In the late '50s, as the BBC's ever-popular radio plays started getting bleaker, more psychologically probing, and outright stranger, the corporation reluctantly set up a "Radiophonic Workshop" to produce electronic sound effects, jingles, and music cues. First released in 1971 and 1975, these reissued Workshop compilations provide a neat summation of the outfit's heyday and will school anyone who thinks of its output as mere "Dr. Who music."
Radiophonic Music is haunted by the towering presences of John Baker and Delia Derbyshire. Baker, a classical and jazz man, used the tape technology available in the '60s to make gorgeous percussive melodies similar to Renaissance or Baroque music. Derbyshire was an artsy geek who spoke and moved like a posh schoolteacher but made some of the weirdest music ever broadcast, often by banging on a metal lampshade and messing with the soundwaves. They left the workshop in the early '70s, just as Moog's synthesizer superseded their crafty, homemade sounds.
The second collection focuses on the synth era, a period when these public-television soundtracks were shaping the impressionable brains of Aphex Twin and a legion of toddlers who went on to create the electronica revolution of the '90s. Ephemeral tracks that began life as an approximation of the sounds of nightmares and nervous breakdowns (and were condemned by some annoyed listeners as the sounds of "an Orwellian prison") are here at last, deservedly revered as a very British — dig that playful sadness! — futuristic folk art.
