Jul 31, 2008

Warp Records present the BBC Radiophonic Workshop?

Delia Derbyshire
A dusty tape among scores stored in an attic has just blown apart the entire history of dance music.

Among the possessions of Delia Derbyshire (pictured), knob twiddler for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, was the recording of an experimental dance piece that simply should not exist.

It sounds like the sort of thing you would expect from Aphex Twin, Massonix or Sabres Of Paradise, yet it was recorded in the late 60s.

As a piece of production well ahead of its time, it has the same woo factor as Pink Floyd's On The Run, or The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows.

And yet it's more advanced than those pieces, as though some beardy electronica fellow is messing about with a TARDIS and not telling us.

"That could be coming out next week on Warp Records," bleeps ex-Orbital man Paul Hartnoll, who, incidentally, did a cracking cover version of the Workshop's Dr Who theme tune.

Decide for yourself - jump to Delia Derbyshire's experimental 'dance' track on this BBC news piece.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That track is a marvellous thing. I was thinking Black Dog? I discovered that you can have different players going at the same time and you can adjust the volumes too - I am currently laying the Hamlet thing over the edgy glitch track.

Literally hours of fun ..

Fat Roland said...

You're right, it is Dogesque. And I thought Black Dog were ahead of their time. Genius idea about multitracking the BBC clips, by the way. And the volumes go up to 11, like Spinal Tap.

Anonymous said...

It is, quite literally, one louder.

Liking the blog a lot.