1973 synthesizer music LP: BBC Radiophonic Workshop - Fourth Dimension

TradeMark Gunderson kindly ripped an out-of-print LP from 1973 by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, called Fourth Dimension. It's awesome.

If you know only one thing of their work, it would be the theme to Doctor Who, the venerable BBC sci-fi television series. They also did the sound effects. And incidental music. In fact, they were a BBC department that produced all manners of strange noises and sound effects (and theme songs) for over 200 other BBC shows. In doing so, they paved a superhighway of innovation that led electronic music growth for decades, from studio engineering to electronic composition to sound collage to synthesizer technology.

I came across this album in a dilapidated Leeds (UK) record shop for just a couple euros and have held onto it for dear life — BBC Radiophonic Workshop on vinyl doesn’t sell cheap. The standout track for me is easily Vespucci, a funky saunter with a very sampleable cool synth melody. The abstract cover from this 1973 release looks quite a bit like a CD exploding, perhaps another ahead-of-their-time move from these old-timers.

BBC Radiophonic Workshop - Fourth Dimension

[#1 posted by caipirina , December 2, 2008 2:25 PM]

euros? in the UK ? we are not there, yet :D

nice album to hunt down

[#2 posted by ill lich , December 2, 2008 2:27 PM]

I have the vinyl for "Dr. Who backgrounds"-- essentially they made "environmental sounds" for spaceships and alien planets which you may not notice during the show-- every ship or planet had it's own sound, makes for good ambient listening.

[#3 posted by iCowboy , December 2, 2008 2:47 PM]

The BBC put out a new recording of some of the music from the Radiophonic Workshop only last month. It's called 'The Radiophonic Workshop', but look out for the remastered version dated 2008.

One of my university professors tried to describe the Radiophonic Workshop's work on HHGTTG to a group of American students; the best he could manage was 'they are the only place in the World you can go to if you want the *exact* noise a blancmange would make sliding down a black hole.'

I'm not old enough to remember, but I wonder what the impact of the Doctor Who music was in 1963 - even today it is an extraordinary piece of work, but what did it sound like to an audience used to light orchestral work and the sound of tubercular coughing?

[#4 posted by Kim Scarborough , December 2, 2008 3:03 PM]

Thanks for the link! We're down from the load but it should be back up shortly.

[#5 posted by laffmakr , December 2, 2008 3:16 PM]

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was also responsible for all the "electronic jiggery-pokery" on the Hitchhiker's radio series. And many others we may not be as familiar with.

It's amazing to read how they created many effects we take for granted today with nothing more than a couple of reel-to-reel recorders, some sticky tape, a few bits and beads and a lot of imagination.

[#6 posted by avraamov , December 2, 2008 3:37 PM]

They also scratch-built stuff they needed to produce sounds they couldn't make with the gear they had. I was at a symposium this year where Maddalena Fagandini described how they cobbled together a sequencer which routed signals from multiple tape decks and oscillators using a rotor arm which swept across a series of switches.

[#7 posted by nosehat , December 2, 2008 3:56 PM]

Thanks for posting this! I had a BBC Radiophonics LP when I was a wee lad in the 70s. It was a combination of sound effects (from Dr. Who and others) and some more "musical" tracks. I loved it. It was much more sonically "interesting" than most of the songs on the radio.

I think these guys had a profound effect on popular music at the time. They were taking Karlheinz Stockhausen-type sounds, and broadcasting them to the general public. I think it opened a lot of people's ears, and musicians thought "Oh, I could be using sounds like that!"

[#8 posted by robulus , December 2, 2008 4:17 PM]

Wow... AIR just lifted that track wholesale and built a post modern genre out of it. Nice find.

[#9 posted by Scary_UK , December 2, 2008 4:19 PM]

There was an excellent documentary on BBC4 about the Radiophonic Workshop a few years ago - The Alchemists of Sound.

It's currently on YouTube:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=cKPGzX5kZd0

[#10 posted by homestarrunrun , December 2, 2008 4:50 PM]

VINYL! Noice. It's not available in the U.S. and it's hella expensive but still. Nice find.

[#11 posted by sammich , December 2, 2008 5:24 PM]

Ill Lich @ 2 - I have volume 13: "Sound Effects of Death and Horror" - not good ambient listening...

[#12 posted by skullivan , December 2, 2008 5:26 PM]

So BBC Radiophonic Workshop isn't just the name of the first track on The Magnetic Fields' album Holiday? :P

Looking forward to checking this out.

[#13 posted by nosehat , December 2, 2008 7:16 PM]

@9 Scary UK: Thanks for the link to the documentary!

Delia Derbyshire and John Baker are now on my Find-Out-Lots-More-About-These-People list.

[#14 posted by Dead Air , December 2, 2008 8:44 PM]

Unfortunately, it just wasn't as good as I'd hoped it to be. They did much, much better than this.

#2, please rip that Doctor Who incidentals album and post that to Boing Boing! That's the stuff I absolutely love.

[#15 posted by gretagretchen , December 2, 2008 9:49 PM]

Agreed. I (and my eyepatch) demand mp3s of all mentioned here.

[#16 posted by jbettineski , December 3, 2008 8:01 AM]

I'm loving this.

I'm also a huge Boards of Canada fan, so that kind of makes sense.

Thanks for the find!