Forgery League

This post is in honour of Ada Lovelace Day.

A big part of my fascination with electronic music is thanks to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which I was first exposed to as a kid via Tom Baker-era Doctor Who (I’ve written here previously about Delia Derbyshire’s arrangement of the theme) and the original Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series, which creator Douglas Adams conceived of in part as a radio play with the production values of a modern rock album. I learned later that they provided sound effects for The Goon Show and other BBC dramas.

But where did they come from? Who came up with the idea of a room tucked away in the Maida Vale Studios whose express purpose was to birth previously unimaginable sounds?

The answer: Daphne Oram. As a teenager she had become a studio engineer at the BBC, entering the traditionally male domain during the height of WWII. Her duties included balancing sound levels and “shadowing” broadcasts from the Albert Hall during the Blitz, keeping a disc of the same piece synchronized to allow the music to play on even if the concert was interrupted by German bombs.

Later, when audio tape recorders came to the UK, she spent nights hauling the machines together to work on projects before returning them to their various studios in the morning. Excited by the possibilities of tape and electronics as composing tools, she lobbied for a dedicated studio for such experiments, and at last in 1958 the BBC established the Radiophonic Workshop with Daphne Oram as its first studio manager.

It was her hope that the new studio would be a centre for art music, but to her disappointment, the music department regarded the Workshop merely as a source of background music and funny noises. She resigned in 1959, though her work there would be the inspiration for those who followed in her footsteps—and for generations of viewers and listeners who grew up hearing their work.

Meanwhile, Daphne Oram went freelance, setting up a studio, which she called Tower Folly, at a farm in Kent. There, she worked on soundtracks and commercial pieces as well as concert pieces, and began work devising a sound synthesis system which she called “Oramics”. It used patterns on 35mm film to generate and shape sounds—essentially an early method of creating sound graphically. (If you have RealPlayer, the BBC’s tribute has a great audio clip from 1972 of Ms Oram demonstrating her invention.)

She also wrote An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, a playful and eccentric little volume that mingles circuit diagrams, metaphysical musings, electronic music history, and design notes for the Oramics system, which she hopes is a step toward more “humanised” machine interfaces. It’s long out of print, but Dan Pope of the band Gusset has posted a scanned PDF version.

Paradigm Discs have released a two-CD set of Daphne Oram’s work called simply Oramics—the page includes a few downloadable MP3s. Her piece Four Aspects also saw release this year on the Sub Rosa compilation An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, Vol. 2. It’s currently the only piece you’ll find on iTunes. Her commercial pieces are light and blippy, perhaps a little reminiscent of her contemporary Raymond Scott’s, while some of the longer, “serious” pieces are moody and introspective, foreshadowing the ambient music of later decades. Here’s hoping for more re-releases to come.

From the What I Been Listening To department:

For unfathomable reasons, I’ve been hooked on a show called Blue Jam. Aired in the late ‘90s, it was the brainchild of Radio 1 enfant terrible Chris Morris, whose earlier pranks had included a discussion of ludicrous methods to obtain a legal high, and most famously, the “non-announcement” of the death of a still-living cabinet minister. After the latter incident, BBC censors clamped down hard; why they ever let him back through their doors is a mystery.

Blue Jam is a deeply disturbing show, but utterly hilarious. Sketches and monologues drift in and out amid music of all sorts, starting with an always-different introduction delivered by Morris in a sinister monotone (“When thrapping door-knock brings not chums with cakes, but friends of Sweaty Fred, full madding because you failed to sell… welcome in Blue Jam…”) and quickly descending into a nightmarish world of misfits and psychopaths.

Almost every character we meet is unhinged: the doctor who amuses himself by humiliating his patients and prescribing useless treatments; the parents who belong to a baby-fighting ring; the avant-garde artists who disembowel a man and put him in a display case (much in the fashion of the art-murders on David Bowie’s album Outside). Some favorites: Maria, the four-year-old hardened criminal, Rothko the doberman, and the inexplicable club-scene and style roundups from Michael Alexander St John.

Some of the best sketches were spun into a six-episode series on Channel 4 called simply Jam, and lots - probably most - are up on YouTube. I’m almost afraid to link to any, but here’s a typical opening, and a sketch about a television repairman. Browse the Related Videos at your own peril. Expect mayhem, blasphemy, dead babies, dead dogs, sexual deviance and bad language.

UK radio comedy review site radiohaha offers this appreciation of Blue Jam. Torrents of it and other Chris Morris shows are available at the fan site Cook’d and Bomb’d.

I realized the other day why I don’t listen to web-radio, at least for music. I miss the personalities.

Wall-to-wall music with no interruptions is all very good if you want texture, some colour for your mental environment, but if I want texture I usually resort to music that’s already familiar to me. If I’m listening to something new, I want to be able to give it the attention it’s due. I want to know about the music and who created it. (Now, some channels do give you ways of checking what it is you’re listening to, but they involve flipping between listening and reading.) As well, most specialty stations stick to a particular genre or era, and I like to be surprised.

You know who I miss? John Peel. And David Wisdom’s Nightlines. Both of them played a crazy range of music - in an hour of Peel’s show you might hear punk, happy hardcore, indie rock, grime, ‘60s psychedelia… all intermingled with tracks from his trademark Peel Sessions, recorded by some up-and-coming (or established) band. Nightlines had a gentler flow to it: Canadian indie early on, ranging into electronica, jazz, comedy, and more far-out stuff after midnight. In either case, you never knew quite what you were in for.

But what held it all together was the personalities of the hosts. Peel, who usually hosted the broadcasts from his home, was hilariously witty, self-deprecating, often slightly befuddled by technology - especially when he had to work out of the BBC studios. He was legendary for accidentally playing vinyl at the wrong speed and correcting the matter a minute or two into a song. Bemused by a record label’s championing of “intelligent drum and bass”, he remarked, “Personally I think I should prefer stupid drum and bass.”

David Wisdom was warm, knowledgeable, a keen supporter of Canadian music, prone to giving out CBC Vancouver’s mailing address using a different spelling alphabet every time (“V as in vehement - six - B as in barnacle…”) Over the course of Nightlines’ run he worked his way through his collection of 45s playing one single by each artist, ten per weekend, in alphabetical order (it took nearly a decade).

And he involved the audience: he regularly played theme tunes for the show recorded and sent in by fans. He took requests via an answering machine, but always asked an offbeat “skill-testing question”. Over time, he built up a contingent of regular listeners, until it felt like you were part of a community just by listening. Some even made the leap to programming an “Hour of Power”, an hour of music and words selected by a listener - and sometimes co-hosted by that listener, if they were in the area. “Co-creation”? “User-generated content”? David was there twenty years ago.

Interesting to compare Brave New Waves, the other late-night Radio 2 music show - which has now been cancelled as well, sadly. Patti Schmidt, and Brent Bambury before her, were cool… maybe a little too cool. They wouldn’t go two songs without coming on and telling you all about the band and the label - which I loved, especially in the pre-Internet era. But BNW always felt like such a serious show, a newsmagazine more than a comfy night in someone’s living room listening to tunes.

Peel died in 2004, leaving behind a great musical legacy. David Wisdom is very much alive and currently hosts something called Pearls of Wisdom, which is fun but far too short, with much more of a light Radio Two format…

Every once in a while I stumble across a radio show with a DJ who shows the same sort of love for the music, who gets into it and tells you all about this artist or that album… but usually they’re genre shows: the best blues, the best jazz, world music, classic rock. I want something that will expose me to crazy new music, unclassifiable music, music that time has forgotten. And I want the warmth of real human voices, connecting me to a community of listeners, reminding me that I’m not just listening to a playlist cooked up by a machine… that these songs matter.

In this crazy cross-connected Internet age, I’m sure there’s something out there. Know any good ones?

With all the ruckus surrounding the return of Doctor Who, I got to thinking about that theme music.

The classic rendition, of course, is by the late Delia Derbyshire - now spoken of in hushed tones by electronic music and science fiction geeks - recorded in pre-synthesizer days using test-tone oscillators and splicing tape. Built up note by note, its phrases are all individually shaped, each note with a unique timbre and tuning - like that gorgeous detuned note right at the beginning: wooo-waaa...

(For the full story, see Mark Ayre’s history of the theme.)

You just don’t get that kind of richness and character playing a typical synthesizer, not without a comparable amount of hair-pulling and sweat. Having a keyboard with all the notes right there at your fingertips, properly in tune and identical from one to the next, makes the playing easier, but not shaping the nuances of the sound. Peter Howell did manage a gripping remake of the theme for the 1980 series (according to legend, using every piece of equipment in the Radiophonic Workshop to do it), but it was all downhill from there.

For the new series, according to composer Murray Gold, the production team had originally intended to use the original arrangement - but it didn’t “sit right” with the new titles and the general feel of the new show. So they opted for something of a remix, using Derbyshire’s melody but a new orchestral backing. From the snippets I’ve heard, it’s certainly a step up from the late-‘80s versions, but still…

When I read that I started to think: surely, with today’s instruments, you could pull off a unique version that’s just as nuanced and hopefully as thrilling as the original, if you were willing to put the time into perfecting it. But no one has, that I’ve yet heard. I know Orbital gave it a half-decent shot, but dammitall, their version was a straight 4/4 dance number which - I’m sorry - is just not right. *twitch*

So I’ve started it as an occasional project: creating a better cover version. I’ll post it if it comes to fruition, but it may take a while to stew.