Three producers and a modern-classical composer armed with vintage technology. Cage against the machine, anyone?
Hometown: London.
The lineup: Felix Carey, Iain Chambers, Philip Tagney and Robert Worby.
The background: We have just written a feature on psychedelia for the Guardian, and in one of the interviews that we did for it Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom of Spectrum/Spacemen 3 waxed lyrical, and with misty eyes, about pioneering experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Well, Pete, no need to feel nostalgic now because here are Langham Research Centre, a quartet of radio producers and composers who haven't just picked up the baton from Delia Derbyshire, they're hitting the baton against a metal surface, and they're recording and playing around with the results using a variety of obsolete equipment and discarded technology, including reel-to-reel tape machines, sinewave oscillators, Bakelite tone-arm cartridges and analogue synthesisers. "We loved the rich sound of tape, and the personalities and imperfections of tape machines," they have said. "We wanted to recapture the spirit of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop."
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The LRC – so-called because three of them were producers operating out of the BBC's Langham Place studios – are "devoted", they explain, to authentic performances of classic modernist (if that isn't a contradiction in terms) electronic music and the creation of new music from their "instrumentarium" of vintage analogue devices, the kind of gadgetry that was last considered hi-tech circa 1955. We featured another group in this column a couple of weeks back called Metamono who used an instrumentarium, a "vast bank of recycled and reworked equipment", but the music they made was more recognisable as conventional electronica, albeit a fringe example of the form. What LRC do is way more avant-garde and out-there: it's musique concrète, basically, all found noises and voices, recontextualised or mangled beyond recognition, taking their cue from John Cage and doing strange things with sound, space and silence.
You can either take that as a warning, or an invitation, depending on your taste for songs with titles such as Eschatology – "a meditation on the end of time" written with Peter Blegvad – or your penchant for pieces such as Obamix which "explores the rhetorical flourishes of the speech-maker, inviting us to question how our physical bodies serve our words" or Symphonies of Wind Turbines, "a sonic meditation" on the controversial power source. There are no easy points of access, although Gateshead Multistorey Car Park – entirely comprising sounds recorded at the now-demolished Trinity Square car park, as immortalised during the scenes of ultraviolence in the film Get Carter – has a certain hypnotic quality, while Dining Alone is mesmeric in its depiction of a man's excruciating social discomfort and Fragment is like something by the Art of Noise. Talking of terror, a voice on Guest + Host = Ghost, "a journey into one man's isolation", demands: "Please. Don't be alarmed." But there is an awkward pleasure to be had here in the sense of dislocation amid the amplified and warped normality of the environments, as the familiar becomes strange. You could even say it was psychedelic.
The buzz: "Britain's leading musique concrète performing group."
The truth: Delia Derbyshire would be proud.
Most likely to: Appeal to fans of John Cage.
Least likely to: Appeal to fans of RATM.
What to buy: Their debut album will be released on Belgium's Sub Rosa Label at the start of 2014, featuring John Cage's early electronic work.
File next to: BBC Radiophonic Workshop, John Cage, Art of Noise, Metamono.
Links: langhamresearch.co.uk.
Friday's new band: Apes and Horses.
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