In the Trees

The Radio Scotland interview is an interview from 1997 by John Cavanagh with Delia Derbyshire and Drew Mulholland, interspersed with some of Delia’s audio tracks.

Delia Derbyshire was one of the most important figures in British electronic music. As a member of the BBC’s legendary Radiophonic Workshop, she was responsible for the unearhtly electronic realisation of the original theme for Doctor Who, made in 1963. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. In this edition of Archive on 4, Matthew Sweet explores her work and airs some rare and previously unheard items from Derbyshire’s vast personal archive. It’s a portrait of a singular and relatively unsung talent, whose work still sounds ahead of its time over half a century later. (42 min.) | via Archive on 4

Delia created “Blue Veils and Golden Sands” as incidental music for the episode “The Last Caravans” in the documentary series The World About Us in 1967.

“This was a documentary program about the Tuareg tribe. The Tuareg tribe are nomads in the Sahara desert and I think they live by bartering, taking salt, I think it was, across the desert. In the piece ...I tried to convey the distance of the horizon and the heat haze and then there's this very high, slow reedy sound. That indicates the strand of camels seen at a distance, wandering across the desert. That in fact was made from square waves on the valve oscillators we've just talked about, but square waves put though every filter I could possibly find to take out all the bass frequencies and so one just hears the very high frequencies. It had to be something out of this world.”   —Delia in the “Radio Scotland interview” | via wikidelia.net

“My most beautiful sound at the time was a tatty green BBC lampshade,” she recalled. “It was the wrong colour, but it had a beautiful ringing sound to it. I hit the lampshade, recorded that, faded it up into the ringing part without the percussive start. “I analysed the sound into all of its partials and frequencies, and took the 12 strongest, and reconstructed the sound on the workshop’s famous 12 oscillators to give a whooshing sound. So the camels rode off into the sunset with my voice in their hooves and a green lampshade on their backs.”   —Brian Hodgson’s Guardian obituary for Delia

“The Dreams” (1964) is the first of Delia's four Inventions for Radio produced in collaboration with the poet and dramatist Barry Bermange. (wikidelia.net)