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.

Selected Radiophonic Works on Radio 4 Extra

There was a treat for fans of the Radiophonic Workshop on Radio 4 extra last Saturday evening, with 3 hours of programming based around their output. It was presented by Richard Coles, a former keyboard player and singer with The Communards who made an interesting post-pop career move of taking up the cloth (he is a C of E vicar, the Rev.Richard Coles), and, as far as his ecclesiastical duties allow, is an irregular but always welcome commentator on and presenter of arts programmes. As a sort of prelude, Stuart Maconie played John Baker’s Codename as the opening track on his Radio 6 Friday night programme The Freakier Zone. It’s Baker’s theme for a 1969 BBC spy adventure serial, and can be found on the first of the two excellent volumes of The John Baker Tapes released on Trunk Records a couple of years ago. It’s typical of his style, its springy melody riding effortlessly on infectiously sprightly rhythms, the source sounds (usually of humble, everyday origin) edited together with immaculate precision.

Baroque portal - the entrance to the Maida Vale studio, home of the Radiophonic Workshop

The Radio 4 extra celebration presented several archive programmes featuring the Workshop’s music and sound design, beginning with a 1971 documentary, Electric Tunesmiths. This was made at a pivotal moment in the Workshop’s history, with fundamental changes in production methods occurring. Principally, this was due to the arrival of synthesisers, and in particular to the installation of the mammoth EMS Synthi 100 in April 1971, nicknamed the Delaware after the road in which the Maida Vale studios, where the Radiophonic Workshop was based, were situated. Incidentally, the studios are still there, as I discovered when, with an hour or two to spare before my train was due to leave Paddington Station, I took a walk to Delaware Road via Little Venice and the Regents Canal. There is still the same jarring disparity between the baroque, white-icing façade and the utilitarian, hangar-like roof which slopes up behind it. It displays an architectural split-personality similar to that evident (on a larger scale) in St Pancras Station, with its dark Victorian neo-gothic spires and towers masking the busy, modern railway interchange beyond and below. The Maida Vale studio really does look like a building which houses a busy workshop behind a fancy façade, although before the BBC moved in during the 1930s it had in fact been London’s finest Edwardian roller skating rink. You can see a picture of it on the back of Volume 1 of the John Baker Tapes, or in its 60s state (little different from the present, actually) in the Masters of Sound documentary on the Radiophonic Workshop included in the extras of the Doctor Who dvd Edge of Destruction (the follow up to the very first serial An Unearthly Child).

It’s marvellous to be able to hear extracts from Delia Derbyshire’s piece IEE, written on the Delaware to mark the 100th anniversary of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. It demonstrates her analytical approach to music, drawing on her mathematical background (she studied maths at Cambridge), her own interest in engineering matters, and her philosophical belief in a Pythagorean order to the universe, and to the structure of sound. She translated the letters IEE into morse code, with syncopating dots in between, and produced melodic material by treating IEE100 as musical notation and code. The I became a B, and the 100 a C in Roman numerical form. It’s a very modernist way to go about things, somewhere between the chance compositions of John Cage, such as Atlas Eclipticalis, created by the superimposition of musical staves over a star chart, and the fixed serialist systems of Pierre Boulez and early Stockhausen – compositional calculus. The result of Derbyshire’s codified musical transpostitions, intended to convey the ‘simplicity and loneliness’ of a man walking on the moon, is hauntingly, melancholically atmospheric. It’s not a million miles away from her earlier, tape-created piece Blue Veils and Golden Sands, showing that a strongly defined musical personality could bridge the new technological divide. The piece was one of those presented at the IEE100 Radiophonic concert in the Royal Festival Hall on 19th May 1971, with the Queen present to hear it. Desmond Briscoe sent out a memo to Workshop members before the concert, suggesting they tone down the challenging and adventurous qualities of electronic music in their contributions. Ironically, given both Derbyshire’s technological facility, Daphne Oram’s tireless efforts to initially establish the Workshop in the late 50s, and the significant number of women composers who worked within it, Briscoe’s reasoning for such timidity is couched in the most cringingly patronising and obsequious terms. He wrote that ‘the calibre of the audience is such that while there is a natural interest in music, electronics and the arts, the social nature of the event and the presence of the ladies requires that the programme is non-technical, entertaining, aesthetically pleasing and as visually interesting as possible’. This kind of attitude was increasingly prevalent beyond the immediate demands of the concert performance, and was immensely frustrating to both Derbyshire and John Baker. Indeed, Briscoe can be heard in the programme taking in his authoritative managerial voice about the need for the Workshop composers (or ‘producers’) to subsume their personal artistic aims in order to provide for the requirements of the programme at hand. Something of independent artistic value might be produced, but only incidentally. Art can in some cases disguise art, as he puts it.

John Baker joining and splicing

The abandonment of time-consuming tape-based composition which had been the predominant means of production in the 60s resulted in a demand for increased output. Derbyshire and Baker, both perfectionists with a proprietory pride in their work, were used to being allowed to work to a great extent at their own pace and in their own time. This necessary in the context of the labour-intensive work of splicing, editing and re-recording countless, often tiny lengths of tape. Synthesisers theoretically allowed for a more instantaneous creation of the desired sound, and with a keyboard attached, the means to mould it directly into musical forms. But actually getting the machine to produce the sound you wanted was often a long and exasperating process, and subsequently reproducing it an imprecise art. Both Derbyshire and Baker, whilst they were fully capable of using the Delaware and the other Workshop synths to original musical ends, found this nascent technology more limited in scope than the concrete and more home-made electronic sounds they had become used to. It was simply incapable of realising the sounds in their heads.

In Louis Niebur’s book on the Radiophonic Workshop Special Sound, he relates Brian Hodgson’s tale of Derbyshire’s inability or reluctance to finish her IEE piece on time. As she was still working on it the night before the performance, he got Workshop engineer and later composer Richard Yeoman-Clarke to run off an extra copy of her ‘final version’, knowing that she was unlikely to let her work go out in what she considered an incomplete or imperfect form. The following morning, he discovered that she had destroyed her tape, and Hodgson used his copy, together with sound clips garnered from the BBC archives, to present an impressionistic history of electronic communications spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Thomas Edison, through opening and closing broadcasts from the BBC studio at Savoy Hill (leased out to them by IEE between 1923 and 1932), and culminating in the launch of the Apollo 11 rocket and the messages from the moon delivered by Neil Armstrong. With a hint at lingering exasperation at having to resort to such subterfuge on behalf of his friend and close musical collaborator (they would continue to work together outside the Workshop in Unit Delta Plus and the Electrophon studio), Hodgson told Niebur ‘somebody had to produce something, the fucking queen was going to be there, for Christ’s sake, in the Festival Hall! It wasn’t brilliant, but it was there, it sounded loud, and if it’s loud it sounds impressive’. Indeed, its loudness is commented on in Desmond Briscoe and Roy Curtis-Bramwell’s book The BBC Radiophonic Workshop: The First 25 Years, in which they write that ‘the powerful punch of Delia’s take-off threatened the very fabric of the Festival Hall’, no doubt rattling Her Majesty’s jewellery at the same time. The EMS Synthi 100 which took centre stage, and which was played by Desmond Briscoe, wasn’t the fabled Delaware but a model lent by its creator Peter Zinovieff. Getting the gargantuan beast into the Radiophonic Workshop studio had involved enough Laurel and Hardyesque rigmarole, and they weren’t in any hurry to shift it again.

John Baker searches for the right sound

Delia Derbyshire and John Baker, such central figures in the ‘golden age’, or glowpot days as they are described in Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell’s history, of the Radiophonic Workshop, didn’t stay on much beyond 1971, the year in which Electric Tunesmiths was broadcast. Derbyshire left in 1973, and more or less stopped producing music shortly thereafter. The programme also features the gently-spoken voice of John Baker, who guides us through his methods of creating a short piece from an initial sound recorded on tape, a means of production which was already largely redundant by this time. His piece New Worlds is played without, for once, reference to Newsround as the rise and fall of its final punctuating, percussive cadence had yet to become indelibly associated with the John Craven-helmed children’s news programme. Delia Derbyshire’s realisation of the Doctor Who theme is often cited as the piece which brought experimental electronic music to the masses. A similar claim could be made for John Baker’s many and varied short but vital and joyfully inventive themes and local radio call-signs. They were little bursts of playful musique concrete which introduced electronic music to many households on a daily basis, without listeners even really noticing that they were enjoying such new and experimental sounds. The PM theme, Radio Nottingham station call-sign or the intro to Woman’s Hour would probably still be instantly recognisable to many on an instinctual level. The Woman’s Hour theme is here picked apart into its simple component sounds: a cork being pulled out and liquid poured from a bottle. Baker was descending into a slough of depression and heavy drinking as he entered the 70s, and was unable to cope with the pressures of studio demand. He would deliberately try to avoid the attentions of Desmond Briscoe, who had effectively abandoned his own music-making career to manage the Workshop, a source of frustration for him too. As Brian Hodgson, who was also to leave the Workshop in 1972 to open his own Electrophon studios, puts it in Niebur’s book, ‘the strain of the Workshop and Desmond became a great bogeyman at some point in the 1960s. He (Briscoe) was seen as an obstacle rather than anything else’. Richard Anthony Baker paints an affectionate but unflinchingly honest and deeply moving portrait of John, his brother, in the sleevenotes to The John Baker Tapes Volume 1, describing him as ‘my hero’. He notes that he was already in a bad way when their mother, Vi, died in 1971. They had been very close, and it was a devastating blow. Baker left the Radiophonic Workshop in 1974, sacked according to his brother, and subsequently never made music in public again. If Baker and Derbyshire are anything to go by, the Workshop could be an emotionally and creatively exhausting environment, which was unforgiving towards more sensitive or unconventional souls. The 1971 documentary acts restrospectively as something of an elegy to the ‘golden age’ of the Radiophonic Workshop, and it’s difficult to listen to it without a sense of sadness at times and people passed and gone.

Delia at the controls

More from this golden era comes in the form of the Inventions for Radio programme Dreams, produced in 1964. This was a collaboration between Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange, a marriage of words and sound of the sort that had been a specialty of the Workshop since its inception in 1958. Indeed, a major impetus behind its creation had been Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play All That Fall, which was written with a particular sound world in mind. That world was recreated by Desmond Briscoe from concrete sources, and anticipated the Workshop’s key role in coming up with sounds for dramatic productions. For Dreams, Bermange recorded a number of people relating their dream experiences, and then edited them into a structured collage of voices, with repetitions and thematic passages giving it a musical form. Five general areas and recurrent themes provide ‘movements’: running, falling, land, sea and colour. The tone is dark, with repeated references to pursuit, drowning, disorientation, unspecified or half-defined dread, and death. Derbyshire provides a suitably ominous backdrop of low-pitched, humming atmosphere, summoning up the emotional inner landscapes recollected through the obscuring mist of waking consciousness by the participants. Her subtly modulated, undulating electronic drones are reminiscent of those which would be produced by the French composer Eliane Radigue some years later, initially on tape and then on her trusty ARP 2500 synthesiser.

Fourth Dimension - Radiophonic pop from Paddy Kingsland

The 1971 documentary also looks forward to the future, with Richard Yeoman-Clarke demonstrating the sound range of the Workshop’s EMS synthesisers, from the pure sine wave tone to the undifferentiated hiss of white noise, and then showing how they could be added to or subtracted from to produce all manner of different tones and effects. Paddy Kingsland showed the more conventional rock or pop context into which synthesisers could be incorporated with a piece he was composing for the Schools Department’s USA 72 programme, which ended up on his Fourth Dimension Radiophonic Workshop LP. The synths are here used mainly to provide the melody, over a guitar, bass and drums backing which Kingsland had recorded in another of the Maida Vale studios. Dick Mills, who had been at the Workshop since 1958, initially as an engineer, was introduced as the resident ‘comic composer’, a somewhat belittling categorisation based on his enduring miniature of apocalyptic gastric eruption Major Bloodnok’s Stomach. His sound design for Don Juan’s descent into hell, also featured, made it clear that he was capable of more than mere tomfoolery (impressive though his efforts in that direction undoubtedly were). The potential for comic sound effects were thoroughly explored by Spike Milligan, a regular visitor to the Workshop studios. The Goon Show episode The Scarlet Capsule is included here, a take-off of Quatermass and the Pit, whose music was originally created by Desmond Briscoe. The Workshop is thus left effectively parodying itself.

In the loop - Dick Mills keeps an eye on the spooling sounds

Relativity, from 1975, is another blend of sounds and words, a piece of ‘lingual’ sound poetry written by Lily Greenham in collaboration with Workshop composer Peter Howell. Language is the musical material here, with words looped and layered to bring out their inherent sound qualities. The basis of Greenham’s linguistic sound blocks is Einstein’s theory of relativity, and specifically his E=MC2 equation. Words are repeated, overlaid and stretched in a manner which recalls Steve Reich’s early tape pieces such as Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain, without the element of phasing over time. It all ends with Richard Baker announcing that ‘the silence you have just heard was the velocity of light’. Peter Howell was also responsible for a later dramatic piece from 1983, Inferno Revisited, which was written in the form of a package tour around the circles of Dante’s Hell. Briscoe and Curtis-Bramwell’s Workshop history, published in the same year, looks forward to this as being one of the ‘major radio events of 1983’. The sounds and music were all composed and edited together on the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument, a top of the range example of the new digital synthesisers which the Workshop had bought (at not inconsiderable expense) in 1981. The hellish soundworld which Howells conjures up is impressive in its own brittle, glassy way. It sounds at some points like one of John Carpenter’s horror film soundtracks (particular when the keyboard is used to produce relatively conventional synth chords); at other times it is reminiscent of parts of Stockhausen’s Licht cycle of ‘operas’, which have a similar glinting digital sheen. It was produced by Brian Hodgson, who had by this time returned to the Workshop as its head, replacing Desmond Briscoe, who for all his sometimes fractious relationships with his staff had done so much to nurture and develop it since its initial creation. The Radio 4 extra overview was peppered through with samples of the Workshop’s work through the years, with snatches of Paddy Kingsland’s fantastic theme from The Changes to Delia Derbyshire’s eternal Blue Veils and Golden Sands, Desmond Briscoe’s terrifying sounds for Quatermass and the Pit and Dick Mills’ airy Dandelion Countdown to Malcolm Clarke’s charming electronic nursery song Bath Time. Finally, Richard Coles informed us that since the Workshop’s closure in 1998, Brian Hodgson had gone on to run a restaurant and Dick Mills had written a bestselling book on the care of tropical fish. An appropriate indication of the diversity and range of interests which made the Workshop such an inventive place, creating marvels with unconventional means and materials. Perhaps they sometimes wonder what marvellous sounds might be produced from the food or the fishes, and contemplate the Music for Restaurants or Fishtanks LPs they might one day produce.

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.

Broadcast and Sound Poetry

This is a lovely version of In Here The Universe Begins from Broadcast’s recent show on 7th December at the HiFi Bar in Melbourne, Australia. Singer Trish Keenan paces lightly back and forth, casting expanding and retracting shadows over the coruscating patterns projected onto the screen. The whole show sounds magical, warm and relaxed, with an experimental and improvisatory flow which sounds natural and unforced. You can hear it thanks to someone who has generously put their recording up online. James Cargill’s analogue synth lines are burnished and glowing, as if his equipment has absorbed some of the Antipodean sunshine and released it in radiant melodic scales. Valerie, Lunch Hour Pops and In Here The Universe Begins have become languorous electronic lullabies, soothing the way to golden slumbers. Valerie in particular sounds gorgeous set against a gently humming and droning bed of sound. Even the as-yet unreleased song, with its chorus refrain of ‘what you want is not what you get’, which has become a standard performance finale, is slowed down to a mesmeric chant rather than the pounding one-chord kosmische drone thrashed out on what looks like some sort of two-stringed Mongolian lute which is its usual form. The crowd is effusive in its appreciation, and Keenan returns to sing a round with her own echo on You and Me in Time, a short and hauntingly poetic song from the Tender Buttons LP.

Earlier, Keenan had prefaced Black Cat with a babel of voices which suggested speaking in tongues before Cargill’s circular riff locked in. The song ended in a long looping fade-out over which those voices found articulation in her intoned lines of verse. This is indicative of a long-standing interest in the written word (she has had pieces published in a literary paper called High Horse) and the manipulation of language. This is entirely in keeping with their love of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which had a close involvement with the marriage of word and sound throughout its history.

The Workshop partly had its origins in a piece written for the radio by Samuel Beckett in 1957, All That Fall. Beckett had a particular interest in the sound environment for the play, and Desmond Briscoe was called in to provide the required atmospheres and effects. Later that year, he went on to work with Daphne Oram on Private Dreams and Public Nightmares, written by Frederick Bradnum and subtitled ‘A Radiophonic Poem’. This was the first use of the word ‘radiophonic’. Producer Donald McWhinnie explained that ‘by radiophonic effects, we mean something very near to what the French have labelled musique concrete – concrete music. Not music at all, really. It doesn’t necessarily come out of musical instruments and it can’t be written down. It’s simply sound, or patterns of sound, which are manufactured by technical processes’. A rather denigrating technician’s description which seems keen to downplay the considerable artistic potential unleashed by such new processes. The Private Dreams piece was written with accompanying sounds specifically outlined as an aural adjunct to the words. McWhinnie described it as being ‘an inextricable conception of word and special sound and an exploratory flight into a new territory of sound’, and warned engineers not to ‘attempt to alter anything that sounds strange – it’s deliberately meant to sound that way’.

Desmond and Daphne in the Workshop

The Radiophonic Workshop officially came into being shortly thereafter, with both Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Oram present as key founding members. It was situated in an old art nouveau building in Maida Vale which had previously seen service as a roller skating palace. The Workshop moved its equipment into room 13 and opened, appropriately enough, on the 1st April 1958. It continued to produce the combinations of word and sound, concrete poetry and atmospheric meditation from which it had originated. There was a collaboration with Brian Gysin in 1960, Minutes To Go, which featured his cut-ups (a technique which William Burroughs adopted in books such as Nova Express) and ‘permutated poems’ I Am That I Am, Rub Out the Word and Junk Isn’t Good Baby, which, with the help of the Workshop, subjected language to random realignments. Gysin declared his intention to ‘let the machines speak – even if they’re going wrong, they are still saying something’. Poet Lily Greenham created the piece Relativity with the Workshop in 1975, based around Einstein’s equation and the visible spectrum of colours. She talked about ‘how a sentence can be given shape and driven in a musical sense beyond its meaning’. Philip Oxman’s 1974 piece The Origins of Capital and the Descent of Power sounds like a rather grim slice of Marxist analysis centring on the story of a poor circus family who end up having to butcher their own performing animals. Malcolm Clarke (who wrested remarkable alien sounds from the ‘Delaware’ synthesiser for the Doctor Who story The Sea Devils) worked on this piece, and was described by a reviewer as having created ‘voices and sounds that loomed, struck, tottered out of darkness…one was less in a precise story than in a circle of images in words and electronic sound, very deliberately plotted, the relationship between sound and space designed to be as informative as the explicit dialogue’.

Barry Bermange's sketch for a Gothic altarpiece in sound

Perhaps the best known of the Radiophonic Workshop’s combinations of word and sound are Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange’s Inventions for Radio, and David Cain, Ronald Duncan and Derek Bowskill’s The Seasons. The Inventions for Radio were 4 programmes broadcast in 1964, mixing Delia Derbyshire’s atmospheric clouds of sound (which were effectively a precursor of ambient music) with recorded voices. For Amor Dei, Burmange sketched out a modest request that she create ‘the sound of a Gothic altar piece’, something which she duly built using the human voice as source material. Sadly, the only one of the Inventions which seems to be still extant is Dreams (although who knows what the Delia Derbyshire archive at Manchester University might turn up). Delia provides the rather ominous sonic medium within which people’s recalled dreams are embedded.

David Cain’s The Seasons was a BBC Drama Workshop LP from 1969, in which the poems of Ronald Duncan and Derek Bowskill, which evoke the moods of the months, progressing through the seasons of the year, are set to his electronic music. These moods could be ‘expressed’ by the schoolchildren who were the record’s intended audience. It’s been featured on a regular basis on Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service, his Radio 6 show, although he’s now completed a year’s cycle of seasons. Perhaps he could start up again next year with the astrological cycle of Mort Garson’s Zodiac Cosmic Sounds, although, given that it’s an afternoon show, this would make it rather difficult to comply with the LP cover’s instruction that it ‘must be played in the dark’.

The Music of The Book

I listened recently to the original radio series of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I always regarded as the best realisation of Douglas Adams’ creation. Having not heard if for many a year, I was surprised to hear what a wealth and range of interesting music was used in the background, mainly to accompany Peter Jones’ inimitable readings from The Book. The fact that I now recognised many of the pieces used suggests that my youthful self, listening repeatedly to the cheap cassettes on which I’d recorded the series off the radio, was having his ears attuned to sounds which would spark an unconscious thrill of recognition when I came across them later in life. Alongside Doctor Who, it certainly seeded a fascination for electronic music which lasts to this day.

After Tim Souster’s sonically enhanced arrangement of Journey of the Sorceror by The Eagles which gives the programme its memorable space banjo theme music, we are plunged straight into the dizzying world of 20th century Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti as Peter Jones puts the story into its cosmic context. I think the piece is Atmospheres, famous for its inclusion in Stanley Kubrick’s religiose SF survey of the aeons, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The use of music associated with that imposing film serves as an immediate indication of Adams’ intention to puncture the grandiosity of such high-minded science fiction with bathos at every possible turn and corner, although he also manages to retain the genre’s starry-eyed sense of wonder. Ligeti is used on various occasions throughout the series. His diffuse, tonally indeterminate ‘clouds’ of orchestral and choral sound are perfect for conveying a sense of terrified awe and disorientation in the face of the immense infinity of the universe and the bewilderingly alien experiences to be found within it. Indeed, it was his music which did much to lend 2001 its air of slightly frightening, transcendent mystery. The hovering, shifting swarm of melismatic voices in the Requiem, used in the moon monument sequence in 2001, here provide the heavenly choir which accompanies Arthur and Ford’s comedown from their first experience of the Infinite Improbability Drive which powers the spaceship Heart of Gold. It’s incongruously mixed with an organ on Southend Pier chirping out ‘I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside’.

Ligeti in Klaus Kinski mode

A crashing, rumbling explosion of a chord from Ligeti’s astonishing organ piece Volumina provides an over-the-top prelude to cliff-hanging pronouncements, as when the captain of the Vogon constructor fleet pauses before offering to Ford and Arthur his alternative to certain death in the vacuum of space. This is a good lead-in to a typical bit of Adams bathos; The implicitly horrific nature of an experience in the stead of which summary death seems an option open to serious consideration turns out to be an unpleasant but non-lethal subjection to a reading of excruciatingly bad poetry. Ligeti’s harpsichord piece Continuum, which requires the player’s hands to scurry unceasingly across the keyboard like a particularly workaholic cadre of ants, accompanies an entry from The Book on the rise and fall of the Galactic economy and the part which the luxury planet-building business of Magrathea plays in its fluctuating fortunes. Appropriately enough, it’s a piece of music which is scarcely credible to picture as the product of any human agency.

Such could also be said of the electronic sounds which comprise the bulk of the rest of the background musical radiation of the Hitchhiker’s universe. Electronic music has long been associated with science fiction and space, going back to its use in Bernard Herrmann’s theremin and electric guitar driven score for The Day The Earth Stood Still (recently heard in the BBC Concert Orchestra’s Electronica concert, broadcast on Radio 3 a couple of weeks ago), and Louis and Bebe Barron’s ‘electronic modulations’ for Forbidden Planet. Perhaps the technological element of electronic soundmaking creates an association with the advanced technologies required to reach space in the first place. Or perhaps it’s just that these strange, alien sounds, which no longer have their origins in any familiar musical objects, are an effective aural analogue to the psychological experience of exploring entirely new worlds of the imagination. They’re equally adept at portraying states of mental disequilibrium, after all, as the theremin featured prominently in Miklos Rozsa’s scores for The Lost Weekend and Spellbound (also featured in the Electronica concert) demonstrates.

Terry Riley’s Rainbow in Curved Air is the most frequently used piece of electronic music here. His echo-delayed loops of burbling and cascading organ notes provide the sound of the selections from The Book’s teeming streams of digital information. There’s also a single use of an extract from the more sombre and stately Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band, the second side of the Rainbow LP, with Riley’s sax snaking out shehnai-like lines into intertwining coils. The opening of Robert Fripp and Brian Eno’s Wind on Water from the Evening Star LP breathes its shimmering breezes behind The Book’s ruminations on several occasions. It accompanies the description of the planet to which lost biros make their pilgrimage, there to join the wide variety of biroid lifeforms which inhabit it. The tentative opening triads of Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene are used a couple of times, giving a poignant emphasis to Peter Jones’ summation of the fates of the newly created whale and instantly world (or universe?) weary bowl of petunias. Tomita’s synthesised arrangement of Debussy’s La Cathedrale Engloutie (The Drowned Cathedral) plays during the description of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. John Carpenter also wrote a synthesiser version of this piece, in collaboration with Alan Howarth, to add atmosphere to the scene in Escape From New York in which Kurt Russell’s grizzled adventurer negotiates the air corridors between the futuristic Manhattan’s deserted skyscrapers in his one-man glider.

Digging the Floyd

I distinctly remember that when I first heard the programme on the radio, Pink Floyd’s pacific held-chord meditation Shine On You Crazy Diamond heralded the spaceship Heart of Gold’s arrival on the planet of Magrathea, Arthur’s first sight of an alien world. It turns out to be the depressive robot Marvin humming. A comment on the Floyd’s less than joyful ‘concept’ of the world, perhaps. This scene has disappeared from the show in subsequently released recordings, the issue (or expense) of rights evidently having become a problem. Strange, since that Roger Waters always comes across as such a reasonable and accommodating chap. It’s funny that a radio programme from the year’s of punk’s ascendancy (it was first broadcast on 8th March 1978), which was supposed to have cleared away the dead weight of the 60’s increasingly bloated legacy, should feature Pink Floyd and the music of synth players with varying degrees of Prog-association. Apparently there’s even a track from one-record x Yes keyboard player Patrick Moraz’ solo LP in there somewhere, although I can’t claim to be familiar with it. His album with Yes was Relayer, by the way, and it's quite a good one, with a nice Roger Dean cover (gatefold, of course). Perhaps such musical choices are not so surprising, given that Ford and Zaphod are, essentially, a couple of interstellar hippies.

The Radiophonic Workshop played its part in the production, of course. Dick Mills created the ubiquitous sound-effects essential for evoking a space-based SF universe. Amongst these is a short piece which rivals his earlier magnum opus Major Bloodnok’s Stomach (created in 1959), a nine second eruption found on the 1975 Radiophonic Workshop LP, for complex creation put to the service of absurd humour. The apocalyptic roar of the universe’s destruction diminishes to a gurgle as it drains down some sort of cosmic plughole. Its can be heard in its full 30 second splendour on the BBC LP Science Fiction Sound Effects (no. 26). There’s also a brilliant piece of Radiophonic music resurrected from the archive to be used as the fanfare for the Magratheans’ automated non-welcoming message from the distant past. This is Delia Derbyshire’s Tutankhamun’s Egypt, in which the echoes of ancient trumpets seems to rise like sonic phantoms from the half-buried and sand-eroded ruins of empires long since faded into legend. You can hear it here. The Radiophonic Workshop would take over the music for the second series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide, using the latest generations of synthesisers. Paddy Kingsland composed pleasantly melodic synth backgrounds, with prominent use of the whistling, flute-like sounds which also characterised the late Tom Baker and early Peter Davidson Doctor Who soundtracks to stories like The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva. He switched on his arpeggiator to provide the auditory sensation of the tickling of the brain’s pleasure centres (a reward from a teaching machine in a technologised schoolroom). Synth arpeggiators have always had a similar effect on my brain, so I’m very glad that they’ve recently featured to a significant extent on Oneohtrix Point Never’s sprawling collection of analogue electronic music, Rifts, a gorgeous paean to futures past.

The Magrathean story is also accompanied by some rhythmically enhanced Gregorian-style chant overlaid with Eastern-tinged sax. There is some similar music (minus the chant) playing during the pointless meeting of hairdressers, TV documentary producers and telephone sanitisation engineers (obviously bugbears of Adams’) to discuss their plans for life on the prehistoric Earth upon which they, along with Ford and Arthur, are stranded. This has the sound of a sprightly medieval dance. I thought it might be The Third Ear Band’s music for Roman Polanski’s film of Macbeth, or perhaps even a 70s early music troupe along the lines of David Munrow’s consort. But no, it is in fact a group who were called Gruppe Between, one of the more organic (ie acoustic) of the ‘krautrock’ bands of the period. Both of these pieces were taken from their 1971 LP Einstieg, which you can read about over at Julian Cope’s Head Heritage site. It’s appropriate that this record was released on the German WERGO label, better known for its recordings of modern classical music by the likes of Ligeti.

The radio show, like the TV series, goes out on a bittersweet note with Louis Armstrong singing What A Wonderful World. It’s a song which has, it seems, become synonymous with a wistful observation of what a wonderful world it isn’t, Armstrong’s warm tones becoming an insistent invocation of beauty in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Its fading out here unveils the melancholy at the heart of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and perhaps of Adams himself. In the end, there is no meaning behind it all, no answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything. It’s all just a cruel and hollow farce. Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you.

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.