!!!KORRECT!!!

Jonathan Fitoussi - Pluralis

2011-12-15T02:11:00.000-08:00

Vidéo by Sabrina Ratte
Music by Jonathan Fitoussi

"Pluralis" taken from the album "Pluralis" (Pan European Recording)

From his electro-acoustic laboratory, Jonathan Fitoussi takes us on Pluralis, crystalline musical star of eternal cycles. Travel in the light of mysterious stars from dark forest to ivory continents, from magnetic fields to sound oceans of unfathomable echoes...

PAN010

www.paneuropeanrecording.com

Hubble : Hubble’s Hubble

2011-11-28T07:32:00.000-08:00

music : Hubble/Hubble’s Hubble
video : Nasa

Canadian Electronic Ensemble (The Music of Man documentary)

2011-09-30T07:04:00.000-07:00

Bleu Nuit //Music : Le révélateur;Vidéo: Sabrina Ratté

2011-08-29T08:53:00.001-07:00

BLEU NUIT from Sabrina Ratté on Vimeo.

Bleu Nuit is a track from Le Révélateur's LP on Gneiss Things, Fictions.

Jürgen Müller - Sea Bed Meditation

2011-07-07T01:53:00.000-07:00

Jürgen Müller was a self-taught amateur musician who, while studying oceanic science at the University of Kiel, purchased some electronic instruments and set up a mobile studio on his house boat, docked along the town of Heikendorf, on the North Sea. He held a life-long fascination with the ocean, the expansive and endless inner-space of the deep, where he felt many ecological miracles had yet to be discovered, and which kindled a love for the unknown. This love of all things nautical started early in his youth and eventually led him to study the oceanic sciences.

For one week in 1979 Jürgen took up with a film crew on a mission to document some sea-water toxicity testing that was being performed by a couple of notable biologists, only a few kilometers off the shore. This was to air as a special later to be viewed in universities. Jürgen went to take notes for a course, but soon found himself instead moved by the surroundings more in an artistically inspired sense than a scientific one. He found the mystery and romance of the great seas to be quite moving, and then decided rather abruptly that he would make music to capture this feeling.

Utilizing only a handful of barely-remembered childhood piano lessons, Jürgen set about creating his marine-influenced vignettes with some electronic instruments he had gathered through friends, as well as borrowing some new equipment from a local school’s music department. As a general music lover, earlier in the '70s he had taken note of several avant garde electronic composers who he felt simultaneously captured a purity of sound and sense of wonder that was lacking in other music. He dreamt of fusing this ideal with the synthetic recreations of nature. In a sense, one could say he stumbled onto an early “new age” aesthetic through pure ignorance and coincidence. Mixing relaxing ambient tones and spooky otherworldly sounds, he came up with a unique approach. After filling several reels of home recordings he held ambitions of becoming a film composer. He decided to start his own publishing company, Neue Wissenschaft, and hoped to compose albums in order to sell as production music to various film companies for use in documentaries and television programs. As he was simultaneously hard at work on his studies to finish school, he had to work on his music in short intervals, and often had to put it aside altogether. As a result, it took several years for him to actually realize his sole full-length recording, Science of the Sea, the sessions for which began in late 1981, before finishing a year later.

C. CHRISTER HENNIX The Electric Harpsichord

2011-05-19T02:05:00.000-07:00

out on Die Schachtel's the 1976 largely neglected masterpiece from Swedish-born composer Catherine Christer Hennix, a disciple of LaMonte Young and Pandit Pran Nath during the 1970s.

Terry Riley rare footage, live in the 70s

2011-05-19T02:03:00.000-07:00

Pandit Pran Nath + La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela and Terry Riley in the 70s

2011-05-19T02:02:00.000-07:00

Some very rare footage filmed during a live performance in Rome in 1977

Delia Derbyshire - Sculptress of Sound documentary

2011-04-27T02:51:00.000-07:00

The broadcaster and Doctor Who fan Matthew Sweet travels to The University of Manchester - home of Delia Derbyshire's private collection of audio recordings - to learn more about the wider career and working methods of the woman who realised Ron Grainer's original theme to Doctor Who.

Further details from http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rl2ky

Photographs are BBC/public domain. Used, by permission, from Ray White's 'Radiophonic Gallery', http://whitefiles.org/rwg/.

ENTRANCE "Grim Reaper Blues" Music Video

2011-03-30T08:32:00.000-07:00

From the album "Prayer of Death"
Tee Pee Records
Directed by Maximilla Lukacs

Sarah Rara / Lucky Dragons

2011-03-24T07:50:00.000-07:00

A RAY ARRAY TRAILER from Sarah Rara on Vimeo.

A RAY ARRAY is a new video directed by Sarah Rara that examines visual and aural interference. Structured like a collection of short stories, the piece is composed of 15 video chapters that deal with different forms of interference: from the failure of a message to be discernable, sudden interruptions, visual disturbance, the interaction of 2 sound signals, instability, and optical effects. The piece explores the subject of interference using simple sets, everyday objects, and subtle special effects. A RAY ARRAY will be exhibited as an hour long loop that the viewer may enter at any point.

A RAY ARRAY features a soundtrack created by Luke Fischbeck and Sarah Rara, members of the band Lucky Dragons.

The installation of A RAY ARRAY includes a set of wooden bleachers that occupy the space of the gallery, co-designed by Sarah Rara and fellow LA-based artist Michael Parker.

Electric Independence: Morton Subotnick

2011-03-02T08:37:00.000-08:00

"In its early days, electronic music wasn’t very musical. Painstakingly put together with wave generators or tiny bits of tape spliced together on splicing blocks by music professors and hobbyists, it was often highly abstract, largely concerned with pitch and timbre, and lacked much rhythm or pattern.

Enter Morton Subotnick.

Back in the sixties, while Robert Moog was developing his pioneering keyboard on the East Coast, Subotnick, Ramon Sender and Don Buchla were toiling away in San Francisco on what would become possibly the world’s first analog synthesizer, the ‘electronic music easel’BUCHLA 100. Instead of a keyboard, it relied on pressure sensitive touch-plates, which controlled individually tuneable keys for limitless micro-tuning possibilities, analog sequencers, and complex waveforms beyond your basic sine, sawtooth, and square waves. You can now find it at the Smithsonian.

Check out more at Motherboard.

See the rest at VBS.TV: Electric Independence: Morton Subotnick - Motherboard | VBS.TV"

"MEA CULPA" A FILM BY BRUCE CONNER / Music David Byrne -Brian Eno

2011-02-14T08:33:00.000-08:00

"MEA CULPA" A FILM BY BRUCE CONNER 1981
Music : Mea Culpa / My life in the bush of ghosts David Byrne / Brian Eno

Dieter Moebius - Sinister - Tonspuren 1983

2011-01-13T06:32:00.000-08:00

Produced by Connie Plank

Trust us (live) - Captain Beefheart / RIP

2010-12-20T03:20:00.000-08:00

Recorded for John Peel's Topn Gear Show in 1968

ROEDELIUS-REGENMACHER

2010-12-15T02:45:00.000-08:00

Album "Durch die Wüste"1978

LUCKY DRAGONS - MORNING RITUAL

2010-12-07T07:01:00.000-08:00

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers/Sound of Noise

2010-12-03T07:18:00.000-08:00

Discover the short film which inspired the swedish movie Sound Of Noise. Meet the Six Drummers, a crazy group of percussionists. First revealed at Cannes Film Festival 2001, this short film also won more than 30 awards through the world. Directors Ola Simonsson et Johannes Stjärne Nilsson decided to continue the adventure by making their first full length film : Sound Of Noise.

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN / THE TAROT -DON CHERRY-JODOROWSKY

2010-11-23T05:32:00.000-08:00

From The Holy Mountain Soundtrack

The New Sound Of Music 1979 / BBC

2010-11-18T08:10:00.000-08:00

LUCKY DRAGONS

2010-09-21T03:30:00.000-07:00

Mirror Friends - Lucky Dragons

Very 2 (bonus) by Lucky Dragons from Dream Island Laughing Language

Givers-Lucky Dragons

yOU CAN BUY THE LUCKY DRAGONS ALBUM "dream island laughing language" HERE :

http://www.upsettherhythm.co.uk/luckydragons.shtml

Lillian Feldman Schwartz - Googolplex

2010-09-07T03:52:00.000-07:00

1972

Extended editing techniques based on Land’s experiments affect the viewer’s sensory perceptions. “This viewer also found ‘Googolplex’, the six-minute computer-made compilation of swiftly-moving patterns … to be inventive, eye-catching examples of technical professionalism.” – A.\ H. Weiler, N. Y. Times. Lincoln Center Film Festival. (5-1/2 min.)

www.lillian.com

MIRAGES by Sabrina Ratté/ Music : Le révélateur

2010-09-02T02:26:00.000-07:00

MIRAGES from Sabrina Ratté on Vimeo.

Vidéo: Sabrina Ratté
Musique: Le Révélateur
-2010

"Mirages" est une vidéo qui est née lors d'une collaboration avec Le Révélateur (myspace.com/circeotones). Avant tout une projection live lors de ses concerts, la vidéo s'est raffinée de plus en plus à travers la pratique et la performance. La nature des images s'est transformée naturellement afin de se fondre les unes dans les autres et ainsi former ce que je crois être un tout cohérent et organique.

"Mirages" est une exploration ensoleillée de la nostalgie qui prend forme dans les images évocants un monde de science-fiction.

Il sera possible de télécharger une version de plus haute qualité sur le blog Sound of Eye (thesoundofeye.blogspot.com) dans quelques temps.

Ursula Bogner - 2 Ton & Speichen

2010-07-20T07:17:00.000-07:00

Ursula Bogner - 2 Ton from Marketa Vũ Trụ on Vimeo.

Ursula Bogner - Speichen from Marketa Vũ Trụ on Vimeo.

Ursula Bogner, as Jelinek explains in the compelling backstory that accompanies this record, was born in 1946 and died in 1994 and spent twenty of those years creating synthesizer music as a hobby. She never released any of her music, preferring to keep it to herself—a sort of Sunday producer who otherwise lived the normal life of a pharmacist and family woman. Nevertheless, she was at the very least a deep appreciator of early electronic composition; she built her own home studio and followed the theories and activities of early electronic music collectives such as Studio Für Elektronische Musik.

The story of how Jelinek came across these personal home recordings is no less intricate. Jelinek first heard about the recordings from Ursula Bogner's son, Sebastian, who happened to be sitting next to him on a flight. From there, the two began corresponding and eventually the son sent Jelinek his mother's tapes. The large collection of recordings Jelinek received betrayed a dabbler who spent over twenty years experimenting with different styles and possibilities, from exercises in oscillation and modulation, to the layering of rhythmic patterns, to simple electronic pop melodies.

FELIX & HIS MACHINES

2010-07-15T08:17:00.000-07:00

Felix's Machines from Felix Thorn on Vimeo.

FELIX & HIS MACHINES
Felix’s Machines are music making sculptures. They were constructed in Felix’s bedroom and exist to facilitate music by translating rhythmic audio structures into a three-dimensional visual show. They function as musical instruments as well as kinetic sculptures. The Machines are a performance device, but can be well suited to act as an art installation, theatre accompaniment, or standalone sculptures. The pieces invite an audience to share the experience of their creator. Felix aims to exploit the complexity found behind the workings of most digital music and turn digital compositions into a more accessible equivalent. These Machines do not intend to match human potential. Instead they exist to test the advantages of mechanical instruments alone. Felix comments on his machines: “Although my medium focuses on the development of acoustic sounds, I am continually inspired by electronic music - the countless abstractions act as blueprints for the construction of its acoustic counterparts. I aim to build a space where artificial and dream-like environments can become a reality."

CHECK THIS VIDEO TOO :

http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/7/14/sound-builders-felix-thorn-turns-junk-into-incredible-musical-sculptures--3

Plus d'infos : http://www.myspace.com/fmachines
http://www.felixsmachines.com

Terry Riley - Shri Camel: Morning Corona (Live 1976) - Part 1

2010-07-15T01:24:00.000-07:00

Terry Riley - Shri Camel: Morning Corona (Live 1976) - Part 2&3

2010-07-15T01:22:00.000-07:00

J.D. Emmanuel - Attaining Peace

2010-05-04T01:18:00.000-07:00

MUTATIONS / JEAN-CLAUDE RISSET + LILLIAN SCHWARTZ 1969

2010-05-04T01:06:00.000-07:00

Concert Trinité Pan European Party 160410

2010-04-19T02:57:00.000-07:00

-"Mozox"
-"Kora"
-"Route"
-"New beat"
-"Besoin de mer" (Extrait)

Concert en téléchargement sur le blog Trinité :

http://musictrinite.blogspot.com/

Laurie Spiegel: Appalachian Grove 1 edit / 1974

2010-04-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

Arnold Dreyblatt - Point Rotation

2010-04-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

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From the album 'Animal Magnetism'

La Lune / Sabrina Ratté / Roger Tellier-Craig

2010-04-06T02:15:00.000-07:00

LA LUNE from Sabrina Ratté on Vimeo.

Gunter Schickert: Puls 1979

2010-03-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

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eminiscent of compositions by such musicial wizards as Schulze, Branca and Gottsching, in 1979 Gunter Schickert produced this hypnotic mixture of looping guitar and echoing drum beats on top of shimmering synth-processed sounds of flowing water. Überfällig is a neglected gem from the late 1970s German scene as Krautrock segued sweetly into NWW... The video is a veritable potpourri, including snippets from Hammer's 'Four Sided Triangle', footage of US army LSD experiments, hipsters from the 'counter culture', a UFO crash and excerpts from a fascinating 'One Step Beyond' episode with a seemingly straight-laced TV presenter gobbling magic 'shrooms in an attempt to enhance his psychic powers...
Thanks shazzula&itah!!

Reflected Message

2010-03-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

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An animated film by KATE DAWKINS(www.katedawkins.co.uk) for part of a video installation presented in the V&A by Onedotzero. Music: "Reflected Message" by The Focus Group.

John Whitney-Matrix III (1972)

2010-03-19T06:47:00.000-07:00

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Music : Terry Riley

Gavin Russom Interview

2010-02-22T02:53:00.000-08:00

Machine love: Gavin Russom

RA's William Rauscher gets nerdy with DFA's synth maestro about building guitar sequencers, the power of magic and improvising.

A lifelong artist, musician and onetime stage magician, Gavin Russom has remained fervently attuned to the enigmas of the analog man-machine, having repaired and built synths from a young age. As a studio tech for DFA they called him the Wizard because of his mastery of modular mysteries. But it's perhaps a not altogether ill-fitting moniker for someone with a strong interest in magic who sports a Cali-cult leader appearance.

The pulse, sizzle and raw electric charge of Russom's self-designed instruments are on grand display in Days of Mars, his previous album with Delia Gonzalez that dove into expansive Tangerine Dream/Klaus Schulze-style kraut-cosmic dreamscapes, as well as his new self-titled solo release as Black Meteoric Star, which finds Russom focusing his energies on the bristling energy of early Detroit techno and acid house. We caught up with Russom in his Berlin studio to find out more about his work, his gear and the magic of both.

Can you describe your current set-up?

a) Roland TR 707 -- b) Essential Russom mantra -- c) Korg EX-800
I kind of define each project that I do by what equipment I use. For Black Meteoric Star I use an EX-800, a Korg early-80s hybrid digital-analog synth, it's a poly-800 without the keyboard, basically, and I built that into a rack case with a Moebius, a hardware sequencer made a few years ago by Future-Retro.

Basically it's a very, very expanded version of a Roland-style step sequencer, like you'd find on an MC 202, where you assign a note to each step in a sixteen-step sequence. This one is just a lot more elaborate, you can chain a lot of sequences together, edit stuff on the fly. It's actually an incredible tool and it also takes MIDI inputs and then has all kinds of outputs. So when I'm doing Black Meteoric Star I'm using MIDI to trigger the EX-800, I use the 707 for all the beats and then I have a sequential circuits six-track which is also a hybrid keyboard from the early '80s.

How does the hybrid aspect work?

It's different for different companies. Here it's both digital oscillators with analog filters and such. Also they're polyphonic, so rather than editing sounds with a set of knobs, there's usually some sort of parametric editing, where there's a number assigned to each function, to filter cut-off for example, and you just edit those. You have memory, polyphony, those functions that come with digital, but you have a fat analog filter sound. One of the reasons I got into building my own gear was being able to take really complex sounds and then tweak them with analog filters.

Do you have a usual work flow for a new track?

I work in a really live way whether I'm editing a mix in Logic or playing on a keyboard or writing sequences. I like to have as much sound going as possible in real time so that I can edit parameters by ear and move things around. I generally do a lot of live takes when I record and have the recording running, so when weird things happen I can record them.

You can kind of catch the analog, you have a net for it.

Exactly. When you're working with analog gear, it's so unpredictable, one time you turn it on and then you can never get the sound again. So that's one of the cool things about digital recording. I did the Black Meteoric Star tracks with a tape deck, but in general I use Logic to record and for remixes. Logic 8 is pretty fast, I can cut and paste stuff while the track is playing, and sometimes something falls into a weird place, it's out of sync, and I can keep it. I think in terms of the way I approach writing things, it's the feedback aspect, that's why I got attracted especially to modular synths in the first place, because they kind of play themselves, I try to get into a transparent relationship with what I'm working on, get a feeling for what it's trying to be.

One of the benefits is that you don't have complete control over analog gear. You're riding it, a bit.

Totally, I really like that a lot. I came from playing in bands to getting into improvisation when I was a teenager, doing weird tape music at home, and that's still the way I relate to making music, when something has its own momentum and its own energy and I can interact with it, it has a life of its own.

What about recreating that live?

"World Eater," for instance, I don't know how I did it, so I can't play it live. I had cascading filters, but I don't know how I patched it. The way that sounds affect each other and are interdependent is actually quite weird.

Sometimes it's quite frustrating, "How the hell did I do this?"

When I went back to the Black Meteoric Star songs and redid them for live sets, I had to let go of the idea of making it sound like the record. But that's the life of the box I use. This box was kind of a major thing for me, how to set up a controlling network where the sounds are interdependent on each other. What one sound does controls what another sound is doing. You know like in "Anthem" the bassline is also triggering the filter parameters for the arpeggio. It's not something you recognized immediately, but it has a certain effect whether you recognize it or not. One sound controls another, that's really interesting to me.

You're giving the machine a certain kind of life.

I like this organic element, where it's kind of alive and I can interact with it.

What's definitely noticeable on Black Meteoric Star is that it does sound like you're not exactly sure what's going to happen next.

There's a biker element to it and that's totally my experience with it, just getting on this machine and turning up as fast as it goes, and hoping you don't die.

Does your set-up change a lot?

There's some things I use on everything, the sequential circuits six-track keyboard, especially for live playing, it's a really powerful keyboard, the programming is weird but once you get it, it's fast, it's capable of these insanely fat sounds. It's got six oscillators that you can stack up.

Yeah, Black Meteoric Star sounds pretty dense.

It's dense as hell, and it's not even multi-tracked. It's really stripped-down in terms of what's actually there, but because of how powerful those machines are, it sounds really layered, there's all this crazy harmonic activity. A lot of these little melodies that you hear in the repetitive sequences are not "there" in any real way, I didn't play them, they happen when two elements collide with each other.

What was your setup for Days of Mars?

We had a synth that I had built that we processed almost everything through, to achieve this kind of gated strobe-light effect. It's basically high and low pass filters, VCAs and envelope generators. It's the design that I've stripped down to what I use on absolutely everything now, a step-sequencer and filter box. It's just normalized in a slightly different way than most modular synths or anything that's commercial available.

Where do you get components?

Sometimes I hack stuff out of old synths, or build from scratch. I usually use Mauser electronics, it's a mail-order thing in the states. Here in Germany they have Konrad, which is like what Radio Shack used to be, where you can buy an insane amount of components.

I rarely do that much electronic stuff here. I hit a point right around when I moved here where I was at the limit of what I could do by myself, prototyping my own boards, getting my own components, and I had also kind of achieved what I had set out to do, which was this box that I use, and I just spent a long time using what I'd already built without much interest in building new tools.

Also on Days of Mars we used a lot of digital keyboards with sampled sounds or PCM sounds but then put through analog filters, producing a lot of weird harmonic excitation. For the live set up Delia played a digital keyboard and I played that sequential keyboard and everything would go through that box. Later on we used this box I've got now, but the original had very different filters on it.

Do you think it takes a lot of technical know-how to put this kind of gear together? Do you have background in that kind of design?

I was always really interested in electronics, but I started by building acoustic instruments. I was interested in things that could have a melody and a drone at the same time, some string but also reed-based instruments, also percussion instruments, like rattles. I was trying to create instruments that had their own life in a way.

Then I started experimenting with electronics, really having no idea what I was doing or how it worked at all. I had a lot of weird things blow up in my face. I just explored patching pedals together, mixer feedback, that kind of thing. When I first got into analog synths there wasn't a lot of information available, but once the internet got going that totally changed, suddenly there was a wealth of information.

Once that happened I taught myself some basics and then I worked with some other people. Mainly I worked with this guy called Jeff Blankensop, he works for a company called E.A.R.S. in New York. He's worked with Hawkwind, Pink Floyd and Vangelis. As for my own technical expertise, for me I needed to be able to do that to make the music I wanted to make, how I wanted to make it. Although I have a certain amount of technical knowledge about synths, how you use them, what's going on inside them, it's really the sound first. All the other stuff helps just to get there faster or to tell somebody what I'm doing.

You attended a unique music program at Bard, what was that like?

It actually doesn't exist anymore, it morphed into a couple other things. It was a really intense composition program, and what was radical about it was that it focused on playing and listening as the main activities, rather than studying compositional methodology. All the theory work was done by listening and discussing from there. Starting with sound.

It would begin with making something and then theory would come from that. Really a kind of post-Cage method. I was exposed to tons of stuff I probably wouldn't have heard otherwise. It's a bit strange because a lot of things that I do or know how to do musically, I don't really know how I know them, I can't explain them, I just know, without understanding how it works. It's in there on a deep level, it's a bit weird.

You learn how to respond intuitively.

And in a way open a kind of channel to the music-making activity. I studied cello when I was young, learning the classical method. It took me a long time to be able to approach music from the point of view of the sound first, with everything else being a tool to explain what you're doing to other people.

You used to repair synths for DFA.

That's how I met James [Murphy] and everyone else. Around the time I started building synths, I was 25 or something, I was at the point where you're like, "I have to start doing what I'm going to do." I quit my job and I had some money saved up so I spent time learning how to build synths, then I sent out a mass email to really a ton of people, saying "I build custom synths, I do vintage synth repairs, I'm available." James was the only person who wrote me back. I went over to their studio, it was incredible, they had really a ton of stuff they'd collected, all of it worked but was a little bit off. That was my main gig for a while, building stuff for them, getting everything up and running.

Is there a certain satisfaction of out bringing something back to life again?

Totally. Actually if you're a musician, doing electronics for sound is incredibly frustrating. For me, I want to make the sound. I want the thing to make the sound, whatever I'm building or repairing. It's just agonizing to be working with the materials and some little tiny thing is wrong and you can't tell what it is. Especially with building but also with repairing, once the tone comes out, it sounds so great. There have been some remarkable moments. I haven't done too much building in a while. Now I mostly design stuff and get someone else to do the work.

You've a broad interest in magic practices and rituals, does that have a connection to building equipment at all?

Yes, in my own creative development, for sure. When I was a student I studied a lot about magic and ritual. Then when I moved to New York I got burned out really quickly on having an academic relationship to anything. I wanted to do and make things instead. The way that this came out was through these stage magic shows I was doing that had a ritual element, I was interested in connecting these things, understanding their history. I built all these props and machines for the shows, and that led directly into building synths. It was a seamless continuity for me. It wasn't until later that synths became this musical choice. In the beginning it was about harnessing electricity in this magical way.

Yeah, even though you might think that machines and technology are under our control, it's always fascinating that they're powered by electricity, a natural element that's completely unpredictable.

And the process involves going through that and having things fuck up and burst into flames, it really drove home that point that it's a really elemental force. I saw working with electronic music as a kind of channeling, working with this raw, natural force.

So that's the parallel with magic practices, that you're having to channel something, harness something.

For me the process of making music has always been like that, music is also this untamed force and composing music is like taking this big unmanageable energy and channeling it into something that expresses something, giving it a meaning and a purpose.

Building a guitar sequencer
Gavin Russom

You've built custom gear for some DFA guys, like James Murphy and Bjorn from Black Dice.

Bjorn [from Black Dice] came to me and asked, can you make a sequencer for guitar? First I didn't know if it was possible, then I realized that what we were talking about was quite a bit like the box I used with Delia and still use now. It ended up making a lot of sense.

That design combined with what I use is what I'm working on now to make a more professional box that will probably be commercially available, a small run for studios and stuff. It's basically a sequencer with filters and VCAs but normalized in a way that makes it a powerful tool, especially for the studio.

How does this work?
I'm having a hard time visualizing it.

Yeah, the normal idea of sequencer is that it's something that plays an instrument, so you imagine that a guitar sequencer is some totally weird thing where it has robot hands. But this is the cool thing about understanding how analog synths work: under the hood, the sequencer isn't exactly playing the synth. The keyboard's not playing it either, like a piano does with little hammers. When you hit a key on a synth, it sends a control voltage to an oscillator, which sets the pitch, it's also sending a gate signal to an envelope generator, which sends an envelope to a VCF and a VCA or two different EGs, and that processes that sound.

That's what clicked it for me. I realized that what a sequencer is usually doing is actually processing the sound in a time-based way rather than actually generating the sound. So it's not about having a sequencer play the guitar, but about processing the sound of a guitar in the way that a step-sequencer processes sound. I had already been dealing with that stuff, especially processing the keyboard parts that Delia and I played.

A lot of what you hear on Days of Mars is one or both of us playing a sequence live at the same time that the sequencer is processing it, so that there's a slipping in and out of sync with each other. At the end of "Black Spring" for example, there's this one sequence where what the downbeat is keeps changing, because it keeps shifting in and out of the programmed sequence.

So what I built Bjorn is basically a sequencer with an audio input rather than a link to a VCO. I started to use that and figure out things about routing filters in different ways that really opens up what you can do. If you're under the hood of an analog synth, what the VCO does is shaping the timbre of the sound over time.

Normally it's done in a very conventional way which is based on imitating acoustic instruments. You want a patch that sounds like a piano, you use zero attack, a certain amount of release. But what's cool about analog synths is that once you get out of that, there's really all kinds of ways that sounds can change over time, based on how you modify a filter.

A sequencer is just kind of sending the time clock of how the sound is changing over time. That could be over five minutes, how one sound is going to change, what's going to happen in that time. Even having two filters rather than one opens up a huge field of possibility in how you route those filters to each other.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1074

Video :

http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/2/17/electric-independence-gavin-russom

Glass Orchestra, Toronto, 1979

2010-02-01T02:50:00.001-08:00

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The classic experimental music band, The Glass Orchestra, performs in 1979 with the original members. Eric Cadesky, Paul Hodge, John Kuypers, Miguel Frasconi, and Marvin Green. An excerpt from the CBC-TV show "Music to See."

Broadcast and The Focus Group - #2: I See, So I See So

2010-02-01T02:45:00.000-08:00

Philip Glass Ensemble "Train/Spaceship" part 1

2010-01-25T06:27:00.000-08:00

Philip Glass Ensemble "Train/Spaceship" part 2

2010-01-25T06:26:00.000-08:00

JAMES WHITNEY + TERRY RILEY

2010-01-11T05:18:00.000-08:00

Various - The Synthi Group Vol. 2

2009-12-26T09:11:00.000-08:00

The Synthi Group is back for the second installment of their ongoing Electronic Music Studio (EMS) instrument centered compilations. With the popularity of Vol. I, downloaded over 41,000 times, it was made clear that an interest exists for the unique sound of EMS machinery. Vol. II continues the DIY ethic of the first, encapsulating a diverse array of sounds from ultrasonic frequencies and spring reverb howls to rubbery logic sequences and colliding inverted ramp oscillators.

The members presenting their own manipulations and interpretations of the Synthi. Encompassing elements from vintage analog, ambient, glitch and experimental, both beginners and aficionados of electronic music alike will find interest in the varying styles presented here. Available through Clinical Archives, the Synthi Group: Vol. II must not be missed. Bleep.

free download :

http://www.archive.org/details/ca345_tsg

La Monte Young - B flat Dorian Blues (5th day of hammer)

2009-12-17T02:32:00.000-08:00

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Performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music in 1962:
La Monte Young : Sopranino Saxophone,
John Cale : Viola,
Marian Zazeela : Voice Drone,
Angus MacLise : Hand Percussion,
Tony Conrad : Bowed Guitar

The Man Machine (Live, Minimum-Maximum) - Kraftwerk

2009-12-07T02:57:00.000-08:00

Gamelan gong kebyar from bali

2009-12-07T02:41:00.000-08:00

Krautrock BBC documentary Pt 1 of 6

2009-11-06T02:08:00.000-08:00

Krautrock BBC documentary Pt 2 of 6

2009-11-06T02:06:00.000-08:00

Krautrock BBC documentary Pt 3 of 6

2009-11-06T02:05:00.000-08:00

Krautrock BBC documentary Pt 4 of 6

2009-11-06T02:04:00.000-08:00

Krautrock BBC documentary Pt 5 of 6

2009-11-06T01:59:00.000-08:00

Krautrock BBC documentary Pt 6 of 6

2009-11-06T01:58:00.000-08:00

Broadcast and The Focus Group - #1 : Witch Cults

2009-09-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

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Taken from the new Broadcast and The Focus Group mini album 'Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age'

http://warp.net/records/broadcast/new-mini-album-broadcast-and-the-focus-group-investigate-witch-cults-of-the-radio-age-out-now-to-download

Peter VOGEL "Son, lumière et mouvement"

2009-09-24T03:16:00.000-07:00

Peter VOGEL "Son, lumière et mouvement" /
Exposition du 10 Septembre 2009 au 10 Octobre 2009

Galerie Lara Vincy
47 rue de Seine 75006 Paris

http://www.lara-vincy.com/

http://www.getlofi.com/2006/02/peter-vogel-circuit-artwork.html

http://www.amazon.fr/Peter-Vogel-Partitions-r%C3%A9actions-audio/dp/2840663260/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253610489&sr=8-2

David Vorhaus Analogue Electronic Music 1979

2009-09-24T00:06:00.000-07:00

">
n this historical video excerpt, David Vorhaus talks about two of his analogue inventions - the MANIAC analogue sequencer, and the Kaleidophon from 1979.

The MANIAC (Multiphasic Analog Inter-Active Chromataphonic (sequencer)) was an analogue sequencer having variable step lengths, and the ability to split sequences into several smaller groupings giving considerable sonic potentiality. Addition and subtraction of events was possible, as well as the possibility to chromatically correct the output during performance. David could program his MANIAC sequencer to play a background rhythm or combination of musical events, to then improvise over the top with another instrument or synthesizer.

The Kaleidophon was a double-bass-like instrument using four velocity-sensitive ribbon controllers instead of strings. The instrument is played entirely using the left hand, leaving the right hand free to manipulate the sound via a number of controllers and a joystick.

David speaks about the processes of making electronic music, and the developments that such possibilities can provide for the imaginative electronic musician. This excerpt is taken from the BBC 1979 documentary entitled "The New Sound of Music" hosted by Michael Rodd.

BBC Archive Tomorrow's World Moog Synthesiser

2009-09-24T00:04:00.000-07:00

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n this report from a longer programme, Derek Cooper introduces the Moog synthesiser, an instrument that can produce a variety of noises and arrangements, both mimicking real instruments and creating new sounds, all electronically.

Herbert Eimert: Klangstudie II 1952

2009-08-04T05:16:00.000-07:00

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Born in 1897, Herbert Eimert was a multi-talented German composer, broadcaster and founder of a highly regarded studio that helped shape the experimental compositions of the incomparable Stockhausen. Klangstudie II is a menacing burst of pioneering bloop 'n' bleep electronica recorded in the early 50s with Robert Breyer.

ELIANE RADIGUE

2009-08-03T05:42:00.000-07:00

Eliane Radigue trailer from Anaïs Prosaïc on Vimeo.

La Monte Young - The Well Tuned Piano

2009-07-20T07:53:00.000-07:00

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The first 10 minutes of the more that 5 hours composition.
The piano is re-tuned to in just intonation.

Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan- Song To The Second Moon

2009-07-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

">">

One of the first electronic songs from 1957

Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt 1959

2009-07-20T07:47:00.000-07:00

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Kid Baltan (Dick Raaijmakers) and Tom Dissevelt at Philips "Nat. Lab" 1959, explaining how electronic tape music is made. Broadcast by VARA television on January 17, 1959

TURZI - TRAILER

2009-07-20T02:06:00.000-07:00

TURZI Teaser Live from Samuel Petit on Vimeo.

Delia Gonzalez / Gavin Russom - Relevee

2009-07-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

Who You Are Looking For is Who is Looking - Tony Martin

2009-07-10T07:26:00.000-07:00

">
A compendium of light projection combination methods of the period 1963-1973.

The Joshua Light Show - Liquid Loops (1969)

2009-07-10T07:22:00.000-07:00

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Live projection performance on an overhead projector using oil, water and glycerin. Light artist: Cecily Hoyt. Originally recorded on 35mm film.

lucky dragons

2009-07-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

The Pretty Things rare Film Clip 60's part 1

2009-07-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

The Pretty Things rare film clip 60's part 2

2009-07-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

Capt Hard Rock Gunther & Judah Warsky / Live Point Ephémère

2009-06-04T01:31:00.000-07:00

Hard Rock Gunther / Judah Warsky
envoyé par ItahLives. - Regardez la dernière sélection musicale.">

Pan European Recording : A Psychedelic Night part. V 16/04/09

Tangerine Dream - Ossiach Lake

2009-06-04T01:20:00.000-07:00

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Tangerine Dream live in 1971.

Elektron Musik Studion 1974 Stockholm

2009-05-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

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Stiftelsen Elektronmusik Studion (EMS, Stockholm)

1974. EMS was founded in 1968, but existed since 1964 as a department of the Swedish Radio.
It is the very first computer music centers in Europe,

The digital music production was based on a a DEC PDP 15/XVM computer (similar to the Utrecht studio)

At that time the main software for the PDP-15 were the real-time interactive program IMPAC (Michael Hinton)
and the universal purpose program EMSETT. Both developed at the EMS.The software controlled the analog synthestizer
with its 24 tonegenerators, filterbanks etc.

The film shows both the huge Synthetizer occupiÿing a whole room, the PDP 15/XVM with Tamas Ungvary programming and the fameous control consol

The Ventures Live 1966

2009-05-27T07:04:00.000-07:00

Peter Zinovieff and Electronic Music Studios

2009-05-27T07:02:00.000-07:00

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Peter Zinovieff's pioneering work into the fields of electronic music production and research led to many innovative electronic music instrument developments that were outstanding for the time. Peter was fascinated by electronic music and used his financial resources to develop a huge voltage-controlled studio that occupied an entire room in his home premises. There was a time when EMS (Electronic Music Studios) stood as equal to Moog and Arp. In many ways, EMS was more advanced with several pioneering ideas being investigated. Peter used two PDP8 minicomputers in the late 1960s to control the voltage-controlled analogue modules for research into electronic music exploration. Twenty years before affordable computing and sequencing packages, Zinovieff's computers could store and replay compositions, complete with sound shaping parameters even inventing a form of spectral or additive synthesis. Excerpts are edited from the television documentaries "What the Future Sounded Like" and "The New Sound of Music" featuring the first public performance of music by a computer in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967. The spirit of EMS continues, and Peter's synthesizer innovations like the VCS3 and Synthi 100 have become outstanding analogue classics.

WHAT IS MUSIQUE CONCRETE?

2009-05-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

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Musique Concrete is the experimental technique of musical composition using recorded sounds as raw material. The principle uses the assemblage of various natural sounds to produce an aural montage. A precursor to the use of electronically generated sound, musique concrete was among the earliest uses of electronic means to extend the composer's sound resources. Before the days of sampling and computer manipulation of sounds, musicians used analogue tape recorders to record natural sounds and tape splicing techniques. Music concrete uses natural sounds to create aural compositions. This excerpt is taken from the BBC 1979 documentary "The New Sound of Music".

Aly, Walk With Me - The Raveonettes

2009-03-05T09:15:00.000-08:00

Between the Eyes - Amon Düül II

2009-03-03T03:20:00.000-08:00

">

Title: Between the Eyes
Artist: Amon Düül II
Album: Lemmingmania
Video in the Best of krautrock volume one

BEST OF KRAUTROCK Vol. 1

2009-03-03T02:58:00.000-08:00

Le DVD Best of Krautrock Vol.1 est produit par l'éditeur allemand Aviator Entertainement. Revenons rapidement sur les différents sens du terme "Krautrock" pour lever toute ambiguïté. Chez les anglophones, inventeur de l'étiquette, il a tendance aujourd'hui à recouvrir la frange expérimentale et électronique du rock allemand des années 70 (CAN, Kraftwerk, Neu!, Faust...). En France, suivant l'exemple anglo-saxon, le mot est maintenant couramment employé dans la presse musicale pour cette même signification restrictive et pourrait tout aussi bien être remplacé par "motorik". Les fans hardcore sont quant à eux plus proches de sa signification première et classent au rayon Krautrock les tendances les plus bigarrées du rock allemand des seventies : entre rock progressif et fusion jazz-rock très électrique. En Allemagne même l'étiquette a toujours été, depuis son importation d'Angleterre, synonyme de Deutsch Rock ou German Rock, soit, on l'aura compris, "rock allemand" tout court. En bon Best of ce DVD reflète sa diversité avec 15 extraits d'émissions télévisées, une interview de Lothar Meid (d'Amon Düül II) et un documentaire datant de 1975.

Le grand intérêt de ce DVD est de publier pour la première fois tout à fait officiellement des prestations live dans l'émission culte The Beat Club, 10 au total. Parmi elles figurent Amon Düül II avec "Between The Eyes" ; CAN avec "Paperhouse" ; Popul Vuh avec "Bettina" ; le fameux "Rücktoss-Gondoliere" de Kraftwerk en 1971 (alors réduit au power trio Michael Rother / Klaus Dinger / Florian Schneider), ainsi que des groupes s'exprimant par un heavy rock progressif mettant nettement à contribution l'orgue Hammond : Frumpy et le poids lourd Birth Control (avec une excellente improvisation instrumentale). L'émission The Beat Club détonnait par son usage parfois extrémiste des surimpressions psychédéliques, superpositions de prises de vue et effets très "spéciaux". Si vous avez déjà vu la prestation de Kraftwerk, vous vous rendez compte que non, la copie pirate qui circulait n'était pas endommagée. L'image était dès l'origine consciemment altérée pour obtenir un rendu disons "esthétique"... Quelques autres prestations, de 1977/78 sont issues de l'émission Rockpop de la ZDF, nettement plus sobre, avec Novalis (s'inspirant de la musique classique), Eloy (un hard-rock soutenu par de l'orgue Hammond et une voix passée à la chambre d'échos), Jane (un groupe heavy progressif à tendance pink-floydienne très populaire aus Deutschland). Le DVD permet aussi d'avoir des images de la référence du jazz-rock allemand, le très cuivré Passport. Le documentaire de 1975, qui évoque justement la valse des étiquettes en Allemagne (Deutsch Rock, German Rock, Krautrock) permet de voir quelques groupes ayant sillonné les landers : Pell Mell, Holderlin, Ougenweide, Tangerine Dream, Kraan... Ce documentaire, présenté par une voix off en allemand malheureusement non sous-titrée, s'apprécie aussi pour l'exotisme de cette plongée dans un passé d'Outre-Rhin. Avec pas loin de 3 heures d'images, le dépaysement est garanti mein Herr

http://www.aviator-entertainment.com/Index/dvd/music/bestofkraut.html

Tangerine Dream - live in Paris 15Feb73 (part 1)

2009-02-23T07:58:00.000-08:00

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Tangerine Dream live at the Theatre de l'Ouest in Paris, February 15, 1973.

Tangerine Dream - live in Paris 15Feb73 (part 2)

2009-02-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

electronic dream 06 by Johnatan FITOUSSI

2009-02-23T07:42:00.000-08:00

electronic dream 06 from Jonathan Fitoussi on Vimeo.">

CONRAD SCHNITZLER ::: Premier Con/tact

2009-02-23T07:40:00.001-08:00

CONRAD SCHNITZLER ::: Premier Con/tact
envoyé par Gonzai_mag">

EMS SYNTHI HI FLI

2009-01-27T06:30:00.000-08:00

The Story Of The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

2009-01-27T05:29:00.000-08:00

50 years ago this month, the most celebrated electronic music studio in the world was established. We trace the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, talking to the composers and technical staff who helped to create its unique body of work.

Steve Marshall

I was 10 years old. As the last 'whoosh' of the Doctor Who theme dissolved into a wash of tape echo I sat transfixed by the light of the television, eagerly reading all of the end credits. "Wow!" I exclaimed. "I want to get a job in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop when I grow up!"
"I'm sorry, son," said my father. "You won't be able to do both."
Although it never felt like a 'job', I did eventually get to work in the Radiophonic Workshop. I was only there for three months, but I've never stopped going on about it. Wouldn't you too, if you'd been lucky enough to have worked in the most famous electronic music studio in history?

The story of the Radiophonic Workshop began half a century ago, in 1958.
Britain in the 1950s was a bleak place, as the nation struggled to rebuild itself after the devastation of war. Food rationing had continued right up until 1954, when bananas finally came back on sale; anything worth having was still in short supply. We now think of the '50s as the rock & roll years, but the UK charts for 1958 tell quite a different story. Elvis was there for a few weeks; so was Jerry Lee Lewis — but the chart is mostly dominated by the likes of Perry Como, Connie Francis and Vick Damone. It was a dull time for music, but things were about to get more interesting...

Defects Of The Brain

Before the Workshop: Daphne Oram manipulates a tape loop at Broadcasting House, watched by Frederick Bradnum, 1956 or '57.

One of the few benefits of wartime had been that some women had an opportunity to work in jobs previously denied to them; Daphne Oram was one. Daphne had started working for the BBC as a 'music balancer' during the war, turning down a place at the Royal College of Music to do so. After her promotion to studio manager in the '50s, she began pestering the BBC to follow the lead of the French broadcasters, and to provide a facility for the production of electronic sound and musique concrete. Desmond Briscoe (1925-2006) was also a studio manager, with similar interests, so in 1957 the pair teamed up to produce some innovative programmes for the BBC Drama Department. Using borrowed test oscillators and tape-splicing techniques, they produced sounds that had never been heard before on the BBC.

Desmond Briscoe at work, 1960.

Their nagging finally paid off, and in April 1958 Desmond and Daphne founded the Radiophonic Workshop in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios (a former ice-skating rink). They were joined later in the year by 'technical assistant' Dick Mills. Brian Hodgson came along in 1962 and he eventually ended up running the place.
Brian adds: "Workshop was then a very popular word among theatre 'types', and it gave away the Drama Department origins. It was originally going to be called the Electrophonic Workshop, but it was discovered that 'electrophonic' referred to some sort of defect of the brain, so it had to be changed! A board was set up to see that the place was run properly. Unfortunately, one board member had a doctor friend, who advised that three months should be the maximum length of time that anyone could work there, as staying any longer could be injurious to their health; they'd go mad, or something. This problem recurred throughout the Workshop's history — just as a recruit was getting into the swing of things, they'd have to leave."

Daphne Oram was the first to fall foul of this rule. After three months in her new job, she was ordered back to work in a control room at Broadcasting House. But for some reason Desmond Briscoe was not required to leave: instead he was appointed as the Workshop's Senior Studio Manager. For the BBC's women, it seemed, the war was over. A lengthy and bitter row ensued, and eventually, Daphne left the BBC for good in 1959, moving to an oast-house that she'd bought in Kent and establishing her own Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition. She was replaced by Maddalena Fagandini.

Fag-ends & Lollipops

John Baker was another stalwart Radiophonic Workshop composer.

The Workshop's reputation grew over the next few years, and the ranks swelled with the addition of Brian Hodgson, Delia Derbyshire and jazz pianist John Baker. The equipment at their disposal was minimal, to say the least, as Brian recalls. "In the very beginning, Desmond had been given £2000 and the key to 'redundant plant' [the BBC's junk pile] and that was it! The place kept going for years on what we called 'fag-ends and lollipops'.
'Fag-ends' were the bits of unwanted rubbish that other departments had thrown away; 'lollipops' were the much rarer treats that were occasionally sent down to keep Desmond quiet. Like the vocoder, for instance: it was very nice, but we hadn't asked for one and didn't really need it. It was like the icing on a non-existent cake!"
The Workshop's equipment consisted merely of a lot of old tape recorders and a few pieces of test equipment that could make noises. The tape recorders could be used for echo, and reverb was also available — it came from an empty room downstairs with a microphone at one end and a speaker at the other. Maida Vale Studios is an unusual building, long and thin with one of its two floors below ground.
The Radiophonic Workshop's rooms were at street level, spanning an extremely long corridor.
One room was occupied by a succession of dedicated engineers who had the tools and the know-how to fix all the broken rubbish that arrived; they also built special equipment to order. First was 'Dickie' Bird; then came Dave Young, and finally 'The Two Rays' (White and Riley). Dave Young started a tradition of visiting the nearby Portobello Market every week to buy bits and pieces for the Workshop, and this continued long after he'd left. In the '60s, a lot of ex-military kit from the war was still being sold off; Dave would return with items such as a genuine aircraft's joystick!
Much of the Workshop's output then was produced simply by using the techniques of musique concr te: natural sounds were recorded and manipulated on tape by editing, pitch-changing, and very often by reversing the tape. There was a standing joke that a Radiophonic composer could enthusiastically churn out original compositions for several years. When the inspiration ran out, all their old tracks could be re-used (and improved?) by playing them backwards!

Wobbulating The World

Brian Hodgson plays a tune on the Workshop's home-made keyboard, controlling 12 individual oscillators.

In the early '60s, synthesizers simply did not exist. Producer Joe Meek was using the monophonic, valve-operated Clavioline but the Radiophonic Workshop, oddly enough, never had one. What they did have, though, was all the test oscillators that they could beg, borrow or steal from other BBC departments.
A method was devised for controlling 12 oscillators at a time, triggering them from a tiny home-built keyboard of recycled piano keys. Each oscillator could be independently tuned by means of a range switch and a chunky Bakelite frequency knob.
There was also the versatile 'wobbulator', a sine-wave oscillator that could be frequency modulated. It consisted of a very large metal box, with a few switches and one very large knob in the middle that could sweep the entire frequency range in one revolution. They were used in the BBC for 'calibrating reverb times in studios' apparently. And as far as the Workshop's electronic sound sources went, that was it!
Yet, curiously, it is the work produced in those early years that the Radiophonic Workshop's reputation still hangs on. The Doctor Who theme was first recorded in 1963, and still there are fans who insist that the original is the best of many versions made over the years. What's more, some of the sound effects made for the first series of Doctor Who are still being used! When the newly revamped Doctor Who appeared in 2005, hardcore fans recognised the original effects and wrote to Brian Hodgson: "How nice to hear the old original Dalek Control Room again, after all these years!"

Brian Hodgson with dismembered piano, as used to create 'the Tardis sound' from the Doctor Who TV series.

Brian's 'Tardis' sound, dating from 1963, is also still used. "I spent a long time in planning the Tardis sound," says Brian. "I wanted a sound that seemed to be travelling in two directions at once; coming and going at the same time." The sound was actually made from the bare strings of a piano that had been dismantled. Brian scraped along some bass strings with his mum's front-door key, then set about processing the recordings, as he describes it, "with a lot of reverse feedback". (By this, I assume he means that tape echo was added, then the tape reversed so that it played backwards.) Eventually, Brian played the finished results to Dick Mills and Desmond Briscoe; at their insistence he added a slowly rising note, played on the wobbulator.

Working Up A Storm

Brian and Delia Derbyshire were, as he says, "best mates. We used to go on holiday together." In 1966, together with the founder of synth maufacturers EMS, Peter Zinovieff, they formed Unit Delta Plus, a band of sorts, and began performing on London's psychedelic underground scene. As one Workshop member remembers it, "At the end of their day at the BBC they used to race off to the West End, changing into their kaftans in the taxi." Unit Delta Plus split in 1967, but some of their gigs sound like crackers: how about the two-day 'Million Volt Light and Sound Rave' at the Roundhouse? I'm sorry to have missed that one! In 1969 the pair teamed up with David Vorhaus as the White Noise, releasing the cult classic album An Electric Storm.

Radiophonic Workshop composer Malcolm Clarke (1943-2003) with the EMS Synthi 100 modular synth known as Delaware.

Meanwhile, the Radiophonic Workshop was going through some changes. The three-month rule ensured a steady throughput of staff, but some managed to become permanent. David Cain arrived in 1967, Malcolm Clarke in 1969; Richard Yeoman-Clark, Paddy Kingsland, Roger Limb and Peter Howell all joined in the early '70s, just as Brian and Delia were leaving. The association with Peter Zinovieff had already led to the BBC buying three VCS3s, but in 1970 the Workshop took delivery of an EMS Synthi 100 modular system. It was the biggest voltage-controlled synthesizer in the world! Christened 'The Delaware', after the road outside the studios, it had 16 oscillators and even incorporated its own oscilloscope and frequency counter.
As with the VCS3, there were no messy patch cords: instead were provided two 60x60-way 'pin patch boards'. There was a digital sequencer too, which could store up to 256 events. The massive control surface presented a sea of knobs to twiddle, but one of them, labelled 'Option 4' was actually a dummy. Not connected to anything at all, it was occasionally tweaked to appease awkward producers who wanted to get 'just the right sound'.
Desmond Briscoe's retirement in 1977 saw Brian Hodgson returning as Workshop Organiser, after five years away. Brian finally managed to prise a reasonable annual budget out of the BBC and he set about systematically renovating the place, eventually providing a customised studio for each of the five composers. Apple Macintosh computers were introduced, and a lot of the new kit was identical to what could be found in any studio of the time; there were growing mutterings about the Workshop having somehow deviated from its original purpose to become a 'music-writing factory'. This was not really true: the Radiophonic Workshop had been founded because the equipment needed for electronic music production was not generally available. Mass-produced synthesizers did become affordable with time, but remember that when the first 8-bit digital sampler, the Fairlight CMI, appeared in the early '80s, it cost over £30,000: you could buy a house for that! The Workshop's composers were all producing work in their own styles, using equipment that may have been available to outside composers, but was prohibitively expensive for most. Elizabeth Parker joined in 1978 and her trademark sound came from the pricey and unreliable PPG 2.2. Richard Attree, who, in 1987, was the last composer to be taken on, made good use of the Yamaha TX816, which was effectively eight DX7s in a rack. Just one DX7 cost £1200 when it was new.
Peter Howell told me: "There's still this prevailing idea that we were somehow almost traitors for using modern gear and computers! Some people still believe that the original Workshop, with virtually no equipment, was the only incarnation that mattered. But we were there to do a job. With the Fairlight I could play something live, in real time; why on earth should I spent three weeks chopping up little bits of tape to get exactly the same result? We had to catch up with the real world — otherwise we'd never justify the time and cost."

The Cost Of Everything

Ultimately, it was costs that killed off the Radiophonic Workshop. The controversial appointment of John Birt as the BBC's Director-General in 1992 was the writing on the Workshop wall — for Birt brought 'producer choice' to the BBC. The asylum would be run by lunatics no longer: the accountants were taking over.
With 'producer choice', staff producers at the BBC could now either use the BBC's carefully costed in-house facilities, or they could choose to go outside — all that mattered was the cost. And everything in the BBC was costed. So what happened? In London, staff producers and directors cleared off to Soho in droves, to work with their old mates who'd already taken redundancy and gone freelance.
For about a year, many BBC buildings felt empty. Everyone was eventually recalled and producer choice was 'modified', but the damage was done — it resulted in a catastrophic lowering of morale within the BBC.
Brian Hodgson struggled for a long time to keep the Workshop alive, but it was a losing battle. Under the Birt regime, every BBC department was assessed for profitability, and if running costs were found to be greater than profits, extermination followed swiftly. The Radiophonic Workshop had been doing a fine job providing quality music for many programmes that didn't have big budgets — schools programmes, in particular. But now the Workshop was expected to compete on the 'open market' with freelance composers like myself. Brian spent many months calculating the cost of finished music per minute and searching for ways to reduce it.
I didn't even bother costing my music per minute: I didn't have to. If a director asked me for a quote, I could just say "Well, it depends How much have you got?"
Despite this approach being the most obviously competitive, it was not permitted under BBC rules, and so in 1998 the Radiophonic Workshop finally closed its doors. John Birt was awarded a Life Peerage, by the way, and now sits in the House of Lords.

Dick Mills (left) and Brian Hodgson compare the lengths of two sections of tape; watching is Desmond Briscoe.

Daphne Oram (1925-2003)

There would have been no Radiophonic Workshop without Daphne Oram, despite the fact that she worked there for less than a year. She was a remarkable woman and a true pioneer, whose achievements have never been fully recognised. As well as her work in electronic music she also composed many orchestral pieces, all of them as yet unperformed. This year though, Sonic Arts Network (www.sonicartsnetwork.org) are to mount an exhibition and concert celebrating her life and work. Details will be announced in SOS, or see www.daphneoram.org.
Daphne left the BBC in 1959 and moved to Tower Folly, a Kent oast-house that she had already started converting into a home and studio. Here she produced music for film and theatre, using the techniques of musique concr te and primitive electronics. Over the next years she was to develop her own Oramic Synthesis, an extremely novel way of producing electronic sounds.
At that time, the most advanced electronic instrument in existence was the RCA Electronic Music Synthesizer Mark II. Built in 1957, it consisted of a huge array of steel racks and was bigger than the average living room. The machine (which still exists) was controlled, or 'programmed' by means of a roll of paper, punched with holes. It also offered an alternative: the parameters could instead be drawn onto transparent film that passed over a series of photo-cells. Daphne's Oramic system was similarly controlled by drawing, but for each parameter there was a separate roll of 35mm transparent film (known as 'clear leader' in the film industry). The 10 rolls of sprocketed film were mechanically linked, and passed over a horizontal 'drawing table' where the operator could make marks on the film to control pitch, envelope, intensity, and so on. Additional rolls of sprocketed recording tape or 'mag track' could be used to record the results; this section was referred to as the 'multitrack' recorder.

Daphne Oram with the wobbulator (centre of shot), 1958.

Daphne seems to have preferred to draw onto the film using a brush and special ink, but felt pens or sticky tape could be used. Her machine had several oscillators with variable waveforms, again controlled by photo-electric cells. This part of the machine was even more bizarre: a selection of glass plates, each with a cut-out pattern, could be fixed to 'cathode ray scanners' to change the waveforms. It was effectively an oscilloscope in reverse! Reading contemporary accounts of how the Oramic system worked is confusing nowadays [see photo and diagrams,courtesy Sonic Arts Network, overleaf], as the words analogue and digital are used, but not in the sense that we know them. Continuously variable parameters were regarded as analogue, while those that could only be switched on or off were 'digital'. However, Daphne did eventually go digital in the modern sense.
I met Daphne Oram once, in 1989, and inquired whether she still used the Oramic system. Surprised and delighted that I'd even heard of it, she laughed "Oh no, not that old-fashioned thing!" She then explained that her old Oramic system had been swept away and replaced by something far more modern! She'd been working with 'some clever young chaps' who had helped her to build a new, computer-controlled synthesizer. "It's a huge improvement!" she said. "Now, when you draw the parameters, they're digitally scanned into a micro-processor"
Yes, it still used rolls of 35mm film!

The unique Oramics synthesizer was controlled by drawing onto 35mm photographic film.

Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001)

Although her name will be forever associated with her 'realisation' of Ron Grainer's Doctor Who theme, Delia Derbyshire (pronounced 'Darbyshire', by the way) proved herself to be an extremely original and sensitive composer. She had a degree in Music and Maths from Cambridge that may have accounted for her unusual and analytical approach to sound: she is reputed to have always carried a book of logarithm tables that she used in her work! During her time at the BBC, the Workshop composers were not always properly credited, so consequently there is no complete catalogue of her music. She also 'moonlighted', producing library tracks under various pseudonyms. Some of her music is available on CD, though, and she has a MySpace tribute page. Blue Veils & Golden Sands and The Delian Mode, two pieces that she made in the Radiophonic Workshop, are particularly outstanding, featuring organic sounds that seem to 'shimmer' as their harmonics slowly change.
She claimed to have made the sounds by analysing the partials of her favourite metal lampshade and replicating them with sine-wave test oscillators! Before Delia, electronic music had a reputation for sounding 'ugly'; she proved that it could also be extremely beautiful.
In 1973 she left the BBC and gave up composing, working for a short time with Brian Hodgson at Electrophon Studios. Then followed a series of curiously directionless moves: she went to Cumbria to work as a radio operator on the gas pipeline; was briefly married; she ran an art gallery, and made a disastrous attempt at teaching music in York. Eventually she settled with a partner who brought much-needed stability. In the late '90s her interest in electronic music returned and she began working on an album, but sadly, it was never finished, as she died at the age of 64 after cancer treatment. In a 2001 obituary Brian Hodgson wrote of her:
"One night many years ago, as we left Zinovieff's studio, she paused on Putney Bridge. 'What we are doing now is not important for itself,' she said, 'but one day someone might be interested enough to carry things forwards and create something
wonderful on these foundations.'"

Delia Derbyshire, with Workshop co-founder Desmond Briscoe in 1965.

Dick Mills

Dick Mills spent virtually his entire career in the Radiophonic Workshop and holds the record for the most Doctor Who credits. Now retired, he finds himself increasingly in demand for Doctor Who and sci-fi conventions.
"I joined the Workshop in November of 1958, after it had been going for only about six months, so I'm now the oldest surviving member. As a duty engineer, I'd worked once with Desmond Briscoe on a very silly drama thing he'd done, which was set on the moon! It was about a couple of astronauts who went there and fell in love with a moon woman and when they got back to Earth one of the men was pregnant... It had weird sound effects and was great fun to do. So when I saw a notice asking for someone to help out at the new 'Radiophonic Workshop' I jumped at it. I stayed there until I retired in 1993."
Dick's speciality at the Workshop was sound effects — not just sci-fi ones, but outrageously funny ones too. I asked Dick where his interest in effects came from. "From the early '50s there used to be a Saturday night DJ called Jack Jackson who did amazing things with records — cutting and mixing between music, comedy and sound effects. He was much appreciated by those in the business. Then there was the Goons — remember, all that stuff was done live, with a studio manager spinning in sound effects from 78rpm records."
For the Goons, Dick famously produced one of the best comedy effects of all time: 'Major Bloodnok's Stomach' was an outrageously long impression of a tortured digestive system. It has appeared on several BBC FX discs and was even sampled by the Orb! Dick remembers recording it: "I always wanted to work on the Goons, but Desmond Briscoe was in charge and he said no, because he thought they'd be unreliable and a nuisance (he was probably right). Anyway, Desmond was away on holiday that week A producer came in and asked if we could do something for the Goons, so I just said yes! The finished thing was hysterical, and originally even longer, all cut-up burps, gloops and explosions. We just fell about laughing every time we played it. The producer sat and listened in silence, then said 'Well, it's all right, but we've only got half an hour for the show. We can't spend 30 seconds on one effect!' So we had to cut it down to 10 seconds for him."
Because the Workshop had a couple of in-house technicians, some of Dick's experiments would involve them building custom pieces of equipment. "I got obsessed with crossfades at one time," he laughs. "I wanted to be able to do longer ones, so I got them to make me a splicing block that was 18 inches long! No, it didn't catch on We tried all sorts of variations on tape loops: I once tried splicing a Moebius strip. That didn't work either. The tape changed sides at the splice, so half of it was bright but the other half had top-cut because the tape was now upside down. Someone else invented a vibrato unit for tape! It consisted of a gramophone motor, attached to a biscuit-tin full of sand, to make it heavy enough; the motor had some sort of gearing, probably Meccano, to make an arm press periodically against the tape and give the vibrato effect. It worked, sort of."
Eventually, the Workshop began to be seen as uneconomic and unnecessary. Doctor Who had finished and there was no need for sci-fi effects any more. What could the Workshop provide that couldn't be found in studios anywhere else? The answer turned out to be intelligent noise removal: it was new and extremely expensive in the '90s (even hard drives cost a fortune then). So Dick's last few years at the Workshop were spent running a Sonic Solutions No-Noise system. No-Noise was a useful tool for TV production — from one small sample it could automatically remove hiss, camera noise, hum, and so on. Dick was set up in a brand-new new computer studio and was kept busy with archiving work, remastering video sound for DVD. "It was very interesting and satisfying work," says Dick, "but quite ironic really. I started my career with the BBC paying me to add horrible noises to their programmes; then in the end they were paying me to take them off!"

Dick Mills (left) and studio manager John Harrison attempt to control a very long tape loop!

Roger Limb

"I'm 67 this year," Roger declares, "but I like to keep busy. I play keyboards with a rock & roll band and we gig regularly" Roger Limb has always been busy: with his phenomenal output from the Workshop he must count as one of the most prolific composers in history! He spent his first few years with the BBC as a TV announcer. Then, some time in 1972, he bumped into Paddy Kingsland in the street outside Broadcasting House.
"Paddy and I had been studio managers together," he says. "He told me he was working at this fantastic little department in Maida Vale and that I should apply for an attachment — so I did! What they were doing was what I'd been dabbling with at home for several years. I'd been dangling microphones inside pianos and just playing with interesting noises. It had never occurred to do me that this could be a career." Roger had been with the BBC for over five years, but before the Radiophonic Workshop he'd never heard of such delights as tape loops. "What impressed me the most," he says, "was vari-speed. I'd never thought it possible! There was 15 ips [inches per second], seven and a half, three and three-quarters — but it hadn't occurred to me that there could be anything in between!"
Roger was yet another victim of the dreaded three-month rule: after his allotted time he duly left, and was only able to return when a place in the Workshop was advertised (internally, of course) in 1974. Roger remembers the instruments of the early '70s: "There was the VCS3 and the Delaware, both of them certainly ground-breaking, but not terribly reliable. The VCS3, in particular, used to drift out of tune all the time. I was told that this was due to their being made with poor components. But you must remember that although we now call them all 'keyboards' they were often played, or controlled, without a keyboard, just by twiddling knobs. I do remember there was an attitude back then that using keyboards as controllers was probably just an interesting cul-de-sac, almost a passing fad! I did love the ARP Odyssey, though — it had a decent keyboard and it was very musical. It felt like a real instrument."
Roger says that the mid-'70s saw crucial changes in the way that the Radiophonic Workshop was run: "The original tape-splicers, John Baker and Delia Derbyshire, both left and it became much less experimental. With the likes of Paddy and myself coming in as musicians, it became more of a music-making factory."
The equipment was changing, too. Paddy and Roger began recording their tracks onto the Workshop's two eight-track recorders, which speeded up the business of making music considerably. "In 1985," says Roger, "the Fairlight arrived, and I think that one instrument changed music, and the way it was to be made, forever. I was a big fan of the Fairlight, and once when I travelled to Australia I called in at the factory to meet one of the inventors, Kim Ryrie."
I asked Roger if he had any other favourites. "The Yamaha CS80 was a lovely instrument — very expressive. I had an Oberheim that I was very fond of; I loved the Prophet V. The Delaware was an amazing instrument, but so labyrinthine that you could disappear for weeks just making sounds! We never had any Moogs, you know — although I believe that Mr Moog himself once visited. We did get an awful lot of visitors, particularly musicians who were working in the other studios. One day I was leaving my studio for a coffee break and as I opened the door I almost knocked over Marc Bolan, who was listening outside! He looked very sheepish and apologised. 'I've always wondered what went on in here,' he said, so I invited him in to have a look around. He had an appointment and said he'd love to have a tour the next time he was at Maida Vale, but it never happened. Two weeks later he had his fatal car crash."
So how would Roger sum up his time at the Radiophonic Workshop? "I feel very fortunate that I had the best job in the world for 20 years — I'd have done it for nothing! Well, maybe not absolutely nothing"

Roger Limb attacks an empty tank with a mallet.

Peter Howell

Now a lecturer in Screen Music at the National Film & Television School, Peter Howell started his musical career in the late '60s, playing 'psychedelic folk' with Agincourt and other related bands. Peter eventually got a proper job as a BBC Studio Manager, but after a few years he managed to become a full-time member of the Workshop. "I started in '74 — the same year as Roger Limb," says Peter. "John Baker was still there, but we sort of crossed over. It was a funny period, really. I saw how to do the tape-splicing techniques, and had a go myself, but this was just when synthesizers were becoming available, and that was what really interested me."
Peter later became known for his work on the Fairlight, but he was happy to be the guinea pig for any new gear that came into the Workshop. "What I really found satisfying," he laughs, "was making beautiful sounds from ugly, clinical-looking machinery. The Fairlight was one of the ugliest instruments ever! I enjoyed using the VCS3 a lot; with the eight-track recorder I could make a whole piece using only the Odyssey, which I was very keen on.
"Then polyphonic synths appeared. I tried the Polymoog and really didn't like it; I liked the Prophet V, but my favourite was the Yamaha CS80. When I did Jonathan Miller's TV series The Body In Question I really wanted one, as I'd just seen it demonstrated. There was no money for one at the Workshop but we got the programme, which did have a decent budget, to hire one for me. It became a hit series, so later the BBC was later shamed into buying me one. It was a wonderful machine: polyphonic, though only eight-note; it was so expressive, with soft-action pads, and a great long pitch ribbon that you could play like a violin string. My party piece was to play the hornpipe just on the ribbon! I used the swell pedal constantly and this became crucial to my technique. Later, when we got MIDI sequencers, I used a volume pedal in the same way — so I ended up with files that were huge with all the Controller 7 changes."
Peter was an early convert to making music with computers: "I did love having a room full of actual things that made noises, but what appealed to me most about computer instruments was the fact that all the settings could be memorised. Previously, I used to dictate all my studio settings into a cassette recorder, especially if there was a chance that someone else might come in to use my studio and change something. People would call in as they were leaving at the end of the day, and I'd be crawling around on my knees, calling out 'Attack seven; decay three; sustain nine' It could take me 20 minutes to do the whole studio!"

Peter Howell with his beloved Fairlight.

Paddy Kingsland

Of all the composers who passed through the Radiophonic Workshop, Paddy is possibly the best known, because of his prominent credit on the end of each episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Paddy was originally a guitarist, playing in several semi-pro bands; after several years as a Radio 1 Studio Manager he joined the Radiophonic Workshop. "When I started in 1970 there were three rooms — 11, 12 and 13 — plus the 'Piano Room' and an 'Organ Room' that housed a great big electronic organ that someone thought might be useful. It wasn't. John Baker was in room 11: he had three Phillips tape machines and the room was lined with hooks that had hundreds of tape loops hanging from them. John had a playback machine (a Leevers-Rich?) with vari-speed, and the speed control had been marked up in semitones. He would play his original loops on this, change the speed and run off copies onto a standard 15ips machine. In this way he'd make all his notes first, then splice them together to make the music. And he used to listen to Radio Four while he did it! I tried his technique myself and really enjoyed it — one track I made used DIY effects like hammers and drills.

"Next door in Room 12 were Brian Hodgson and Delia Derbyshire with a VCS3. They had Electrophon Studios and a connection with EMS, so they'd persuaded the Beeb to buy some VCS3s. I always found them great for effects but not very tuneable. Then in room 10 there was the Delaware. Composer Dudley Simpson used the Delaware a lot for Doctor Who: he would arrive with an eight-track tape he'd recorded with live musicians in Lime Grove Studios, then, working with Dick Mills, he'd somehow sync up to the Delaware and add extra electronic tracks. He used the sequencer a lot."
Paddy, though, along with Roger Limb, was largely occupied with getting as much finished music out of the door as possible — every day. "I enjoyed it, but as I wasn't really into 'weird', I didn't feel I was doing anything that couldn't have been done anywhere else. Not until I started on Hitchhiker's, that is! Then suddenly I thought the Workshop came into its full potential: it was using the place properly."
The first episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy was actually a one-off pilot to test the idea. Actors' voices were recorded onto eight-track tape in the studios at Broadcasting House, then sent over to the Radiophonic Workshop to have the effects added. Paddy really went to town and created some extremely original sounds, many of them using his latest gizmo: the Eventide Harmonizer. "I did use it a lot," says Paddy. "For processing voices, mostly. Marvin the Paranoid Android used it; Eddie the Shipboard Computer, the Vogon Space Captain It was the first real-time digital pitch-changer. The Vogon voice was treated with an echo that went up in pitch with each successive repeat, as the Harmonizer had been patched into a delay line."
Douglas Adams' witty script and Paddy's innovative sound effects proved to be a great combination; the pilot was a success and a further five episodes were commissioned to make up series one. But there was a problem: "All of this took ages, and I'd been moved on to a radio series that was to take six months — I just wasn't available to do it, so Dick Mills and Harry Parker came in and took over." Producer Simon Brett had put the first episode together and introduced Douglas Adams to the Workshop. The writer immediately saw the potential. "The first series was a big hit," says Paddy, "and I came back on board for the Christmas Special — you know, the one where the robot falls down a lift shaft This time I made the music too [apart from the Eagles' signature tune]."

Paddy went on to make effects for another radio series of Hitchhiker's and then the TV series. "My biggest mistake when I did the TV series," he admits, "was to add squiggledy 'computer' noise to the book sequences as the letters drew across the screen. It looked great, though! I did it for the first episode and the director loved it. 'Great effect,' he said. 'We must have it for all the other episodes,' So I was stuck with the laborious task of cutting the sound to picture, using 16mm magnetic track, for the entire series! It took ages, doing it all by hand using an old-fashioned film splicer."
Paddy left the Workshop in 1981 and set up his own PK Studios in London (www.pkstudios.co.uk), where he now works. "It's a great mix," he says. "My son works with me and we do TV post-production, some music, a lot of film dubbing. What I enjoy most is Foley work — making sound effects, live to picture. I could happily do that all day."

Mark Ayres, Radiophonic Archivist

A life-long Doctor Who fan, Mark Ayres first visited the Radiophonic Workshop as a schoolboy! He kept up contact and eventually returned years later as a freelance composer, now working on Doctor Who himself. Mark is now a member of the BBC's unofficial 'Doctor Who Restoration Team' — a group of dedicated fans, some of whom are BBC staff. The team has been responsible for restoring 'lost' episodes and remastering many DVD releases. Mark Ayres has done much of the audio restoration, and was also responsible for rescuing the Radiophonic Workshop's tape archive when the place was closed in 1998. "I suddenly got phone calls," says Mark, "from Brian, then Peter Howell, then Paddy They all said 'Someone's got to get in there and save the archive before it ends up in a skip!' — so I did."
Doing so took a great deal of time and effort, almost costing Mark his career. "I'd just done my first feature film score," he says, "and I should have been out promoting it and trying to get another. But instead, I spent 18 months in Maida Vale, cataloguing tapes."
The Radiophonic Workshop was unique within the BBC, as it was the only department to hold its own archive. Absolutely everything was kept. When DAT tape came along in 1988, composers were ordered to continue making quarter-inch copies, as no-one knew then how long DAT tapes would last. The tapes were all stored in three cold, dark, tomb-like rooms. "The Workshop had closed and no longer existed," says Mark, "but they had a system whereby it was still being charged rent by the BBC for storage! So all the tapes were taken out of the three store rooms and crammed into Dick's old studio. And they were now all out of sequence." Mark was told that some of the later tapes had been thrown out to save space, but that wouldn't matter, because "it will all be on DAT anyway".
"So," says Mark, "having messed up the archive, the BBC paid me (not very much, I might add) to sort it all out again." He started with the oldest tapes and worked his way through the pile. When he got up to 1983, all the rest of the tapes were missing. "They'll be the ones that are on DAT," he was told. Pointing out that DAT had not yet been invented in 1983, he set about scouring the building. The tapes, he discovered, should have been put in a skip, but by some fluke the paperwork had not been done — so they must still be in Maida Vale somewhere. "It took a whole week," he says, "of borrowing keys and opening rooms that no-one had been in for years. Eventually I opened a room labelled Band Store and there they all were!"
The tapes are now safely stored in the BBC's main archive, but are 'non-accessioned', meaning that no-one apart from Mark really knows what is there. "They all need properly digitising and cataloguing," he declares, "but it takes forever to do. There are three and a half thousand reels of tape. Ten of the reels are John Baker's sound sources — his sample library, if you like. But they're 40 years old, and full of splices that are either dry and falling to bits, or gone sticky. You have to copy a little bit, clean the heads, copy another bit"
He started by concentrating on the Doctor Who tapes. "There are about 250 reels of sound effects," he says, "each up to 40 minutes long and containing about 100 sounds. It's an enormous task."
Mark has remastered four CDs of Radiophonic music so far. He started by pulling out the quarter-inch masters for the first two albums that had originally been released on vinyl, and discovered that they came with extra unreleased tracks. He hopes to continue, but as he says: "The funding just isn't there. I started remastering them as a labour of love, really. I'd work slowly on remastering an album, then deliver it to BBC Music when I'd finished. I phoned them up one day and said that I'd got another album ready for them, after several months of work, and there was an embarrassing silence. 'Sorry,' they said, 'we don't have a label any more!' Mark hastens to add that this problem has been resolved: BBC releases are now licensed to other labels, and he also has the support of an enthusiastic music department. "What this project needs, though," he says, "is lots and lots of time. And some money!"
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Radiophonic Workshop, Mark is compiling a two-CD set of Workshop music. It will comprise the two classic Workshop compilations 21 and Soundhouse, as well as an hour of previously unheard material. Details will be announced in SOS, and you can find out more at Mark's web site: www.markayres.co.uk.

Ray White, Engineer

Ray White, whose engineering expertise made many of the Workshop's experiments possible.

"I had several attachments to the Workshop," says Ray, "They interviewed me a few times for a permanent job, but I was very bad at interviews. Desmond Briscoe really wanted me to stay, so eventually he just fiddled it! We had a 'rehearsal' for the interview and sure enough, next time I passed."
Ray spent most of his BBC career as an engineer in the Radiophonic Workshop, fixing, building and modifying anything electronic. Arriving in the early '70s, he stayed for 20 years. "In the early days it was almost like a club," he says. "It was great fun, going to work. If they thought you were right, the management would welcome you in — then recommend that you join the Union! That would just not happen nowadays."
Ray is proud of his association with the Radiophonic Workshop but points out that not all the music produced there was good. "There was some awful dross came out of the place at times," he says, "and no-one mentions that. I think it was at its most successful when it combined electronic innovation with something more traditional. Like a tune The Doctor Who theme is the best example. Could you imagine anything like that ever coming out of, say IRCAM in Paris? They've produced so much stuff in that place that is clever, and pushes the limits of music technology, but it all sounds horrible! You wouldn't want to listen to that in your lounge, would you?"
In 1993 Ray decided to take early retirement. "As soon as Birt was appointed, I could see what was to come," he says, "The Workshop had gone as far as it could and it had served its purpose. Looking back, it was so difficult for those early pioneers to achieve what they did." Ray cites film composer Tristram Cary: "He was making electronic music in his home studio in the '50s - building his own gear too. He'd get stuck halfway through a composition, then have to get out his soldering iron and build some new machine, just so he could finish the track! By comparison, it's so easy to make electronic music today. But that means it's even easier to produce rubbish!"
Ray White's web site contains the most detailed account of the Radiophonic Workshop and its equipment: http://whitefiles.org/rws/index.htm.
Better Late Than Nedder
My own three months in the Radiophonic Workshop in 1988 were spent in Malcolm Clarke's Studio C, which was at the end of a short corridor running past Dick Mills' Studio D. I was covering for Malcolm, who was off sick, so I never got to know him (Malcolm died in 2003). Dick's approach to sound work was extremely practical and no-nonsense: his small studio was brightly lit with fluorescent tubes and resembled a laboratory. Malcolm's studio, on the other hand, was dark and moody; decorated entirely in red, at his insistence (something to do with the primal nature of creativity, apparently). Some witty technician had installed a tie-line box on Malcolm's studio wall; it included a dummy jack socket embossed with the words Fine Art Output.
One morning, Dick showed me his party trick. "Have you ever seen this before?" he chirped, producing a full 10-inch NAB spool of quarter-inch tape. In the centre of the hefty aluminium spool was a large circular hole, with three more sharp indents. Holding the spool balanced on the flat of his left hand, he deftly laced the tape into a Studer A80, winding it onto an empty take-up spool. He jabbed a button and put the Studer into fast-forward. The Studer is a huge, heavy beast of a machine, mounted flat on its back in a wheeled caddy. The enormous size of its reel motors means that 'fast forward' is terrifyingly fast. As the machine whizzed into action, Dick gently patted the full NAB reel into the air and kept patting to make it hover just above his hand as it spun faster and faster. As the spool emptied, it began spinning even faster still. "Now the tricky bit!" shouted Dick above the whooshing and whirring sounds that rose steadily in pitch. The tape had almost all come off the spool; it was spinning dangerously fast already. The last bit of tape came off and whipped the spool like a top. With that, Dick tossed the reel up into the air above his head, then suddenly clapped his hands together and caught the empty spool between them. The spinning and the noise immediately stopped. "You do have to be careful not to catch your fingers," he said.
Finally, an opportunity to work with Dick Mills came with a radio sci-fi show for BBC Schools called Slambash Wangs Of A Compo Gormer. Dick was to make the sound effects and I was to start with the music and make some effects if I had the time. Eventually, schedules slipped and all I managed was a signature tune. One of the effects was the sound of 'a galloping Nedder'. A 'Nedder' was a six-legged horse, in the alien world in which the series was set, and Dick and I agreed that whoever had some free time first would make the Nedder effects. I kept thinking of complex and sophisticated ways to do this, most of them involving samplers and/or coconut shells.
One day I saw Dick as I passed his studio. "I've done the Nedder," he said, and proceeded to play me it. It was perfect — exactly like a six-legged horse.
"How did you do it?" I asked. "Samples? Library discs?"
Dick reached out to his bench and picked up an empty plastic cassette box. He held it close to my ear, then rapidly drummed his fingers on it.
"Voila!" he said. "There goes a Nedder!"

The New Atlantis
"Wee have also Sound-Houses" became the Radiophonic Workshop's motto. Taken from The New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, it was rediscovered by Daphne Oram, and for many years was pinned to the Workshop's office wall. It is an extraordinary piece of writing, seemingly a vision of some recording studio of the future; yet, incredibly, it was written in 1624.
"Wee have also Sound-Houses, wher wee practise and demonstrate all Sounds, and their Generation. Wee have Harmonies which you have not, of Quarter-Sounds and lesser Slides of Sounds. Diverse Instruments of Musick likewise to you unknowne, some sweeter than any you have; Together with Bells and Rings that are dainty and sweet. Wee represent Small Sounds as Great and Deepe; Likewise Great Sounds, Extenuate and Sharpe; Wee make diverse Tremblings and Warblings of Sounds, which in their Originall are Entire. Wee represent and imitate all Articulate Sounds and Letters, and the Voices and Notes of Beasts and Birds. Wee have certaine Helps, which sett to the Eare doe further the Hearing greatly. Wee have also diverse Strange and Artificiall Eccho's, Reflecting the Voice many times, and as it were Tossing it; And some that give back the Voice Lowder then it came, some Shriller, and some Deeper; Yea, some rendring the Voice, Differing in the Letters or Articulate Sound, from that they receyve. Wee have also meanes to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines, and Distances."

Recording The Doctor Who Theme
"We got a phone call from Verity Lambert, the first Doctor Who producer," says Dick Mills. "She said she had a little sci-fi series that would only run to six episodes, but she'd like some special electronic effects. So me and Delia went along to Ealing for a meeting with her, and we said we could do the effects, but we could probably help out with a signature tune as well, as we'd just been working with Ron Grainer — a composer who was coming quite into vogue (he'd done themes for Steptoe and other shows). So Ron was hired to write the sig, and us to record it. Ron had originally come to us first, so we were returning the favour. We'd done a TV show called Giants of Steam and Ron had got us to make loops of train effects and process them to different tempos for his musicians to play along to. He had great confidence in us — for Doctor Who, he just handed Delia one foolscap sheet of manuscript paper and said off you go! Then he cleared off to Portugal for a fortnight — he said it was for the sake of his health"
So how was the theme recorded? "Well, we started with the bass line. You know those 19-inch jack-bay panels? You could get blank panels too, to fill in between them. They were slightly flexible, so Delia found one that made a good musical twang, and played it with her thumb. We recorded it then vari-speeded up and down to different pitches, copied them across to another tape recorder, then made hundreds of measured tape edits to give it the rhythm."
And what was the main tune played on? Was it some early synthesizer? "No," says Dick, "it was just a load of oscillators — signal generators — that someone had connected to a little keyboard, one for each note. Again, we had to make lots of tape edits."
But what about that distinctive portamento? How could you bend the notes like that without a synth? Dick sighs: "Well you just twiddled the frequency knob, of course — how else? It was all done with actual knob-twiddling then — there was no other way! We did it in lots of little pieces, then joined all the bits of tape together."
Eventually, after some pre-mixing, the elements of the entire composition existed on three separate reels of tape, which had to be run somehow together in sync. "Crash-sync'ing the tape recorders was Delia's speciality," says Dick. "We had three big Phillips machines and she could get them all to run exactly together. She'd do: one, two, three, go! — start all three machines, then tweak until they were exactly in sync, just like multitrack. But with Doctor Who we had a bum note somewhere and couldn't find it! It wasn't that a note was out of tune — there was just one little piece of tape too many, and it made the whole thing go out of sync. Eventually, after trying for ages, we completely unwound the three rolls of tape and ran them all side by side for miles — all the way down the big long corridor in Maida Vale. We compared all three, matching the edits, and eventually found the point where one tape got a bit longer. When we took that splice out it was back in sync, so we could mix it all down."
Ron Grainer returned from his holiday and famously asked if it was the same piece of music that he'd written. The theme was an instant success, as was the programme. But success brought its own problems, as Dick remembers. "The trouble was, because it was a hit show, every producer wanted to put their stamp on it, so they'd ask us to record another version. We did loads and no-one ever liked them. One was laboriously done on the Delaware. The sounds were great, but no-one liked it. I remember Delia did one version herself, where there was very heavy tape echo on the rhythm that gave it a new and different groove. The first time it was played in a dub all the technicians complained. 'Oh no — what's wrong with that?' they all said. 'Let's have the old one back!' And we also had to make a 45-second version when the show got popular. Anyone who's worked in TV music knows how difficult it is to turn a 30-second sig tune into a 45 — it's a very unnatural thing to do, musically."
As a footnote, there is still a difference of opinion on how the Doctor Who bass sound was created, 45 years ago. Dick Mills remembers Delia twanging a blanking panel in a rack, while Mark Ayres offered two versions — a plucked string and a rubber band (he heard both from Delia!). Peter Howell, meanwhile, told me: "The bass twang was a plucked bass string on a home-made electric pickup device (a piece of wood with a string on it). That sound appears on several early Workshop recordings."

The Voice Of The Daleks
One of the most famous Radiophonic Workshop effects was the voice of the Daleks in Doctor Who, which was created by Dick Mills and Brian Hodgson. "We used a ring modulator," explains Dick, "the old-fashioned type, with two centre-tapped transformers and four diodes. Same as a bridge rectifier. They were 'improved' years later with a transformerless design, but the old ones could be distorted better. We spent a long time finding the right frequency to modulate the voice with, and eventually settled on 30 Hertz. But it's not as simple as all that, because they needed the actor who did the Dalek voice to perform live as they filmed. We set them up with a ring modulator in the studio (which they eventually lost!) and provided a reel of tape with a 30Hz tone on it. They'd run the tape, the actor spoke into a mic, both went through the ring modulator, and it sounded like a Dalek.
"But if the tape was supposed to run at, say, seven and a half inches per second, they'd sometimes run it at 15ips by mistake, or at three and three quarters. So that's why, for all you Doctor Who anoraks, the Dalek voices are slightly different in some episodes — if so, it was a mistake! I did other experiments with modifying the tape containing the tone — distressing it and removing bits of the oxide. It was a good effect, but was never used."

The Radiophonic Workshop's Greatest Hits
When asked for a discography of the best ever Radiophonic Workshop releases, Mark Ayres came up with his top seven 'in no particular order'.
BBC Radiophonic Music (aka 'the Pink Album')
Early Radiophonic wonderfulness from Delia Derbyshire, David Cain and John Baker. Originally released as a mono vinyl album in 1971, catalogue no. REC 25M; now also on CD (BBC REC25MCD), remastered with two extra tracks.

The Radiophonic Workshop

Compilation of material from the early '70s, released as a stereo LP (REC 196) in 1975; remastered CD (BBC REC196CD) includes two additional tracks.

21

Don't be put off by the terrible birthday-cake cover, this is a quality compilation of material from the Workshop's first 21 years. Released as a stereo LP (REC 354) in 1979.

Fourth Dimension

Theme and test-card music from Paddy Kingsland. The Workshop goes lounge. Stereo LP (RED 93S) from 1973.

Through A Glass Darkly

Peter Howell's solo album from 1978 (stereo LP, catalogue number REC 307). Side one is 'a lyrical adventure' (ie. one long track, done 'after hours' for the fun of it). Side two is comprised of shorter tracks, including Peter's classic The Astronauts.

Doctor Who At The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Volume One: The Early Years

CD compilation of Doctor Who music and sounds from the '60s. Originally released by BBC Music, later re-released on the Grey Area sub-label of Mute.

Doctor Who At The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Volume Two: New Beginnings

Continuing from Volume One, this dives into the '70s. Includes Malcolm Clarke's music for the 1972 story The Sea Devils. In effect: 43 minutes of Malcolm fighting with the Delaware. The jury is out as to who won.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr08/articles/radiophonic.htm

Fumio Miyashta ** Far East Family Band (1979)

2009-01-22T06:23:00.000-08:00

temptatio de evol te - abre ojos

2009-01-14T14:07:00.000-08:00

temptatio de evol te - abre ojos from abre ojos on Vimeo.">

Captain Beefheart's Ten Commandments For Guitarists

2009-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

1. LISTEN TO THE BIRDS...That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.
2. YOUR GUITAR IS NOT REALLY A GUITAR...Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.
3. PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A BUSH...Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.
4. WALK WITH THE DEVIL...Old delta blues players referred to amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts demons and devils. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
5. IF YOU'RE GUILTY OF THINKING, YOU'RE OUT...If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.
6. NEVER POINT YOUR GUITAR AT ANYONE...Your instrument has more power than lightning. Just hit a big chord, then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.
7. ALWAYS CARRY YOUR CHURCH KEY...You must carry your key and use it when called upon. That's your part of the bargain. Like One String Sam. He was a Detroit street musician in the fifties who played a homemade instrument. His song "I Need A Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another church key holder is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty making you want to look up her dress to see how he's doing it.
8. DON'T WIPE THE SWEAT OFF YOUR INSTRUMENT...You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.
9. KEEP YOUR GUITAR IN A DARK PLACE...When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure to put a saucer of water in with it.
10. YOU GOTTA HAVE A HOOD FOR YOUR ENGINE...Wear a hat when you play and keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a wet paper towel around it to make it grow.

Mosaic - Norman McLaren - 1965

2008-12-12T06:29:00.000-08:00

Music: The Electronic Edge 1976

2008-12-12T06:26:00.000-08:00

La Prisonnière: Dream sequence

2008-12-11T07:16:00.000-08:00

Lillian Schwartz - UFO's (1971)

2008-12-01T08:35:00.000-08:00

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Music by Emmanuel Ghent. "UFO'S proves that computer animation--once a rickety and gimmicky device--is now progressing to the state of an art. The complexity of design and movement, the speed and rhythm, the richness of form and motion, coupled with stroboscopic effects is unsettling. Even more ominously, while design and action are programmed by humans, the 'result' in any particular sequence is neither entirely predictable ... being created at a rate faster and in concatenations more complex than eye and mind can follow or initiate." - Amos Vogel, Village Voice. Awards: Ann Arbor-1971; International award-Oberhausen, 1972; 2nd Los Angeles International Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art collection; Commissioned by AT&T. (3 min.) (3 min.)

Lillian Schwartz's Pixillation (1970)

2008-12-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

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With computer-produced images and Moog-synthesized sound Pixillation is in a sense an introduction to the electronics lab. But its forms are always handsome, its colors bright and appealing, its rhythms complex and inventive." - Roger Greenspun, N. Y. Times. Golden Eagle-Cine 1971. Moog sound by Gershon Kingsley; Version III: pulls the viewer into a primal experience. Awards:Red Ribbon Award for Special Effects from The National Academy of Television, Arts & Sciences; The Smithsonian Institution and The United States Department of Commerce, Travel Services for Man & His World at the Montreal Expo, '71; collection The Museum of Modern Art. Commissioned by AT&T. (4 min.)

Lillian Schwartz-The Artist and the Computer pt. 2

2008-12-01T08:28:00.001-08:00

Lillian Schwartz-The Artist and the Computer pt.1

2008-12-01T07:13:00.001-08:00

1976 documentary about Lillian Schwartz's work with computers and features excerpts from several of her films. ">

L’Underground musical en France

2008-11-26T08:46:00.000-08:00

Climax de la contestation généralisée, Mai 68 fait vaciller les instances politiques françaises et remet en question l’ordre social hérité du passé. Paradoxalement, la chanson française, la « variété », maintient son écrasante domination médiatique. Cette chape de plomb ne laisse que peu de place au développement d’un rock français qui ne soit pas calqué sur les modèles anglo-saxons. Autant par nécessité que par choix, l’expérimentation musicale en France prend le maquis, entre en résistance. Des groupes s’inspirent du rock psychédélique, de la tradition de la chanson française ou encore du free jazz. Tous affichent des pratiques fortement revendicatives, libertaires, expérimentales. Ils répondent aux doux noms de Red Noise, Barricade, Komintern, Crium Delirium, Maajun, Lard Free, Camizole, Etron Fou Leloublan… Ils ne se résignent pas aux contraintes d’un système capitaliste qui n’aura finalement pas été renversé. Beaucoup refuseront même d’enregistrer des disques pour ne pas se fourvoyer. Leurs musiques sont « bizarres » et déroutantes, pas vraiment « rock », se soustrayant à toutes tentatives d’étiquetage et de mise en boîte. Il ne s’agit surtout pas ici d’en faire le défrichage, tâche assassine, mais d’en révéler toute la fertilité.
Né en 1973 à Vitré, Éric Deshayes vit près de Rennes, d’où il gère le site internet Néosphères, dédié au rock et aux musiques actuelles. Il a publié aux éditions le mot et le reste, Au-delà du rock, la vague planante, électronique et expérimentale allemande des années 70.
Né en 1950, Dominique Grimaud vit dans la banlieue parisienne. Musicien dans les années soixante-dix avec Camizole, dans les années quatre-vingt avec Vidéo-Aventures et aujourdhui en solo. Également chroniqueur musical, il a été dans les années quatre-vingt et quatre-vingt-dix collaborateur des revues Notes et Revue & Corrigée. Aujourd’hui, il dirige une collection discographique Les Zut-O-Pistes dédiée à l’édition d’archives musicales.

Parution : 19/11/2008

23.00 euros

I∆O FESTIVAL - BORDEAUX - CAPC

2008-11-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

IAO Festival ((( (( (∞) )) ))) Psychedel-yah Festival Concerts, projections, performances 28, 29, 30 novembre 2008 CAPC musée d'art contemporain www.myspace.com/iaofestival

http://radiognomevisible.blogspot.com/

Le CAPC et Corner présentent une proposition de ali_fib, projections par Monoquini. En partenariat avec novart Bordeaux.

Vendredi 28 novembre Turzi (Fr) + Tim Blake (UK) Principles Of Geometry (Fr) Pilooski (Fr) Psychic Ills (USA) Endless Boogie (USA) Expo '70 (USA) Feedback 66 (Fr) 18:00-01:00. 15 euros. Pass 3 jours : 30 euros

Samedi 29 novembre Spectrum - Sonic Boom (UK) The Telescopes (UK) D*I*R*T*Y Sound System (Fr) Stellar OM Source (NL) Black Liquid Death (Fr) Arp (USA) Sylvester Anfang II (Be) Heatsick (Ger) The Skaters (USA) 17:00-03:00. 15 euros. Pass 3 jours : 30 euros

Dimanche 30 novembre Ame Son (Fr) Gavin Russom (Ger) Reines d'Angleterre (feat. Ghédalia Tazartès + él-g + jo) (Fr) Steve Gunn (USA) Ben Russell + Joe Grimm (USA) The Family Elan (UK) Ruralfaune Collective (Fr) 16:00-23:00. 10 euros. Pass 3 jours : 30 euros

+ Performances : New Crium Delirium Coyote Circus (Fr). Projections : François Decourbe + Doris Rützel, (ex-Open Light, Fr), Androïde Light Show (Fr), Monoquini (Fr). Films : Serge Bard, Robert Frerck, Ron Rice, Jeffrey Scher, John Smith, James Whitney, Carte blanche à Ben Russell…

Faust & Koll the Polar Bear 1971

2008-11-07T03:00:00.000-08:00

URSULA BORGNER

2008-11-05T03:05:00.001-08:00

Recordings 1968 - 1988 Faitiche ELECTRONIC

This is the debut release on jan jelinek’s label faitiche : a collection of unheard electronic experiments from an unlikely source. ursula bogner was a pharmacist, wife and mother, and she was obsessed with electronic music - an obsession that drove her to build her own studio for extensive recording and experimentation. Over 20 years, she dabbled in many different styles, from filter modulations, tuba tweaking, bass anthems, looping experiments, synth-pulse symphonies, to rhythmic patterns trapped in echo chambers. In the late 1960s, Bogner started to record her own music on reel-to-reel tapes. This album covers a fairly short period of her creative career and is an exhilarating find from a truly undiscovered electronic artist.

STORY AND SOUNDS HERE / http://www.faitiche.de/catalog1_en.html

German Oak: The Third Reich (1972)

2008-10-23T02:31:00.001-07:00

Koyaanisqatsi - Final Part

2008-10-17T07:34:00.001-07:00

Brigitte Fontaine　-　Comme à la radio 1969

2008-10-17T07:32:00.001-07:00