Daphne Oram - Oramics

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release

5...according to our Ant on Thu 01 Jul, 2010.

This is a very special treat for fans of early electronic music. These tracks have been kicking around on CD for a while but until now have never before been available on vinyl. This lady is basically the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop yet for some reason her work is lesser known than Delia Derbyshire and co., which is unbelievable considering she created a ton of astonishing and innovative sounds from 1959 right through to the late 70's. There really are some fantastic sounds on here, clearly ahead of their time. what I like about this set is that there really doesn't appear to be any sort of sequence to the tracks and so it's one of those records you can just dip into now and then just to hear some crazy sounds. what does strike me is how a lot of the sounds a basically functional (i.e. for television/radio etc.), but taken out of that context they just sound plain weird and a lot of them are really quite dark. A total wet dream of a record that is highly recommended. Oh and check out the Lego advert on there!

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Exremely special artefact from the founder
of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
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None of this material has ever been
available on vinyl before
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Oram was the first woman in the world to
direct an electronic music studio, the first
woman to set up a personal studio and the
first woman to design and construct an
electronic musical instrument
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155 minutes / 8 sides of vinyl cut by Lupo
at D&M
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Housed in heavyweight 300gm Gatefold
sleeve featuring rare archive photographs.
Young Americans is a new label operating under
the Modern Love umbrella, here proud to present
an extremely special vinyl pressing of some of the
most important early electronic music ever made.
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
create her abstract soundscapes. Eventually the
BBC bent under her pressure and in studio 13
created the soon-to-be-legendary Radiophonic
Workshop, with Daphne Oram as its first director.
Oram also invented her own ‘drawn-sound’
technique, a process 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.