Walter Kitundu

I pretty much like everything about this guy.

Daphne Oram: mother of experimenal music

                               

Daphne Oram was born in 1925 in England.  She was very interested in both songwriting and electronics.  in 1946, while many males were fighting a war abroad, Oram took a job at the BBC as a "junior balancing engineer".  A balancing engineer is similar to a mixing engineer except in that time it was too expensive to record shows so everything was done live.

That all changed in the 50s when the tape machine was implemented at BBC.  Oram was one of the first people to experiment with tape not as a means to record but as a medium for a new kind of music and I would argue art.

Once everybody at her work would leave for the night, she would experiment with the the sounds recorded on the tape.  Speeding the up, slowing them down, splicing tape together, and playing the sounds backwards.  Later on she even developed a interchangeable set of wheels that could change the sounds pitch by changing the speed of the play heads.  This effectively turned the tape machine into the first synthesizer.

It is pretty easy to imagine that the BBC was not very interested in the work that Oram was doing.  It took years for them to even set up a department that dealt with electronic sounds and when they finally did they didn't let her be a part of it.  Also to avoid any problems with musicians unions anything that was made through her system was not allowed to be called music.

Daphne Oram eventually went on to be the first women to make her own recording studio in 1959.  She received a substantial grant initially, but eventually had to take some commercial work such as helping make some sounds for a ballet version of Beauty and the Beast.

Oram experimented with sounds and electronics the rest of her life, but she also wrote compositions.  Most of them have remained unperformed to this day, but she did record a song called "four aspects" which uses all tape machines as the instruments in 1960.  It sounds very sci-fi.  If I knew how to upload music I would put it on this post.

Anyhoot, for how important she was to music both technically and artistically, I can't believe I hadn't heard of her until last week.  She's one special lady.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Oram

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/aug/01/daphne.oram.remembered

http://web.archive.org/web/20060210194050/http://www.sonicartsnetwork.org/Oram/oram.html

                                         

ELEVATING THE ART

R.I.P. Yma Sumac

Yma Sumac with no doubt is one of the most remarkable voices of our time, with a vocal range which is rarely found once in a century. Her use of voice is also completely her own style, which she developed in a rather autodidactic or at least very individual way. For most of the time she tried to promote legends and folk songs from Peruvian origin, but she also sang mambo amongst other things. Because she stayed in America most of the time, apart from a short while in Russia, in the fifties they preferred to present her music with a big orchestra, where she was presented to the world as an exotica queen, or as a diva with a remarkable voice.- Psychedelic V/H Folk

Yma Suma website
Miracles: The album Yma fans can't stand