Recently I remarked how little British Electronic music there had been before 1989. I know the Basic Channel boys in Berlin threw away all their old records at the dawn of Acid but I think the growth of British electronic music in those years was maybe more startling. Of course there were the divine brace of Electro-Punk singles which Simon Reynolds highlights in RIUASA and their progeny EBM (via Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire) and Electro-Pop (via The Human League) but I can never see either strand as having a huge cultural impact, they seem peripheral in spite of both uniting to seismic effect in Acid House.
In the United States on the other hand electronics seeped out of the Universities and Laboratories fairly early on and managed to permeate Soul (Tonto/Stevie Wonder/Syreeta), Jazz Funk (Dr.Partick Gleeson/Herbie Hancock) even Folk (Czaajkowski/Buffy Sainte -Marie). Electronic music stayed embedded in Black music flowering later into Electro and House, but it only really grazed the white mainstream despite the endeavors of Donald Buchla and Robert Moog.
Of course the sight of the British IDM hordes celebrating the influence on them of Stockhausen and Pierre Henry was one of sillier scenarios of the mid to late 90s, I suppose owing to the total inappropriateness of the comparison! It was transparent that the much lowlier Jean Michelle-Jarre, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream and Wendy Carlos were the real fonts of much of that music. (shrugs) I don't have a particular problem with that but..... If they'd cared to look under their own noses however, they'd have discovered a microscopic pre-history of British Electronic music and it's that tiny trickle I wanted to examine.
I was so pleased to find this Dennis Smalley record in the racks at Haggle in Islington. I couldn't believe how cheap it was. Dennis is now on the staff at City University in London. There's a little potted history of his career there. Quoting: "He studied with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire and electroacoustic composition with the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris before coming to the UK" It's interesting to notice that he studied in Europe beforehand (just like Tim Souster who we'll come to later) and it kinda strikes to the heart of my point about the way Electronic music never really had much confidence in Britain. This correlates closely with the way until the 1960s Britain trailed behind the continent in Modern Art. We had a succession of our own varieties of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and the Avant-Garde. Even so, something like Wyndham Lewis's Vorticism, even though it could be dismissed as a frail copy of Italy's Futurism, it had it's own very British qualities.
I'd argue that like Vorticism, English Electronic music was hamstrung by its lyricism, gentility and eccentricity. Take "The Pulses of Time" for instance, a collection of three pieces composed between 1974 and 1979. It's never truly challenging or unpleasant in the way continental electro-acoustic music can be, it's an exceptionally pleasant listen with what passes for both pre-Techno rhythmic interludes (Tsk, Stockhausen would never tolerate repetition!) and in the middle of the title track what sounds like a melancholic Irish reel lifted from the Titanic cutting-room floor. What the music describes, unlike the strictly parallel alternate sonic realities of Darmstadt, is a journey or "a trip". Within the strict aesthetic boundaries of Modernism that makes it a failure, British Electronic music always seems to hark back to Romantic music, the fantasias of Mussorgsky and Berlioz or aims to match Britten's spiritual odysseys but it is this failure which gives it a warmth, charm and character.
Trevor Wishart is perhaps the titan of British Electronic music. Again like Smalley his connection to Academia is extremely strong. Smalley's "Pulses of Time" was released by UEA Recordings (University of East Anglia) where he was a lecturer in music at the time**. I know of Universities having their own presses, but that they had record labels caught me off guard. Wishart has been connected to the University of York since the early seventies. In the late sixties and early seventies there was a very good reason for composers interested in electronic music getting into bed with universities, there were hardly any electronic music studios available elsewhere, the BBC operating a closed door policy. In his book "New Perspectives in Music" Roger Sutherland elaborates: "After 1970 electronic studios were established in many academic institutions, including the universities of York, Cardiff, East Anglia, City University and Morley College in London."
I'll admit to having a little trouble squaring Wishart's work, so in tune is it with the LSD-fuelled counter-culture, with orthodox University culture. It's reasonable to assume that the climate in higher education was much more radical. To call Wishart's work "electronic" is slightly misleading given that much of it is given over to collaging found-sound, is thus "electro-acoustic" I suppose, but I'm going to cling to the electronic nomenclature throughout this piece because it is the studio-based treatment and mixing of this sound which qualifies it from plain field recording. "Journey-into-Space" is remarkable for its scale and emptiness. Compare Parmegiani's restless edits to side 2 (of 4) of "J-i-S" in which the sound of a rocket trailing into the distance is streamed for nearly five minutes, one's ears training on its granulations and doppler-ing before suspended tubular bell chimes and bicycle bells draw over it like a mist onto the dunes. At some points the mix is so silent, just the quietest residual machine-hum audible, that one wonder whether the needle is resting in the spin-out groove.
This almost under-worked quality of the piece lends it a wholly charming amateurishness, Wishart's rocket to the moon similar in spirit to the one in the British B-movie of 1963 "The Mouse on The Moon". In just the same way that I described some of the recent as yet unreleased "The Focus Group" work to Julian House as being like tele-porting between dusty attics and garden sheds, the ethereal aspects of all this British Electronic music is tempered by dash-it-all-can't-quite-get-the-wretched-thing-off-the-ground eccentricity. This wholly useless bungling quality to Britishness, familiar to viewers of "Dad's Army", and our ability to recognise it in ourselves is part of what made us great, and its gradual disappearance from our now anodized global culture is a huge shame. Though just listening to the unintentionally hilarious Bloodnok from The Goons-meets-pseudo Nepalese priest intoning on side 3 is enough to bring it all back (a slight digression here, but the naked idiocy of much of the earlier Grime was hewn from the same stone as this, the cleanly "embarrassed-into-muteness" of Dubstep on the other hand sounds like.....)
Wishart's "Red Bird" takes the more serious subject of being the dream of a political prisoner, again it's this almost narrative-like thrust that marks it as British. A single disc its extensive use of Animal and Bird sounds puts it in a similar territory to Basil Kirchin's "Worlds within Worlds" and "Quantum". I suppose "Red Bird" is a less obviously charming record than "Journey Into Space", its seriousness and feverishness mark it apart from other of Wishart's work. "Beach Singularity", if I recall a brass band playing by the seaside, with the ambient sound miked high has a cheery conceptual bent, but it does possess a ragged intensity. "Red Bird" and "Journey-into-Space" are available here on CD.
To ricochet back to the Ghost Box connection, I was hipped to the Desmond Leslie reissue on Trunk by Julian House. This is a truly remarkable collection of Leslie's hitherto unreleased recordings. Leslie himself is a classic British eccentric with an impossibly colorful history. His exploits range from co-authoring "The Flying Saucers have Landed" with legendary American UFO-ologist Adamski to hitting the tabloid headlines for punching Bernard Levin on "That was the week that was", retribution for the critic's scathing review of his wife's one-man show. The "Music of the Future" recordings, which include the legendary "Mercury" and "Death of Satan", are astonishingly enough from the period 1955 to 1959 not unseasonably long after Pierre Schaeffer's "Etude aux chemins de Fer" (1948). Though (again) rough-edged and blessed with an occasionally eccentric sonic palette, these recordings have a quite amazingly taught demeanor and a brutal power all of their own.
In the same way that other British electronic music is either sidled alongside Academia, is tooled up as Library music, is used to augment Sci-fi programming on the TV or Radio but is slotted in anywhere except in the regular commercial arena with the exception of the very extreme fringes of head music, the Leslie recordings were used as backgrounds to Television plays (the ABC Television premiere of Ronald Duncan's "Death of Satan") and to soundtrack underground films ("The Day the Sky Fell In" 1959). I suppose it's a shame that no organ like France's INA-GRM was able to serve as a home to all these strands. It's great that Johnny Trunk has made good his interest in Basil Kirchin's work by releasing this recording. I should like Mr. Trunk to try and reissue Peter Zinovieff's "January Tensions" from 1968, a classic of British Avant-Garde Electronics that has fallen through the cracks.
Trunk have indeed done well by Basil Kirchin. They've released the quite lovely "Abstractions of The Industrial North" record (itself once a Library record on De Wolfe), the never-previously released, and quite exceptional, "Quantum"*** and two EPs of other material with "Charcoal Sketches". However I think it is a shame that the one record he did manage to lob into the headlights of the mainstream, his most important record, hasn't been reissued. I first became aware of "Worlds within Worlds" via David Toop's "World of Echo". One of that book's subtexts was to suggest a spiritual and philosophical motivation of similar sounds. The sound something makes, be it an inanimate object, animals, machinery, music is regarded as the expression of its true nature. Therefore the similarity of sounds re-aligns the material manifestation of things, organising them by their inherent true nature to a cosmic order. Kirchin's work is thick with these sonic analogies: from Evan Parker duetting with howler monkeys to the ghostly fug of slowed-down voices of Autistic children meshing with jungle cacophony.
"Worlds within Worlds" is a very strange record indeed, and it's really owing to the slowing-down effect, imagine everything at 45 being pitched down to 33. Devoid of beats one is presented with gigantic, fascinatingly ugly textures, as though flying low over the pitted surface of an alien planet was visually scrambled with examining a face blighted with acne with a magnifying glass. I guess you could plausibly make an argument for it being the Ur "Screwed-Up" recording****, it's almost as though Kirchin built it at the correct speed and then discovered it was more disorientating to hear slowed-down. Of course it's famous for featuring brief liner notes by Brian Eno, which must have been made just before he set up Discreet, drifting at his most distant point from the mainstream. It's funny how such a slight commentary from Eno carries such a huge cultural significance.
I'd been looking for a copy of this for years when I found it at Beanos in Croydon on my birthday in 2001 for $50. I've no idea exactly why I passed over it, but I do remember listening to it on a particularly terrible deck through a shit pair of headphones with, I dunno Technotronic or Cliff Richard blaring in the background, and not hearing anything but a deafening roar of white noise. It cost quite a bit more to get it this time around online, but I dare say this one is in better nick. On Island records!
I've mentioned this record in the past before, so I'm just going to gloss over it cursorily. Tim Souster was Stockhausen's teaching assistant so that kinda underlines my theory about the central lack of confidence of British Electronic music. Bizarrely one side of this is like third-rate Jazz Funk, the flip more impressive with lots of lovely slippery glissandos. I'd like to take the opportunity here to quickly reflect on the amusingly proper names all these people have: Timothy, Basil, Desmond, Trevor, Dennis, Tristram. Pipe-smokers in slippers to a man.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's output is in such stark contrast to the rest of this stuff. Almost candy-coated as opposed to hair-suited. The succinct cheeky plinky-plonky tracks on this cherished bit of vinyl are almost all non-confrontational, with the exception of John Baker's "Christmas Commercial" (cash tills ring out a carol) and the still depths of Derbyshire's "The Delian Mode". The tone of the Beeb's stuff is very commercial, and it bears strong comparison with the approach Raymond Scott took to electronics in the USA*****. Its legacy to British Techno and IDM has been much more real than any influence of continental Avant-Garde music, largely owing to Delia Derbyshire's Doctor Who theme. However in what is an extremely tiny field, one way or another I've covered practically every single practitioner here, the BBC Radiophonic workshop were gigantic and central.
The Beeb wouldn't let any Johnny on their kit. Only Italian Roberto Gerhard was allowed to use it, which he did to score his "The Anger of Achilles" in 1960, assisted incidentally by Delia. It was this same, slightly uptight, attitude which meant Peter Howell couldn't release the last Ithaca LP, that Delia Debyshire had to leave the fold to record the White Noise LP for Island and that Derbshire teamed up with Brian Hodgson to record the "Electrosonic" LP under the alias Russe for KPM. Again, before the hook of Acid House, all this music tends to disappear into the peripheries.
I'm sure k-punk will be familiar with this vintage TV series. Unfortunately I've not had the pleasure. On first impression the electronics actually come as a mild counterpoint to a gigantic orchestra. However in sections like "Vessels" Cary cuts loose with some mean low-slung bleeps.
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* Cabaret Voltaire's Extended Play EP, Thomas Leer's "Private Plane", Robert Rental's "Paralysis", The Human League's "Being Boiled" and Throbbing Gristle's "United".
** In the same way that in the USA Ilhan Mimaroglu was based at Columbia-Princeton.
*** Thanks Jim Clarke.
**** It and Neu!2
***** See if you can still find the amazing three volume set of stuff that came out on Basta...
