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Delia Derbyshire & the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Last Saturday (May 5th) would have been the 76th birthday of the pioneering electronic musician Delia Derbyshire, a name that may be unfamiliar if you are not my side of 40, British or a bit of a geek.
There is however at least one of her tunes that you will recognise, as Delia was responsible for generating the futuristic bleeps, whooshes and synthetic sounds that combined to make the original Dr. Who Theme, which despite being made 50 years ago in 1963, is well worth a quick listen now, to remind yourself how good it still sounds…
Although credited to Ron Grainer, who wrote the basic melody, it was Delia who after three weeks of hard work recording noises and splicing together bits of magnetic tape, created the sounds and atmosphere that continue to make the tune as memorable today as it was then…
Delia (who sadly died in 2001 of alcoholism related problems, just as renewed interest in her work was beginning to pick up) was a key member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a name synonymous with the sonic and musical experimentation of the 1960′s and 70′s.
Formed in 1958 the Workshop’s original brief was to provide incidental sounds for radio and TV shows although this was quickly expanded and the team (which included Daphne Oram, Brian Hodgson and Paddy Kingsland) was soon creating theme tunes and other impressively futuristic sounds not only for The Doctor but also for The Goon Show, Quatermass & the Pit, Blakes 7 and The Hitchhikers Guide to name just a few.
Each of the members was also a composer in their own right and Delia wrote and recorded many original compositions, one of her most well known (and strangest) of which is Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO-OO from 1967. If you think it sounds odd today, imagine what it sounded like back when everyone looked this….
Delia was also involved in two offshoot groups in the mid 1960′s: the brilliantly named Unit Delta Plus (with Peter Zinovieff, inventor of the first British portable synthesizer the EMS VCS 3) and Kaleidophon (with David Vorhaus), neither of which had great musical success at the time, but both of which have since been the subject of much reassessment by musicians who see in their experimental electronic recordings, the beginnings of today’s digital soundscapes…
There a number of videos on YouTube about Delia & the Radiophonic Workshop, and the ones below I think are the most interesting. It’s fascinating to watch how sounds were created by speeding up and slowing down tapes, playing them backwards and then chopping everything up and making loops…. It must have taken hours and hours to do what any self respecting sampler can do in seconds today…
(I’ve no idea what the ghostly chap in the background is all about…)
There’s also an excellent 1 hour audio mix here put together by Soundhog, which through a mix of spoken word and music, gives a pretty good oversight of what they got up to over in their Maida Vale studio…
As a final aside and if you’re interested in this kind of music like me, I’ve also come across this BBC TV programme from 1979. Called The New Sound of Music and presented by Michael Rodd, it’s a wonder of optimism, science and massively complex technology. I especially enjoyed seeing David Vorhaus in the last section (Part 4) who at about 7.40 mins seemingly invents Goa Trance at least 15 years before anyone knew what to call it…
Truly Impressive…
One final excellent BBC TV programme of related interest can also be found here… (noted more for my records than anything else)
Divine Retribution or Science in action…
When I saw this rather excellent photo in yesterday’s papers, I wondered if I should rethink my position on organised religion…
The bolt of lightning that hit the Dome of St Peters Basilica in Rome not long after the Pope announced he was stepping down, was interpreted by many of the faithful as a sign from their God, quoting Psalm 29 which reminds them that “The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning”…
Indeed…
Meanwhile in the real world, science reminds me that lighting is caused when positively and negatively charged particles within a cloud separate to the top and bottom respectively, thereby creating a build up of charge that is best neutralised via contact with, amongst other things, the nearest bit of the earth it can find.
In this instance, St Peters was the tallest building in the area when the storm passed over Rome. Unusual and coincidental perhaps, but nothing more than that…
So actually no, I don’t need to rethink my position. I know exactly where I stand…
The Great Pacific Trash Vortex…
Something definitely in the” Things I don’t like…” category today.
I’m ashamed to admit that I only recently became aware of The Great Pacific Trash Vortex (or Garbage Patch), an area of floating rubbish whose size is difficult to assess, but is estimated to be at least 250,000 square miles (i.e. the size of Texas), possibly up to as much as a mind numbing 6 million square miles (or roughly 1/10th of the entire pacific Ocean) and which contains an estimated 3.5 million tons of rubbish, reaching a depth of between 10 and 30 meters below the surface.
There are five of these huge floating rubbish tips, one in each of the ocean gyres, a natural phenomenon connected to the Coriolis effect and the oceans currents, where the sea forms a huge slowly circulating body of water that despite its circular motion, remains relatively static in terms of where it is. Although the Pacific rubbish tip is the largest of these accumulations, between all five of them, it’s estimated that they might cover upwards of 30% of the surface of the sea (although that can’t possibly be right can it?)
Approximately 90% of all the rubbish in the seas is plastic based. Not as you may think as recognisable bottles and bags etc. but broken down into billions and billions of tiny granules that are not only undetectable by planes and satellites, but are often invisible to the human eye. Which explains why these huge areas of rubbish weren’t much known about until the late 90′s, especially after being discovered and publicised by the American yachtsman Charles J. Moore.
Some facts that we would all do well to remember :
- Plastic never totally biodegrades. It breaks down into ever smaller pieces through photodegradation, losing colour and form along the way, until the polymers become almost microscopic and small enough to be ingested by organism’s like plankton and krill at the bottom of the food chain…
- A single 1 litre plastic drinks bottle will break down into enough fragments to put one on every mile of every beach on the planet.
- More than 60% of the plastic in the sea is 1mm or smaller.
- 70% of all plastic that ends up in the sea sinks to the bottom.
- It is estimated that over 1 million sea birds and upwards of 100,000 marine mammals and turtles die each year from deaths related to plastics, usually ingestion or entanglement.
- Apart from any that has been burnt, every bit of plastic that has ever been produced since its invention about 120 years or so ago, still exists.
To end on a more positive note (although I accept that it won’t make the impending disaster go away), I came across this interesting architectural proposal that suggests a way to deal with these floating continents of waste.
Designed by three young architects from Serbia, and entitled Lady Landfill (although I can’t work out why) it was an entry into a 2011 Skyscraper competition and received an honorable mention.
To radically summarise the key aspects of the scheme, these huge, self-sufficient systems are floated to the areas where the rubbish accumulates whereupon they set to work vacuuming it out of the sea. The islands can move around to enable all areas to be covered, and as the facility fills up with rubbish, any additional weight is offset by pumping air into and out of the structure to keep the habitation zone at the top at the correct height above the water. All the rubbish that is collected is then transformed into energy via a number of on board and inbuilt methods (including conversion into plasma)…
I don’t know much about plasma, but I’m guessing that some of the technologies in the proposal are not currently practical, not least building the Eiffel Tower sized islands in the first place. Still it’s a very neat idea, elegantly presented and very worthy of recognition.
It’s also a big step in the right direction in terms of raising awareness of this fundamentally critical issue, one which we should all do our best to address, no matter how small the gesture feels…
RECYCLE OR DIE (as my good friend Waitey is always telling me)
Is that an airplane in Russell Square?
I was using Google Maps to look for a pub in the Bloomsbury area of Central London, when I came across what appears to be an airplane parked in Russell Square, not far from the British Library (that’s the rather beautiful turquoise cushion shaped building at the bottom)
If you assume the plane (which I think is an Airbus A330) is somewhere between 5000 and 10000 ft (i.e less than 2 miles) above the ground, it gives you some idea of not only how high the actual satellites are that take all of the Google Maps aerial photos, but also some sense of how unbelievably powerful the cameras and lenses must be to capture such staggering levels of detail at that height…
A scary thought…
There is a whole page of conjecture about this image here if you fancy knowing more… but the chatter on the internet seems to suggest that this kind of thing happens quite frequently on Google Maps, especially in and around airports.
Google usually make an effort to remove such strangeness however, so if you’re reading this post much after December 2012, you may be out of luck if you follow this link and try and find the plane for yourself…
39 Furnival Street – The Gateway to a Secret Underground World…
A few weeks ago now, me & And went to visit some of the many buildings that formed part of the Open House weekend here in London. We had an excellent afternoon exploring buildings usually closed to us commoners, and we saw some amazing things, any number of which could easily form the basis of a future post…
But the one thing that has really stuck with me was a building that we didn’t even go into, only walking past it on the way to somewhere else.
Since taking these photos, I’ve found out that the intriguing facade on the left belongs to No. 39 Furnival Street (which is just off High Holborn near Chancery Lane Tube) and is a far more interesting thing than I ever could have imagined…
Hidden behind the heavy duty hoist, the oversized ventilation grill and the formidable steel doors is a goods lift, that dates back to the late 1940′s and which leads down to an endless warren of tunnels known initially as The Chancery Lane Deep Shelter, and latterly as the Kingsway Trunk Exchange, a secret underground installation that began life at the end of WWII…
To hugely summarise the contents of the numerous websites on the subject (of which Subterranea Britannica is the most scarily in depth and where much of this post has been gleaned from) it was after the Blitz of London in 1940 that the idea of deep shelters began to develop. A number of locations were chosen across London, one of which was below the Central Line tunnels that ran along Chancery Lane. Two parallel tunnels approximately 380m long were constructed over the next 5 years, with the primary access being off Furnival Street.
After the war, the tunnels were briefly occupied by nearly 400 tons of Public Records Office documents, until in the late 1940′s, after the Government’s realisation of how vulnerable the Capital’s communications networks were in time of conflict, it was decided to transform the tunnels into a protected trunk telephone exchange.
This huge undertaking was completed in 1954 and the resultant “underground town” became home to (at its peak) over 200 workers a day, who could variously enjoy the delights of the canteen, the recreation areas and the sick bay, confident in the knowledge that if the world was to end, they would still be able to connect phone calls from America…
Under the auspices of The Post Office, the Kingsway Exchange continued to operate secretly until the early 1980′s, when as the equipment became increasingly redundant and the telephone industry developed its digital and mobile formats, the decision was finally taken to abandon the installation to obscurity.
And there it has remained. Other than a few visits from interested Societies and enthusiasts, it looks like it has been more or less empty ever since, although my impression is that much of the equipment is still there and the space itself is just waiting for a new use…
The original shaft the sits behind the facade of 39 Furnival Street..
One of the main tunnels of the Kingsway Exchange sometime in the 1960s.
Joe Kittinger & Felix Baumgartner at The Edge of Space…
It’s a real shame that, due to gusty winds at the jump site above Roswell, New Mexico, Felix Baumgartner had to abandon his attempt to make the highest freefall jump in history. His plans to leap from the mind numbing height of 37 kilometers above the earth’s surface last Tuesday, are now on hold until better weather comes along.
During his descent he would have theoretically broken the sound barrier, travelling faster than 1240km/h… (or about 1km every 3 seconds) and subjected his body to all manner of potentially fatal experiences including boiling blood, uncontrolled spinning and exploding lungs..
The event would have been (and presumably still will be when the time is right) captured by a live stream feed from over 30 video and stills cameras, 5 of which were to be attached to his pressure suit.
Baumgartner was hoping to break a record set way back in 1960 by the American Joe Kittinger who as part of Project Excelsior jumped out of a platform attached to a helium balloon at 31 km above the earth’s surface. It took him about an hour and a half to get to the jump height and about 15 minutes to get home, 4½ of which were freefall through the Earth’s stratosphere where he achieved a staggering maximum speed of 988km/h.
Amazingly there is footage of this fantastic achievement… and here it is. Someone’s even added a rather excellent drum and bass soundtrack which kicks in just as he jumps…)
Can you imagine what it must feel like to look down at your own planet so far below and then just step off…
So whilst the recorded quality and coverage of Kittinger’s freefall attempt may pale against what I imagine will be a beautifully edited and comprehensive visual record of Baumgartner’s jump (when it finally happens), these shaky and grainy images remind us that this courageous US Airman, who despite his first attempt going horribly wrong (he lost consciousness, got into a flat spin, experienced G forces more than 20 times that of gravity and only survived thanks to his automatic parachute opener) got back in the gondola, went up for a another go and did something quite unbelievable, probably using equipment that was barely suitable for the task and that no one would do again for more than 50 years…
Why I like cooling towers…
Earlier this week I read that three cooling towers at Richborough in Kent were blown up in an event lasting only a few seconds and it sparked a quick, but memorable burst of nostalgia…
Cooling towers are without doubt one of the most instantly recognisable building forms in this country. When I was growing up and dad would occasionally drive us to Birmingham for some family jamboree or other, I always used to look forward to seeing two things from the car: Fort Dunlop on the right hand side of the M6 (now a hotel development by Urban Splash) and the two huge, elegant structures that were the cooling towers of the Nechells Power station on the left.
I could never understand what such huge structures were for, especially after dad patiently explained that they were completely hollow on the inside, so allowing the hot steam and gases generated by the power station to be cooled and condense into water in these vast concrete spaces, before all heading up into the atmosphere… I obvioulsy made a comment that stuck in my dad’s mind, as they became known in our family (and still are in fact, despite having being demolished many years ago) as “Joe’s waste of brick towers”…
It was this hollowness of form that resulted in a second part to my nostalgia trip…
When I was at Leeds learning to be an Architect, the journey back up the M1 after visiting friends and family in the Midlands, took me along the Tinsley Viaduct in Sheffield and past two cooling towers that sat eerily close to the road. As with the Birmingham ones, I was always taken with their effortless grace and beauty, and I can remember being very impressed when I was told that Terry Gilliam had shot the closing scenes of his dystopian masterpiece Brazil in one of these very towers, using the huge industrial scale to such stunning effect in the tourture scene…
I believed and told many people this fact for years, learning only a few years ago that it was untrue and the sequences had been shot in Croydon… Memories as shattered as these wonderful structures…
If like me, you find cooling towers fascinating and alluring things, and you know of some near you, I suggest you go and visit them soon.. Our recent industrial heritage seems not to merit the protection afforded their more domestic and residential cousins. All the towers mused over in this post have long since gone. As technology moves inexorably forwards, these peaceful old dinosaurs are destroyed and removed from the landscape, and I for one think that is criminal.
The Transit of Venus.
For about 6 hours last night and this morning, our closest neighbouring planet Venus made its way slowly across the face of the sun.
Due to the orbit of Venus running in a different plane to our own, these solar transits happen very infrequently and when they do, you get two in quick succession. The last transit happened only fairly recently in 2004, so if you missed last nights, the next date for your transit diary is 2117…
I have to admit that I didn’t actually see it myself (living in London, you get used to missing out on astronomical wonders) however I did see some of the all female cast of scientists on the BBC last night, and jolly good they were too, although (and I know this is an easy and probably unfair observation) despite their obvious intelligence, knowledge and presentational abilities, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was just me that saw this as a rather obvious “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” thing…
And while I think of it, is it wrong to admit that I sometimes miss being told about science by bearded men in corduroy jackets and big specs imploring me to understand things the proper way, the old fashioned way, with shonky graphics and laboured explanations…. (whatever did happen to James Burke?)…
Still rather Liz Bonin standing where we can see her, than that eternally amazed goon Brian Cox standing stupidly in front of the sun, spewing out similes…
Anyway, there were some stunning photos up on the net by lunch time today with the ones I’ve stolen below being particular favorites… I love the reality check of these images: Venus (a planet I’ve written about before) is not dissimilar in size to our own earth, and averages about 85 million miles away. The Sun is not that much further distant at 95 million miles (which I’ve just learned is 1 Astronomical unit) but just look how f**kin HUGE it is… completely dwarfing tiny Venus… its enough to scare the willies out of you… (to paraphrase Slartibartfast..)
Ever since I saw Sunshine, Danny Boyle’s most excellent and criminally underrated Sci-Fi epic, the sun has literally taken on a new dimension for me. The whole film is soaked with the heat and size and light and orange and red and intensity of our very own star, slowly baking the desperate and increasingly hopeless crew get as they get closer and closer to their destination…
The first couple of pictures below (both from the amazing NASA SDO satellite) show the Sun as I like to think of it in Danny’s film, raging, beautiful and utterly incomprehensible…
Expedition 31 – Space Ships on Trains in Kazakhstan..
I saw this rather intriguing image in someone else’s newspaper on my way home last night…
It showed an old 1960′s diesel train pulling what looked like a huge rocket through the middle of nowhere. I liked the juxtaposition of the old, the new and the emptiness and I went to find out more…
It turns out that the rocket is a Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft and is being carried by train to the Baikonur launch pad in the former Soviet state of Kazakhstan, from where it will take off on its short journey to the International Space Station (ISS). The rocket is moved to the launch pad area a couple of days prior to take off so that it can be fulled up and prepared for its journey…
The whole event goes by the name “Expedition 31″ and the take off was scheduled for 9.05am this morning (Tuesday 15th May) with a crew of both Russian and US astronauts aiming to spend the next few months in orbit. It’s not clear from the reports I’ve read, but I think the rocket will also pick up and bring some astronauts who are already up in space, back home.
Interestingly (and I didn’t know this till last night), NASA which officially retired its shuttle fleet last year, has relied exclusively on Russian Soyuz craft for transporting personnel to the ISS since late 2009. The trip to the station takes two days from launch to docking, as the rocket has to chase the space station around its earth orbit, whereas the return to Earth takes less than 3.5 hours.
There are a lot more photos on NASA’s flickr site here…
QlockTwo Watch
I like the stylings of this new watch by Biegert & Funk…
The face is a grid of 110 letters and to tell the time you press the big shiny button on the side and it tells you in words…
There’s also an App for my Android phone, which at 70p looks pretty good, until you realise (as one reviewer points out) that by the time you’ve opened the app, waited for the inevitable advert to go away and then pressed the screen to get the time, the moments already gone…
Still the watch itself looks very fine indeed, which it should do for around €500.
It reminds me of a watch that And bought a couple of years back. A beautiful thing made by a Japanese company called TokyoFlash, it had a grid of 42 LED’s which could be used to tell the time in three ways, Hour centric, Minute centric and (our favourite) Binary… Hours of fun, especially if (like And) you could never remember how to read the dots….
And in case you’re wondering, to tell the time in binary, you only use the top two lines of the display and read the dots like this…
