0:00 Intro
3:51 World War 2 and Magnetic Tape
5:31 Pierre Schaffer and the birth of tape editing and musique concrete
7:24 Karlheinz Stockhausen
9:04 The Phillips sound lab, Tom Disvelt and Kid Baltan
11:30 The birth of the Radiophonic workshop
A new kind of video, actually speaking to camera for one and talking about a record I absolutely love and think is very underrated critically. I’m pretty much a first take kind of guy and pretty aware that I’m not making perfect eye contact with the camera. I get better as the series goes on I promise.
So this is basically a 4000 word essay that I wrote regarding the record (which had a profound effect on me as a callow young space cadet).
After reading it to camera I edited some footage to illustrate people and context a little.
lastly I added a soundtrack mainly made of me using the iPad iVSC3 app, a little wobble of the Spring reverb at the beginning and some of Alan Splett’s archive of contact mic recordings mixed in there. I tried to be not too literal in the soundtracking but there are some techniques I felt it was useful to ‘spell out’ in sound terms.
As well as being a bit of a potted prehistory of the precursors to the BBC’s Radiophonic workshop this is groundwork for talking about specific album.
Namely the White Noise’s ‘An Electric Storm’
Released, after 18 months work, in June 1969 it’s perhaps the pinnacle of tape editing as an art form.
Integral to it’s making was Delia Derbyshire, undersung in her lifetime but now rightly regarded as a visionary composer and sound engineer.
As I said the whole deep dive is around 4000 words. This first part covers the early life of Delia Derbyshire as well as how magnetic tape and it’s manipulation freed sound from it’s linear constraints (truth be told there were things going on in Egypt before Pierre Schaeffer and I hope to do an episode on that, those works were performed on wire recorders though, fascinating stuff though, I’ve not included it here because a) it wasn’t magnetic tape and b) it didn’t directly influence others. manipulation of wire recordings became a lost technology, much as tape editing itself became redundant with the easy availability of digital editing in the 1980s.).
Delia Derbyshire is justly deified as an innovator nowadays. One of the true geniuses of late 20th century music. Genius is a word bandied about far too easily. Can we agree what a genius is? Probably not. Certainly from an academic point of view with her degrees in mathematics and music she would be counted as especially gifted by any metric.
But it’s not only this micro level of attention that Derbyshire was capable of, left brain dominant analytical trickery. Her aesthetic senses were highly developed too, she felt the form and format of songs. As a creator even though she made this album with others she was somewhat of an auteur. by this I mean she was able to compose, arrange, play and edit, every part of the process needed for this actually quite complicated piece of music.
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I hear words like psychedelic and Delia Derbyshire and yep of course i am going to sub.
Great stuff.