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Underground > Radio & Music >

Early Electronica & The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

20:18 / 21.01.03

Surfing the BBC website I just discovered Daphne Oram had died.

This woman was creating electronic music while the rest of the world was at war - before rock'n'roll had even reared its head. She was the pioneer behind the creation of The BBC radiophonic workshop - which later employedthat other electronica pioneer Delia Derbyshire.

She will be missed.

So has anyone else ever heard of her before - or are you all like I was - completely unaware of her work - andd what did you think of the now sadly defunct BBC radiophonic workshop.

20:27 / 21.01.03

Just an aside: recently, Radio4 did a wonderful Saturday Play about the life of Delia Derbyshire. Subtle, interesting - appropriate vignettes and a lovely portrayal, plus much archive music, newly composed stuff (by NAME NAME, possibly a spiritual successor who left the RW when it shut down) and a superb use of Orbital's The Girl With The Sun In Her Head.

It's no longer online, the title has escaped me, and I can't be more eloquent... but it was a very fine program. I'd heard of Derbyshire before the program, but not Oram, and it's quite hard to find this stuff. I really need to buy a copy of OHM soon (CD box set of early electronic music).

Goodness Gracious Meme

21:29 / 21.01.03

Bugger.

I had heard of Oram, through asking friends where they got their amazing samples from.

But popping in to say that the British Library has a fantastic collection of this kind of stuff, according to chats I've had with staff/flicks through their catalogue, if anyone wants to hear it.

07:34 / 22.01.03

oops forgot to add the the BBC obit. which includes a radio interview with Oram with her using her device to create music.

10:25 / 22.01.03

Wow, never heard of Daphne Oram, thanks for the heads-up, sleaze.

I'm old enough to remember having the willies put right up me by some exceptionally freaky plays on Radio 4 in the 70s and early 80s, which seemed to consist of 2% dialogue and 98% Radiophonic atmos. That's how I remember it, anyway, though I do have a habit of enhancing these things. I've always thought of it as the perfect example of one of those fantastic, liberal institutions within a tight-arsed, proper institution that usually crops up in documentaries about the war on Channel 4. The sort that gave enormous creative freedom to a few lucky bastard eccentrics. I have to admit, though, that when I heard it had been closed down in 1998 I was surprised because I thought it had gone much earlier. It went downhill for me during the 80s and the whistley synth phase.

I recently got the two re-released Radiophonic Music albums (one from 1968, featuring Delia D and the other from 1975). Mostly 'interesting', and not the kind of thing you'd listen to more than 2 or 3 times in a lifetime, with the exception of the more ambient, spooky tracks (ie Delia D). I find with a lot of early electronica that the sound is often a bit disappointing after you've read how it was put together, or seen the devices that actually made the noises - massive silver boxes with billions of wires and dials that just go 'beep'. It's amazing how much some of the 1968 tunes, which were done entirely with tape edits, sound like the sort of thing you might do on a primitive sequencer now. The best bits on the '75 album are by Glynis Jones. Quite Derbyshire-esque, beautiful and spooky. A highlight for me was mis-reading the directions in a picture caption and thinking that Malcolm Clarke (the most sensible looking member of the Workshop in tank top, tie and neatly trimmed beard) was called "Room 13."

A couple of Radiophonic links I stumbled across recently:

History by a man who was there

Lengthy reviews of the 2 albums plus a brilliant looking bootleg

freelance hairdresser

01:59 / 02.02.03

One of my fave subjects. The two reissues came out about a fortnight after I finally stumbled upon an original copy of the 1968 (reissued in 1971) album... typical. Still, it only cost me a pittance. I'm a huge fan of the 1960s stuff (and 1950s) and I play that LP/CD quite a lot. The later stuff, the 1975 LP included, just doesn't do much for me at all. There's the odd nice tune but the EMS Synthi and the Workshop just didn't click in my mind. I've got another LP from 1983, "Soundhouse". By then they'd just got a Fairlight CMI, and the material is by and large dull, dull, dull...

The majority of tracks on the "bootleg" described on Robin Carmody's site (he does go on a bit...) are from the LP "21" released in 1979 to mark the Workshop's 21st birthday. I only have a cassette version of this myself, and the hiss on BBC tapes is quite amazing when allied to the hiss present in the original material, but there are some really wonderous pieces on there. It's true that you could probably replicate the stuff on a Commodore Amiga, but there'd be something missing. There's an.. er.. "organicness" to those tape loops, oscillator swoops and razor cuts that you'd just never be able to program into a sequencer... I'm a big fan of John Baker's work, very much the pop side of the workshop but his jazz leanings gave his material something that later composers like Roger Limb and the like never had. And remember that Orbital saw fit to use a sample of one of this tunes on their last LP...

I exchanged a few breif emails with Mark Ayers, who's behind the reissues and general upkeep of the RW archive (I mailed to request a tune, actually), and he tells me that there are a couple of CDs lined up for this year which will please fans of the earlier work - so that sounds promising.

I've got the play about Delia on mp3, but at something like 30mb it's too big for me to upload with my 56k connection, but there was a copy of it on a website I chanced upon - lovely quality stereo. It may still be there. I'll report back if anyone's interested.

10:26 / 23.10.03

Did any digital viewers catch 'Alchemists of Sound', the BBC4 documentary on the BRW? Lovely stuff, filled with interesting stories, and lots of the music, including a piece by piece de/reconstruction of Delia Derbyshire's Dr Who theme and one moment where the screen goes black during the playing of the piece except for a brief caption saying 'Your TV is now a radio'. I love the bodged nature of the music and the devices, the hundreds of little tapes, and all the wonderfully nerdy people involved. I did actually buy a CD of BRW music but gave it to someone for Christmas, and now I'm thinking of launching a small raid to get it back. Or I could just ask to borrow it, I suppose...

08:10 / 24.10.03

Went to a lecture by an old BBCRW guy. Forgotten his name right now. Great stuff! Loved all the stories about the ridiculously convoluted ways the music was made. Before multitracking they had to simply play several separate tape machines which were started by switching the power on and hoping they stayed in sync. Sync would drift after about a minute and a half so that constrained the possible length of pieces. They also had a long corridor which they used for laying out the unravelled tape to check all the razor cut edits against each other. Innovation coming from technical constraint. They were insane, though. They'd do things like:

"what we need to create this desired sound is some metal strings tuned to the appropriate notes which pass over a pickup. These strings can then be plucked and recorded as individual notes on tape. We can then edit these notes into the correct order."

Anyone else would have just bought an electric guitar.

Delia Derbyshire was hot! Definately marriageable.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

13:14 / 24.10.03

I saw the 'Alchemists of Sound', it was alright though rather disjointed. Delia Derbyshire is the bomb! But who was that guy with the beard who was standing in the background? I was starting to freak out and wondering if he was really there, whether I was imagining things or if it was the devil in the shape of an old man with a beard.

09:21 / 26.10.03

Was there a bearded bloke in the background? I didn't see anyone.
Random mention of BRW and Delia Derbyshire in the Dr Who section of Channel 4's '100 most scary moments'. Can we start a Barbelith Radiophonic Workshop? Can we can we?

13:19 / 08.12.03

Yes, there was definitely a strange bloke in the background! Glad someone else saw it too. He looked like an archetypal scary music boffin from the 70s - huge head, mostly bald with a long, lank frill of hair. A frightening version of Bill Bailey. Appeared in the background of every interview, usually partially shrouded in darkness, doing nowt in particular except gurning or running his fingers through his hair.

ALSO: each interview took place in a different room, but in each one there was a clock placed in a fairly prominent position, eg on the desk or table next to the interviewee, with the hands set to exactly the same time. Looked like 7:58 (or thereabouts). Different rooms, different clocks, same time. WTF?

Could this be part of some Radiophonic in-joke, an art thing, or just the directors messing about?

15:34 / 08.12.03

After a bit of delving: apparently the bearded guy is some chap called Paul Sparks, and he appears regularly in Victor Lewis-Smith productions. The clocks? 7:58 = 19:58 = the year the Workshop was set up. D'oh!

Our Lady of The Two Towers

08:39 / 14.12.03

Bloody Victor Lewis-Smith. Anyway, the Aphex Twin's label is releasing a limited-edition, apparently vinyl-only, collection of Radiophonic goodness.

Red Cross Iodized Salt

00:26 / 15.12.03

Can we start a Barbelith Radiophonic Workshop?

At the very least, if any of those collaborative projects that get talked about from time to time come to fruition it should be by the Barbelith Radiophonic Workshop. Such a great name...

19:12 / 15.12.03

how would we do this?
great idea though.

Red Cross Iodized Salt

04:40 / 16.12.03

It was discussed before...the plan was to set up a FastTrack server (or even just an FTP site) and swap WAV files of samples, riffs, noises, whatever, until something coalesced. I think I downloaded some loops from someone (not sure who) and then never did anything with them