1 post tagged “bbc radiophonic workshop”
I've seen Sonic Boom a few times, playing with Yo La Tengo, Luna, and (back in the '80s) as part of Spacemen 3. But I've never caught on to his approach as well as I did last week at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop event, where he played solo for half an hour or so.
To be honest, I'd assumed that most of the fuss aboutthe most famous Radiophonic Workshop staff, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, was down to the romantic and slightly kinky idea of these blue-stocking women with horn-rimmed glasses making radically avant-garde music along outlying corridors of the BBC. I still think that's part of it, but now I understand the substance as well. Part of it came out in a panel session before Sonic Boom's set, when someone asked the ex-staff of the Radiophonic Workshop about the arrival of the Fairlight synthesiser in the early '80s. One of the staff suggested that the Fairlight was the beginning of the end for the Workshop, because it marked the point where sound manipulation moved inside the digital black box of the computer. What made the BBC Radiophonic Workshop stand out in its first decades was its work with physical and analogue manipulations of electronic sounds, at a time when this was labour-intensive and there was no other British equivalent to places like IRCAM in France.
It's the analogue approach to electronics that Sonic Boom is continuing, and it makes for a more physical performance style, with more scope for improvisation than you might get with standard digital software. The sequencer programs like Logic Pro encourage you to think in bar lines, but there are no bar lines with the old equipment.
My old friend Jeremy wasn't keen, but I really enjoyed Sonic Boom's performance, and I'll probably be digging out one of the Experimental Audio Research albums of his in the not-too-distant future.
To be honest, I'd assumed that most of the fuss aboutthe most famous Radiophonic Workshop staff, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, was down to the romantic and slightly kinky idea of these blue-stocking women with horn-rimmed glasses making radically avant-garde music along outlying corridors of the BBC. I still think that's part of it, but now I understand the substance as well. Part of it came out in a panel session before Sonic Boom's set, when someone asked the ex-staff of the Radiophonic Workshop about the arrival of the Fairlight synthesiser in the early '80s. One of the staff suggested that the Fairlight was the beginning of the end for the Workshop, because it marked the point where sound manipulation moved inside the digital black box of the computer. What made the BBC Radiophonic Workshop stand out in its first decades was its work with physical and analogue manipulations of electronic sounds, at a time when this was labour-intensive and there was no other British equivalent to places like IRCAM in France.
It's the analogue approach to electronics that Sonic Boom is continuing, and it makes for a more physical performance style, with more scope for improvisation than you might get with standard digital software. The sequencer programs like Logic Pro encourage you to think in bar lines, but there are no bar lines with the old equipment.
My old friend Jeremy wasn't keen, but I really enjoyed Sonic Boom's performance, and I'll probably be digging out one of the Experimental Audio Research albums of his in the not-too-distant future.
