo Hutton was going through Oram’s papers and recordings after her death, she talked of finding one box marked Gesang der Junglinge, which turned out to be Stockhausen’s classic piece of musique concrete subjected to her own variations (added reverb and reversed sections etc.). As Hutton pointed out, this was effectively an early example of a remix. Daphne wasn’t working in Cologne or Paris in the late 50s, however, and had to gather equipment together from various sources after a long day’s work as a sound balancer and studio manager in order to pursue her own late night, out of hours experiments in electronic and musique concrete composition. Having set it up and established it on a firm footing, she left the Workshop after only a year, in 1959. This wasn’t out of any bitterness or disappointment at its direction. She wanted to explore her own musical ideas more fully, and these exceeded the compass of the Workshop’s remit of producing sound for the needs of specific programming. It was a general policy at this early stage to regularly move people on after a period of months anyway, since it was felt that prolonged exposure to these new sounds and intense involvement in their production could result in mental imbalance. And Daphne had been at the BBC for 16 years by this stage, having first joined in 1943. The exhibition does something to redress the balance when it comes to her position in this most iconic of British electronic music institutions. This is partly through its very conception, prominently positioning Oram as a prime force in the development of British electronic music, but it also provides a touch screen biographical and historical post which makes her formative contribution clear.

There is another display case which contains some of the equipment which might have been used in those early days: a Ferrograph tape recorder from 1960 in its handy carrying case; a Bib ¼” tape splicing block; and a Leland oscillator. This latter was an ex-RAF bit of equipment, which is indicative of the way in which so much of the technology scavenged and bolted together by the Radiophonic Workshop and other electronic composers derived from bits and pieces used (and discarded) by the military. Graham Wrench, who built the Oramics machine with Daphne, was himself an ex-RAF engineer. Also in this cabinet is Daphne Oram’s 1962 7” record Electronic Sound Patterns, no.3 in a the Listen, Move and Dance series designed for use in school music and movement classes. Here’s what the sleeve notes say: ‘Teachers seeking original material have found this new approach exciting and stimulating in their creative work for music, movement and drama. The Sound patterns are intended for children to enjoy and may lead them into movement of dance-like character, or involve them in imaginative situations. People who are interested in sound production may like to know that these sound patterns were created by Daphne Oram at her Electronic Studio in Kent. By using audio generators, many tape recorders, filters, ring modulators and other electronic devices she built up the tone colours, pitched each of the notes separately, gave them duration and dynamics and finally spliced the notes together to obtain the required rhythms and sequences’. The language is very Oramic – the politely non-committal way in which she says ‘people who are interested…may like to know’. This is reminiscent of her introduction to Oramics on the first track of the CD of that name, in which, after music of intoxicating atmosphere and alien tonality, she says ‘I’d rather like to introduce you to the many varied sounds which are produced by the studio’. You can see her talk about her work on Oramics on a BBC programme called The Same Trade As Mozart at the exhibition, and enjoy the richness of her beautifully modulated RP tones, resonantly English (of a certain variety) with its rathers, frightfullys and terriblys. The seeming conservatism of this outwardly decorous middle-class lady (often depicted in early photos wearing tweedy twin-sets and floral blouses) somehow makes the radicalism of her music and ideas all the more exciting. This wasn’t the product of some bohemian milieu into which she was born, but the pursuit of a real, individual and wilful passion. As she said in a soundclip played at the Wire Salon, it was all ‘frightfully exciting. I was terribly thrilled by it all. I wish the pioneer days could have gone on forever and ever’.

After leaving the Radiophonic Workshop, she moved to and oasthouse in Kent, where she set up her studio, and where the Oramics machine and process slowly began to take shape. It makes for a marvellously incongruous collision of the traditionally rustic with the futurologically minded and technologically adventurous. It’s like a rather more welcoming and less grimly gothic version of Frankenstein setting up his crackling electrical coils and capacitors in an old castle in James Whales’ 1931 film. I think also of Nigel Kneale’s 1972 TV play The Stone Tape, in which banks of electronic recording equipment are delivered to and installed in an old mansion house. The scientists who used them were an aggressive and invasive presence, however. I would think that Daphne inhabited her historical space with a great deal more sensitivity, and was more alive to its temporal resonance. The round tower and conical roof of the oasthouse give it the romantic aspect of a domesticated Northern European castle. In fact, its architectural form had a more practical function as a place to dry out the harvest of the local Kent hop fields. Perhaps appropriately, the Oramics machine does somewhat resemble a strange kind of loom, with all those parallel threads of film shuttling round and round, joining together all the separate elements of sound. As a hand built piece of technologised craft machinery, maybe it’s not so very much out of place in an old Kentish farmhouse after all.

The music which came out of this old crop-drying silo and drifted over the fields included pieces for ballet (Bird of Parallax, 1972), science fiction theatre (Fred Hoyle’s Rockets to Ursa Major, 1962), film (The Innocents, 1961), exhibitions (Pulse Persephone for the 1965 Treasures from the Commonwealth exhibition), multi-media installations (Episode Metallic for Andrew Bobrowski’s mobile sculptre installed in the lobby of Mallard House, London in 1965), documentary (Snow, a 1963 British Transport Films short by Geoffrey Jones), and adverts (Kia Ora, Lego and a Tumblewash washing machine). All this in addition to (or rather as a means towards enabling) her attempts to promote the Oramics system and incorporate it into concert works. Many of these are included on the excellent 2CD Oramics compilation on Paradigm Discs. As it did for so many, money ran short in the 70s however, and the Oramics machine fell into disuse. As you can see in this short film, when it finally saw the light again after many years in storage, it was covered in cobwebs and accumulated dust. No better metaphor could be offered for the neglect and disregard into which Daphne’s work had fallen. But thankfully, the cobwebs have been brushed away and the ingrained grime washed off, and Oram’s legacy can be appreciated in all its wayward and inspiring glory. Excitingly, there are also a number of purposefully empty cases and spaces, all awaiting further elements of the exhibition to be put into place. This will mean that the Oramics machine and Daphne’s musical ideas as a whole won’t simply be presented as the exploration of a technological dead end by an isolated eccentric. They will be given their proper place in the context of the development of a particularly British electronic music vernacular, often achieved against the odds and with an ingenious use of randomly available materials. Never mind musique concrete, the instruments here were frequently found objects in themselves. The Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music exhibition will be fully opened sometime in October, and will involve the input of those who were there, and of modern electronic musicians. Already there’s been a meeting of museum staff with Dick Mills, Roger Limb and Steve Marshall of the Radiophonic Workshop and Peter Zinovieff and Alan Sutcliffe of Electronic Music Studio (producers of the EMS synths used by the Workshop in the late 60s and early 70s). And what will appear in those empty cases? I shall have to return and see.

Delian Moods

Delia and Des

The BBC Archive Hour on Saturday provided an airing for Matthew Sweet’s documentary on Delia Derbyshire, Sculptress of Sound, presumably in anticipation of the new series of Doctor Who arriving on our screens this weekend (in Britain, at any rate). This was originally made to mark the donation of a collection of Delia’s personal tapes, correspondence and writings to Manchester University, and provided a first chance to hear some of these long lost sounds beyond the vaults of academe. The documentary centred on a roundtable discussion chaired by Matthew Sweet and featuring Delia’s fellow radiophonicists Dick Mills and Brian Hodgson, White Noise collaborator David Vorhaus, and official Radiophonic Workshop archivist and ‘custodian of the loops’ Mark Ayres. We also hear the voices of her ex-boss and Workshop co-founder Desmond Briscoe, and one of her successors, Elizabeth Parker.

Delia herself is heard throughout via archive recordings. She was possessed of a beguiling voice, which contained the requisite elements of BBC received English, but tempered with an individual quality which erased the overtones of assumed authority with which many such accents were imbued (and which was perhaps the reason for their cultivation in the first place). There is a certain hesitancy in her speech at times, but rather than marking an awkwardness arising from introversion, it comes across as the deliberation of someone searching for the most concise way in which to voice her ideas. A facet of what she herself describes as her ‘analytical mind’. Brian Hodgson, Dick Mills and David Vorhaus are all unequivocal in their affection for Delia and their admiration of her work, but they are all also open in admitting that she could be a spiky and emotionally unpredictable person at times. Dick Mills describes her (and not necessarily in a wholly negative sense) as ‘fiery and a bit crazy’. The impression is given of a woman whose mind was constantly firing off in all different directions, following its own thread through mental mazes (sparks in electrical jelly indeed!)

She certainly seems to have cut a dash through the 60s and early 70s. Elizabeth Parker recalls her first encounter with Delia, instantly recognisable in cloak and large hat, with her ‘distinctive voice – very elegant, very beautiful’. She was someone who could become utterly absorbed in her work when the spirit took her, to the extent that the external world (as opposed to the ideal world of mental process) was perceived only on the level at which instinctual reactions were required. Brian Hodgson recalls one incident in which she was cycling from the Maida Vail studios (home of the Workshop) to her adjacent flat whilst beginning to process some ideas for a new piece in her head. Before she knew it, she found herself in Vauxhall, way across town and on the south side of the Thames, with no recollection of how she’d made her way there through the busy streets of central London.

There is an extract played (from one of her tapes) of an early 60s viewers’ questions radio programme called Information Please in which Delia is given the opportunity to give a brief insight into her methods. David Vorhaus notes how irritated she would have been at the patronising tone of the interviewer, and by the simplistic nature of his questions, all of which would have been enough to ‘set her off’, in his words. There is an interesting comparison made between the conservative nature of the light music theme used to introduce the programme, a style which was fairly standard across the station, and which was redolent of pipe smoke and wooden wirelesses, and the electronic music which she and others were producing at the Radiophonic Workshop. This was radical both in its form, the context into which it was placed, and the means of its production. The work of the Radiophonic Workshop was often reduced to the status of sound effects, the collective name under which its anonymous contributors were gathered suggesting a place of artisan labour rather than artistic endeavour. Desmond Briscoe, at the start of the programme, describes them as ‘specialists in sound’, but goes on to make the very John Cage-ian observation that any organised sounds can be regarded as music. This philosophy pointed the way to a very different approach to that of the Worker’s Playtime style of light music, a new soundworld which marked a divide from the post-war continuities with the past and set its sights on the future. This was, in many ways, more of a soundtrack to Wilson’s era of the white heat of technology than the Beatles or the Stones, and the perspicacious Paul McCartney certainly took an interest, sharing a stage on the same bill as Delia at the Roundhouse as he took his own tentative steps into the worlds of electronic music.

Delia’s rather chaotic way of living in her later years, her feeling of being in a constant state of transience, resulted in many of the tapes which eventually found their way to Manchester University remaining unpacked from the various boxes in which they’d been stored when she left the Workshop. Some were even found filed away in corn flake packets. This is a detail which provides a neat metaphor for the way in which her music and the everyday modernism of the Workshop in general was surreptitiously fed into people’s lives, consumed with the radio programmes which served as the background ambience to the daily round. Given that the daytime audience would at this time still largely have been composed of women defined as housewives, the prominence of women composers within the Workshop was entirely fitting. From co-founder Daphne Oram, through Maddalena Fagandini (aka Ray Cathode), Jenyth Worsley, Delia and later Elizabeth Parker.

Electrosonic sounds

The contributions of the Radiophonic Workshop composers always remained anonymous in Delia’s time, something which probably rankled considerably. David Butler, the curator of the collection at Manchester University, reads out a part of a letter written by the head of BBC drama in which he singles out Delia’s contribution to a play called the Talon fro the highest praise, whilst recognising that the quality of her work will of necessity (or the dictates of Corporation policy) go uncredited elsewhere. Such anonymity may have suited Delia to some extent at the time. It meant, as a corollary, that she was by and large left to her own devices and had the run of the studio at night. David Vorhaus recalls how he sneaked in during these after hours sessions and worked with Delia on some of the songs which would go to up the White Noise LP (some of which would go on to soundtrack a black mass in the late Hammer farrago Dracula AD1972! – an implausibly entertaining movie, it has to be said). Delia managed to work her way around the Beeb’s proprietorial strictures in other ways, her naturally rebellious individualism leading her to seek other outlets for her creativity. Her thinly disguised pseudonym Li de la Russe (the last probably a reference to her auburn hair) was used for library recordings, such as the one recently reissued as Electrosonic.

Various pieces of music are analysed by the guest panel, both in terms of their content and the cultural and personal context in which they were made. The elements of what’s widely regarded as one of Delia’s best pieces, Blue Veils and Golden Sands, are revealed (not exactly for the first time, admittedly). There is the heavily filtered sound of her own voice providing the sense of the slow progress of a camel train through the desert sands, and shimmering sound gained from striking the green shade of a BBC lamp, with the attack of the initial impact removed leaving only the ringing resonance which followed. As Dick Mills points out, it’s the sound of a mirage. Radiophonic Workshop archivist and curator (and composer in his own right) Mark Ayres gives the same clear analysis of the component parts of the Dr Who theme as he did for the BBC4 documentary Alchemists of Sound. There are 5 basic elements which comprise its layered sound. Firstly, there are a series of upward bass swoops, which give a skidding rhythmic underpinning. These are overlaid by the main bass line, the train-like pulse which drives the music. On top of this dual layer lies another in the upper register. There is the melody, created with the help of the wobbulator, the knocked-together oscillator set-up which gives a tremulous quality to the pure tones which it, er, wobbulates. This is probably pretty much all that remains of Ron Grainer’s original composition. Above this are thrown the sparks of high harmonics which serve as an aural halo to the melody, giving the whole piece the feeling of possessing its own acoustic, as if it is sounding out a particular space, describing imaginary volumes. Finally, the whole is enveloped in the miasma of a twin track of white noise. This is the whooshing wind which creates the feel of motion for which the rushing tunnel of the opening credits is the perfect accompaniment. Dick Mills describes these sounds as an attempt to create an aural Doppler effect. With one track played forwards and the other backwards (a reversal of the polarity?) and the judicious application of various echo and reverberation effects, the disorientating feeling of being carried along on a wave of motion which proceeds in all directions simultaneously is created; The sound of travels in time and space. Delia’s pride in this, her most famous creation, is evinced by her evident frustration with the constant tinkering to which her piece was subjected. The infamous EMS Delaware version receives short shrift from everyone. Dick Mills makes the point that one of Delia’s skills was her ability to keep things simple, to not needlessly complicate a piece merely because she had the technological means to do so. It is with weary retrospective resignation that she professes to have been ‘shocked by what I had to do in the course of so-called duty’. As Brian Hodgson points out, the theme is so memorable because of its imperfections; it has the sound of performed music because of the nature of its construction, and because it hasn’t been sequenced or quantised into ‘perfect’ uniformity.

Malcolm Clarke wrestles with the Delaware

The final track which is discussed is the dance from Noah, a school’s ‘drama workshop’ production from 1971. This represents Delia’s imaginative use of early synthesisers, in this case the EMS VCS3, a rather more portable and responsive beast than the room-sized monster of the Delaware. The rhythm track is played in isolation and is strikingly modern in its sound. Orbital brother Paul Hartnoll observes that it could be a track off a current Warp release, say an Autechre record. It is placed as the final track on the recent 2CD Radiophonic Workshop Retrospective, a compilation which is otherwise strictly chronological in its approach, emphasising its contemporaneity some 37 years after its composition. It certainly sounds way ahead of its time, particularly in the company of some of the more time-locked sounds on that second disc, which reflect the Workshop’s (and to be fair, most musicians’) wholesale adoption of the programmed sounds of the latest synthesiser technology (such as the Fairlight). It was a direction which Delia eventually decided she had no real interest in following, and its clear from the portrait which has been painted that she was someone who was able to create only if she felt wholly engaged with the work at hand. Its hard to imagine how she could have built something which ‘sounds like a gothic altarpiece’, as she had done at the behest of Barry Bermange for their Inventions for Radio series, from such unmalleable material as synthesiser technology offered. It was all too conventionally musical in some ways, a retreat from the notion of sound itself as sculptural matter. As she is heard saying earlier, ‘any sound can made into a radiophonic sound…we have to shape and mould them’.

Now, with the archive safely stored and being carefully digitised for future study, it seems that her reputation and her place within the wider musical and cultural continuum is assured, and can only grow. Let’s hope that these treasures aren’t hoarded by the academics (good work though they are evidently doing) and find their way out into the wider world. Perhaps they should invite Johnny Trunk in to have a delve and produce something along the lines of his excellent two volume collections of The John Baker Tapes. Or a release of the quality and diversity of Paradigm Discs Daphne Oram collection would be wonderful. After the programme, I listened to the CD of music by Delia and Brian Hodgson (along with Dudley Simpson and David Vorhaus) originally released as the library LP ESL104, but here put out by Trunk Records under the title The Tomorrow People, that being the programme where most of it was released (and like Johnny, I didn’t see it at the time, because it was on ITV). Mr Trunk, in his entertaining liner notes, recommends listeners to go and read Brian Hodgson’s obituary of Delia online, so when I turned on the computer the next day I did just that. It’s an insightful, personal and heartfelt piece, and I echo his recommendation. You can find it here.