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The WIRE (March 2007 - in collaboration with Lily Greenham review)
Two sonic artists, both different in almost all respects other than being neglected, almost forgotten, both women, and both based in England; neither of them living, and both now reconstructed through the fragments of sound that have remained as traces of two complex lives. As with all archive projects hedged by incomplete sources, there is a sense of privileged gazing, the battered scrapbook lying open, the photo album partially revealed, a glimpse through to the hidden person; and pathos, those few moments when access to the inner sanctum was granted: a temporary opening of microphones in a BBC radio studio; a concert in some official palace of the high arts.
Inevitably, the simultaneous release of these retrospectives acts as a reproach to the flawed utopianism of post-war music. Within the male technocracy of electronic music and masculine, even combative world of sound poetry, women were considered rare exotics; their presence and difference highlighting the pathetic subjectivity of aesthetic choices that a male majority battled among themselves to dignify as Theory and Law.
A composer and inventor of the Oramics 'drawn sound' system, Daphne Oram is currently the better known of the two, if only because the kind of early electronic music in which she specialised is now fetishised. Her major work, Four Aspects, composed in 1960 and described by Hugh Davies as an uncanny anticipation of Brian Eno's Discreet Music, was a genuine glimpse into one version of the future. Another futurism, the 1960s techno-paradise, has become insufferably cute and kitsch, as illustrated by the current use of Raymond Scott's Baltimore Gas and Electric Co ("395") for a TV commercial by the beleaguered online bank, Egg. Before his unexpected death in 2005, Hugh Davies had plans to catalogue the Oram archive, of which he was custodian, and prepare material for release. He had noted the CD issue in 2000 of Scott's advertising jingles, film collaborations and musique concrète experiments from the 1950s-60s and believed Oram's largely unknown work to be a British equivalent.
Having worked within the BBC, first as a balance engineer during World War Two, then as a founder member of the Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, Oram had to supplement the financing of her studio by making short electronic pieces for radio and television commercials. Themes of machine futurism - leisure through robotics, labour-saving devices and miracle substances - surface only too easily in her jingles for power tools, Lego, washing machines, instant tea and Schweppes Kia-Ora. These were recorded between 1962 and 1966, which suggests that sonic experimenters of my generation were almost certainly affected by them at an impressionable age (is our vintage of experimental music just another side-effect of media manipulation, re Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders?).
Predictably, these vignettes are charming but rather one-dimensional. Her music for dramas of a more philosophical nature - plays by Professor Fred Hoyle and Arthur Adamov - are necessarily episodic, but evident within the grain and fracture, ominous, melancholy, dystopian, of these distorted micro-compositions, spread over two CDs, is the sense of a composer who never found resources or support to extend her potential. No, the future is not always bright. (David Toop)
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