Oram, Daphne & Andrea Parker

Private Dreams and Public Nightmares

Label: Aperture Country: USA

"Private Dreams and Public Nightmares is a unique concept album which re-works and re-interprets original, unheard sounds from the Daphne Oram archives to create completely new pieces of music. Two of these pieces were performed live by Andrea Parker and Daz Quayle for 'Oramics: The Life and Works of Daphne Oram' at The Royal Festival Hall and for the Short Circuit Festival at The Roundhouse, where they supported the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

The story began in 2008, when Parker was invited to a meeting with Phil Howlett, who was putting together the 'Oramics' event at The Royal Festival Hall. He was looking for an artist who could write and produce an original piece, incorporating some of Daphne Oram's sounds and then perform it live. Having remixed some of the great electronic pioneers in the past and as an idol and inspiration throughout her career, it was the chance Parker had been waiting for.

Shortly after this, four CD's full of Daphne's original sounds dropped through her letterbox. For Parker it was a defining moment. Along with Daphne's numerous recordings were some of the first examples of 'drawn' sounds. This was an entirely new way of making sound, the pioneering concept that paved the way for electronic music as we know it today. These sounds, like Daphne's Oramics machine itself, are part of British musical history and only now are this history and Daphne's legacy starting to be given the recognition they deserve. America had Robert Moog, Britain had Daphne Oram. Both of these pioneers were as important as each other to the future of electronic music, but it was Daphne's unique Britishness that led to her building The Oramics Machine into the empty shell of her own dressing table.

After the performances, the duo wanted to continue re-working and manipulating these sounds to create an entire album, as they hoped Daphne Oram herself may have even done today. Parker arranged to meet with Dr. Mick Grierson, Director of the Daphne Oram Collection at Goldsmiths College and Secretary of the Daphne Oram Trust and, after hearing her ideas, Mick gave them that opportunity. In 2009, Parker became one of the first people to be given unrestricted access to the Daphne Oram Archives, containing photographs, diagrams and hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes.

They soon discovered how descriptive Daphne had been when naming her sounds, calling them things like: 'toothache' and 'rheumatism'. Sounds that literally throbbed and pulsated as their titles suggested.

Hundreds of hours were spent sampling these sounds and carefully treating them through various noise reduction processors. They set out to use some of the less-obvious, unnerving sounds they had found in the archives to explore a different side of Daphne, a darker side, integrating them with sounds from Parker's own archives (made using analogue synthesizers like her arp2600 as well as her 808) and using Quayle's sampling and studio expertise to create the balance. What developed was a deeply personal album, an intense piece of work. Minimal, yet in some pieces over 100 individual sounds were used. Haunting, or itself perhaps... haunted?"-Aperture Records