WOEBOT

Delia and Daphne.

In one of those strange group mind moments a number of Bloggers have been talking about the BBC and Delia Derbyshire. Emerald Daze has been heaping praise on the White Noise LP (a recording I'll confess to never having really enjoyed), Gutterbreakz refers to Derbyshire in heaping scorn upon Paul McCartney and K-Punk has been lamenting the remake of TOTP. Fisher's approach to the Beeb fascinates me, he's always credited it with an aesthetic of it's own. This might seem an unusual approach, assigning a signature to such an enormous amorphous institution, but I think he's right. Beeb product is usually morally responsible, it's also (as Mark once remarked) "homespun." The BBC never manages to be very glamorous. What I like about K-Punk's angle is that in nailing the Beeb, it's easier to identify the gaps in it's mollusc-like grip on the British psyche, easier to "see" it. To add a parallel strand to the discourse Rephlex records have just released a 4x10" collection of music from The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Be like me, buy it.

The single best essay on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is at Elidor, an insanely well-researched piece by Robin Carmody. After a thorough investigation of the Rephlex disc I can confirm Carmody's qualitative observations are positively spot-on. Delia Derbyshire's oevre sails above all other contributors, with John Baker's coming a respectable second place. There is a lightness of touch to Derbyshire's work that amply explains the laurels heaped on her by (amongst others) Sonic Boom. At turns funny, "Door to Door", oblique "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" and tense "Pot au Feu" her music is always both sweetly tuneful and refreshingly "other". Better yet are the tracks Rephlex have grouped on the B-side of her dedicated EP. "Blue Veils And Golden Sands", "The Delian Mode" and "Toward Tomorrow" are vaste darkwave driftworks cut loose from the fabric of late 1960s culture, more charming and sensuous than Stockhausen's blank-eyed zero-kelvin mantras ("Telemusik", "Hymnen" etc) they clearly owe more to Pop than Serialism, without this compromising their integrity, but what Pop? I guess, without wanting to become mired in a fierce debate about sexual politics, hers is a woman's work. It's music you want to bathe in rather than be objectified by, and in that sense it's more modern than the extreme atonality of 60s masculine hair-shirt Avant-Gardism. In fact her music resonates with the period of Post-Techno Electronics, when the glowing embers of the rave are still red in the grate, and before the fiddly encroachments of Modern Electronica in thrall of conceptualism and cowering beneath the legacy of the aforementioned avant-dudes. It's hardly a surprise that Rephlex (home to The Aphex Twin) have put this out.

John Baker's disc is crankier. Baker has fun with textureology, he's not plumbing the depths of the synthesiser like Delia. Duane Eddy twanging ahoy! Tunes tend to be overcompressed with detail, not as in awe of space, though at times the sounds are given room to breathe as on "Accentric" "Brio" or "P.I.G.S" (where a cyborg cello outro it opens up the virtual sonic terrain unexpectedly) and you're left craving more. Inevitably his music is marked by the times, though this isn't always such a bad thing. 50% of the attraction of this music is it's wholly unexpected timbre. If one's used to the invisible colour of the Korg, Casio and Roland these hokey synths sound gourgeously elastic and unfettered, organic even. The attraction of Derbyshire's "Doctor Who Theme" lies surely in it's heathen lollopping echoaic bassline. So loose! So organic! One can see why these old synths are collectible, they're like tickets to another sonic dimension. I believe Carmody makes the same point (with more authority), that the renewed interest in the music is largely to do with it's analogue "freshness."

The problem with this music is precisely that which afflicts Library music, with which it shares the attraction of sonic slinkiness, and which has also been mined to exhaustion by a generation of plunderers bent on feeding their AKAI's new old sounds. It's lacking a purpose. Differing from the ringing cash register of Library music, the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been curated at the behest of the BBC, the closest thing this country has to government-endorsed culture. Publicly incorporated in 1927 (a commercial venture for 5 years) it has been haunted by Sir John Reith's values, a well-intended wish to act "contributing consistently and cumulatively to the intellectual and moral happiness of the community." However owing to it's dependence on a license fee, farmed at the behest of the ruling majority, it's quite easy to view it's role as Number Ten's Nanny. It's colloquially referred to as "Auntie", a moniker resonating with revealing complexities. The true maverick geniuses of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram (more later) and Delia Derbyshire both came at odds with this "official" culture and left, Daphne (who set up the Workshop in 1957) first in the mid sixties, then Delia in 1971.

There are examples of other similar cultural experiments which happened in the shadow of the BBC, most notably, and interestingly also in a space which was opened up by the second world war (when the British Government, through processes such as the distribution of rations, came to act in a wholly Socialistic manner by necessity) was John Grierson's Documentary Film Unit. Indeed the maverick of that collective, Humphrey Jennings, could be seen as the Delia Derbyshire of Documentary film. (Love those Ds!). Also it's worth noting at this point that Government-curated music needn't necessarily be devoid of socio-cultural frisson, for example France's IRCAM experimental audio unit (while also capable of being mothballed) is connected to the rhizome of government beauracracy. I'll have to confess I feel quite strongly on this point, ever since digesting Marshall Berman's wonderful "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air" I've had a suspicion of feudal culture. And that's it; for me the BBC represents the unsightly hangover of pre-modernity, of liege and lief. For all the wonderful contributions it's made (Eastenders innit!) I wish it'd cut itself free from Government.

But how does this affect the integrity of the practitioners of the Radiophonic Workshop? I harbour a suspicion of all institutionalised art. With everyone tripping over themselves to give the unit a posthumous thumb-ups (it shut down in 1998) I'll admit to being deeply unwilling to bestow on it's creations the mantle of "ART," even Delia's exquisite offerings. I'd rather call the free-market, capitalistic, morally-bankrupt shenanigans of Advertising art. This might boil down to a discomfort at the smugness of bourgeois middle-class institutionalised "artists" describing themselves as such, though I don't mind in the least when they call themselves anything else. There's a story which Berman quotes from Baudelaire which perfectly sums this up. Written just before Baudelaire's death, "Loss of A Halo" tells the tale of a poet and an "ordinary man" who bump into eachother in a brothel, to the embarassment of both. The ordinary man who has always cherished an exalted idea of the artist is aghast to find one here:

"What! You here my friend? You in a place like this? You the eater of ambrosia, the drinker of quintessences! I'm amazed!"

The poet explains:

"My friend, you know how terrified I am of horses and vehicles? Well, just now as I was crossing the boulevard in a great hurry, splashing through the mud, in the midst of a moving chaos, with death galloping at me from every side, I made a sudden move, and my halo slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam. I was much too scared to pick it up. I thought it was less unpleasant to lose my insignia than to get my bones broken. Besides I said to myself, every cloud has a silver lining. Now I can walk around incognito, do low things, throw myself into every kind of filth, just like ordinary mortals. So here I am, just as you see me, just like yourself!"

Obviously the central tenet of the parable is the collision of bourgeois self-sanctity with the dynamic thrust of modernism, with the street in essence. Macadam. I think that the only artist is a dethroned artist, and that more often than not institionalised culture works against this, procuring in the individual a self-satisfied "halo" which, within the world as it exists today, just isn't tenable. When I read Sean railing at Upper Middle Class twats with comfortable jobs in the Media I think of this. These are people clinging onto their "halos." (Jesus I'm sounding self-opinionated tonight) It's not as crass as a call to arms for the bedraggled Underemployed (Freelancers) cos many great artists worked to fund their art. Within the field of music, off the top of my head you have Roy Cousins (The Royals) who worked religiously at the Kingston Post Office to fund his reggae recordings, or at the other end of the spectrum John Cage's darling Charles Ives and his enormously successful Insurance Company, his composing hidden in the background. Maybe it's just personal frustration at never quite finding the right niche, but if I ever do get that "wonder job" shoot me in the fucking knees if I tell you I'm an artist.

One character who I was surprised escaped Robin's masterful summary of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was Daphne Oram. Daphne who passed away aged 77 in January of this year to nary a squeak. Clearly the instigator of the entire project, and evidently (like the ladies conducting the buses) a person given enough space by the cultural upheaval of the second world war to sneak into the male-dominated world. Daphne, as we mentioned earlier, tired of the strictures of the BBC early on, in part owing to meetings with both Cage and Stockhausen, and upped-sticks to the Kentish Coast where she worked on an eccentric image-to-sound science of synthesis called "Oramics", eeirly similar to the kind of thing Morton Subotnik has been working on in recent years. If you can see past the gormless strapline: "The Unsung Pioneer of Techno", the obituary (on the BBC's own site!) is touching, especially owing to the comments posted after it, particularly those of Hugh Davies the composer.

Because I'm a freaky crate-digger I even have an Oram record! As I write this I'm enjoying "Three Single Sounds Taken in Canon" from the EP pictured bookending this thinly-disguised rant (you should be able to read the type off the back cover). The 7", from 1962, is orchestrated so sparsely as to function like ultra-minimal morse into the void. These sounds, which must have been impossibly difficult to produce has, once again, share echoes with Stockhausen's "Gesang der Junglinge" of 1956. The latter a hymn for youth, the former "intended for children to enjoy" and which "may lead them into movement of a dancelike character..."

Posted by Woebot at December 6, 2003 10:56 PM