the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

jambo

slip inside my schlafsack
Vorhaus / White Noise is playing at ATP apparently.

"Tracks from "An Electric Storm" like "Firebird" and the incredibly spooky "The Visitation", now being played in a 13-minute techno dance remix version"

Eurgh, *shudders*. These sorts of things rarely work out well.
 
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jonny mugwump

exotic pylon
that first White Nosie album works so well because of it being a collaboration between Vorhaus, Derbyshire and Hodgson. All other White Noise is just solo Vorhaus and the very little i've heard is not good at all.

The Oramics CD that came out on Paradigm is an excellent double set of Workshop founder Daphne Oram's solo work. Trunk released the 2 John Baker comps this year and The Tomorrow People which is a fucking brilliant Derbyshire TV soundtrack. Oram also did the sound design for the one of the best ghost movies ever made The Innocents and Derbyshire and Hodgson did a soundtrack for the interesting but very flawed Legend Of Hell House.

I just reviewed the reissues here.

Finally, Monster Bobby- i guess you're aware of the ongoing digitisation of Oram's work at Goldsmiths and Derbyshire's at Manchester University (or Met- not sure which).

If you write to the respective professors, they will give you full access- i'm currently attempting to put a radio programme together about it...

Hope some of this helps.
 

jambo

slip inside my schlafsack
Pleased to see the thread title has been fixed. ;)

Another woskshop related item - The Stone Tape (1972).

Music and sound effects by Desmond Briscoe.

The Stone Tape

A British electronics research team try to analyse a ghost.

Commissioned as "a ghost story for Christmas", this Nigel Kneale script is one of the masterpieces of genre television. It's a genuine alliance of mind-stretching science fiction concepts with the suspense mechanisms of horror.

An electronics company buys up a derelict country house as a research centre to develop new recording media. The project co-ordinator (Michael Bryant) discovers that a particular room needed for computer storage has not been made ready because the workmen refuse to go into it.

A sensitive computer programmer (Jane Asher) sees the ghost of a terrified 19th-century servant girl. Bryant decides to treat the haunting as a set of data that can be analysed with all the scientific equipment at the company's disposal.

As the rational scientists dissect the phenomena, the instinctive Asher decides that something more frightening and much older lies beneath the Victorian spook and is drawn into a tragic finish.

Intensely acted, the play carries over the themes of Kneale's work on Quatermass and the Pit, pitting science against the supernatural and discovering that an explanation doesn't always mean an end to the terror.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mysciencefictionlife/A17530607

 

jonny mugwump

exotic pylon
oh yeah yeah yeah- The Stone Tape is an absolutely incredible piece f TV and such an incredible piece of twisted thinking, really original and i SO want to say why but it would spoil the kind-of-ending and everybody has to watch it.
 

michael

Bring out the vacuum
I watched The Stone Tape last month. Was really taken by that gloomy plodding theme... it reminds me of Microstoria, both in tone and in the way it's a strange blend of tuneful and burbly / wobbly / not-in-a-tempered-scale.

I thought the actual movie (television play?) was a bit lame. Didn't find the concepts that inventive, thought the plotting was really amateur and that whole "trained thespians, us" delivery really offputting.

It does have absolutely brutal shifts in volume, which is something I always like about older movies / TV. :)
 

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
that first White Nosie album works so well because of it being a collaboration between Vorhaus, Derbyshire and Hodgson. All other White Noise is just solo Vorhaus and the very little i've heard is not good at all.

Yeah, this is entirely true. An Electric Storm is fantastic, despite/because of the weirdness of the vocals.

Is anyone else BBC Radiophonic'd out yet? I like a lot of that music a fair bit, but there's rarely much interesting narrative structure to it really, because it's subsumed to the purposes of the visuals, generally.

I can sometimes get lost in those little cuticles of sound, but the spell some passes.
 

massrock

Well-known member
Holy shit.

David Vorhaus demonstrates the MANIAC sequencer and Kaleidophon.

Check the VCS3 digeridoo acid squelching at 2:30!

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annex

New member
David Vorhaus demonstrates the MANIAC sequencer and Kaleidophon.

Check the VCS3 digeridoo acid squelching at 2:30!

thanks for that, fascinating stuff!
i quite like Vorhaus' follow-up albums Whitenoise 2 & 3, but they certainly are very different beasts from Electric Storm. he also made a few semi-interesting library albums for KPM and De Wolfe in the 80s, though by that time he was obsessed with the Fairlight CMI.
 

massrock

Well-known member
Sampling, yes.

Interesting what he says about synthesizer sounds not being that er, interesting. So it makes sense that he would move into sampling. Of course digital stuff like wavetable, additive and FM synthesis were just around the corner in terms of commercial availability in 1979 as well.
 

mms

sometimes
thanks for that, fascinating stuff!
i quite like Vorhaus' follow-up albums Whitenoise 2 & 3, but they certainly are very different beasts from Electric Storm. he also made a few semi-interesting library albums for KPM and De Wolfe in the 80s, though by that time he was obsessed with the Fairlight CMI.

A guy i worked with about 2 years ago was working with Vorhaus, i think as well that white noise was remastered and re-released no?
whoever said it's rubbish cos of the singers is a smuck and a mook.

This guy ended up getting the sack and the next i heard of him he was in the papers speaking about how he was addicted to nurofen and took 48 a day, which explains alot of his behaviour really.

this is good
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michael

Bring out the vacuum
Yeah, Stone Tape's got some good bits. I mean, it's all stagey and shit and the exposition bits are like HI IT'S EXPOSITION TIME but some of the atmos and the whole attitude of the scientists makes it worth a watch. And the blurring of what constitutes music cues and what's just sound fx is always good.
 

nochexxx

harco pronting
watched it they other day, pleasurable to say the least! love the film quality you get with 70's bbc. further realising how well observed garth marenghe's dark place is!
i felt the part psychic scientist chic character seemed quite familiar

garth_marenghis_darkplace_liz.jpg


i had to laugh at all the shouting that was achieved by the majority of the thespians, felt like i was watching a play rather than a film. the boss character was proper gervais.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"i had to laugh at all the shouting that was achieved by the majority of the thespians, felt like i was watching a play rather than a film. the boss character was proper gervais."
Thespians is right. It seems that unless you had a perfect cut-glass accent you couldn't get on tv in those days. I'm sure that it's just as much who you know these days but at least the accents vary a little.
 
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