Oram, Daphne

The Daphne Oram Tapes: Volume One [4 VINYL LPs]

Label: Young Americans Country: UK

"Daphne Oram was the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department she more or less single-handedly created in 1958 camping out at the BBC studios for nights on end splicing tapes and working with various modified machines to carefully arrange her abstract soundscapes. Eventually the BBC bent under her pressure and in studio 13 created the soon-to-be-legendary Radiophonic Workshop, with Oram its first director. Among her countless other achievements, Oram is cited as the first woman ever to design and build an electronic musical instrument, one that worked around the 'drawn-sound' technique whereby strips of 35mm film would be manipulated before being fed into her home-made 'Oramics' machine which would convert and 'read' the film into sound.

Despite her considerable and historic list of achievements, Oram's life and work remain largely unknown by the wider public. As this remarkable 44-track collection shows, however, her work ranks amongst the most varied and pioneering ever made, it's quite incredible to think that this is the first time any of these precious recordings have been available on vinyl. As opposed to so much of the Radiophonic-era material that has surfaced over the last few years, Oram's work is often characterised by a much more layered and introspective quality, offsetting classic playful interludes and commercial recordings with beautiful, immersive pieces like the breathtaking "Pulse Persephone" and "Bird of Parallax" - pieces that simply have no equal in electronic music made at the time.

It would be impossible to over-emphasise the importance and brilliance of this material - it really is compulsory listening for anyone with even just a passing interest in electronic music - her influence can be charted through pretty every musical current shaping the sounds of today."-Young Americans