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2CD
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YOUNGAM 003CD
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2CD version. Daphne Oram, founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, died in 2003 leaving a colossal archive of reel-to-reel tapes and documents behind. This important collection of material eventually made its way to Goldsmiths College, London, who have been administering it on behalf of the Daphne Oram Trust for the last few years. The collection holds over 400 tapes made by Oram during her lifetime, and 211 of those have been archived and catalogued by the college so far. The Daphne Oram Tapes: Volume One is the result of almost two years spent trawling through the archive in an attempt to piece together a coherent document of one of the most pioneering and genuinely experimental characters in electronic music history. Although some of Oram's recordings have surfaced on the Oramics compilation (YOUNGAM 001LP), this compilation reveals a complex, dark and sometimes disturbing body of work which has, until now, been partially obscured by the more recognizable Radiophonic bleeps and whirrs the Workshop is best known for. This first volume focuses on Oram's love of experimental forms, of musique concrète, of the science and mystery of sound and composition. It comes at a time when her work is only just starting to gain wider acknowledgment in scholarly as well as popular circles. The "Oramics" machine (the first electronic musical instrument in history to be designed and built by a woman) has gone on display at the Science Museum in London, an important step in what will no doubt be a sustained effort to assert Oram's rightful position as one of the most important figures in modern music. Working through the archive has been a life-changing experience, revealing a wealth of musical treasures that include recordings and sound effects made for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Jack Clayton's The Innocents, all the way through to field recordings made in Africa. This first volume, put together with the help of Goldsmiths and Daphne's family, is the first in a planned series that will, for the first time, make Oram's most important and personal recordings available for public consumption. The audio has been carefully mastered and cut by Lupo at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Deluxe 2CD edition comes in a 6-panel oversized digipak.
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4LP
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YOUNGAM 001LP
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2019 repress edition. Originally released in 2010. Deluxe clear four-LP edition, 155 minutes/eight sides of vinyl mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering and housed in a heavyweight, 300gm gatefold sleeve featuring rare archival photographs. This hugely influential, definitive collection from electronic music pioneer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram, has been out of print on vinyl since 2013 and is now thankfully available again via Modern Love side-label, Young Americans. Throughout her life, Oram was a wildly original musician, inventor and theorist who refused to bow to convention. While Delia Derbyshire had more or less become a household name, it was only when Clive Graham compiled Oramics for a CD release in 2007 that Daphne's legacy started to extend beyond the fringes. In the intervening years (aided by the work of the Daphne Oram Trust and Oram's archive at Goldsmith's in London) there have been countless articles, features, a play, an exhibition at the science museum and even a creative arts building and several record labels and arts awards named in Daphne's honor -- going some way to restore her place as a recognized pioneer of electronic music. To recap, 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 also cited as the first woman 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. She was also a prolific writer and lecturer on electronic music and studio techniques, developing concepts of spatial sound years before terms like "spatial sound" were even used. Despite her considerable and historic list of achievements, Oram's life and work remained largely unknown by the wider public for many years until Clive Graham compiled this set. Spanning 44 tracks, it demonstrates Oram's work as some of the most varied and groundbreaking electronic music ever made. As opposed to so much of the Radiophonic-era material that has surfaced over the last few decades, Oram's work is often characterized by a much more layered and introspective quality, offsetting playful interludes and commercial recordings with beautiful, immersive pieces like the breathtaking "Pulse Persephone" and "Bird of Parallax" -- highly atmospheric and experimental variants of musique concrète and tape music that still take our breath away 45 years later. It's impossible to over-emphasize the importance and influence of the material compiled on Oramics, a set that should be considered compulsory listening for anyone with even just a passing interest in electronic music.
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