Steve writes with exciting news: "I got an email today from Ray White, a old friend from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Ray was an engineer there for many years and has had this in-depth technical history of the Workshop up on the web for some time now. However, he has just added a gallery of pictures. As with so many unexplained phenomena, there are very few photos of the Radiophonic Workshop, but Ray’s collection is the most comprehensive to date. All the pics have notes, which are also very good." The pictures are fantastic and incredibly exotic. On a similar note, here has a great old clip of Liz Parker tweaking the enormous EMS Delaware (which people outside the workshop call a Synthi 100).
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Loscha writes: "While not as cool as the Kraftwerk Vocoder, a jackfield from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is still very neat..." Quite right: eBay item #120003732436 is a jackfield/patchbay which was apparently used in the legendary workshop before being shipped to Australia in the luggage of a former BBC engineer. As the vendor rightly says: "I can say, unashamedly, This is the best jackfield in the entire world. Period. You will never see anything like this again in your entire life." Unfortunately, you've just missed the chance to have something to plug it into. eBay item #250001734656 was a AKG BX20 spring reverb unit, "As used in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop", although it's not totally clear if that was this actual unit, or just the model. Either way, it went for a not unreasonable £470.
The Tone Generation is a ten part series of podcasts about the earliest days of electronic music. Part One [mp3 link] covers Britain - with rare recordings from the 1950s and '60s by people like Tristram Cary, Daphne Oram, and assorted Radiophonic Workshop alumni. The music on offer is all pretty challenging - lots of atonal bleeps and waves of noise and very different from the commercially-minded output of Raymond Scott, who was working at the same time - although with more expensive gear. The podcast is presented by Ian Helliwell, and produced by Simon James, who also did the splendid Welcome to Mars.
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These are exciting times for people wanting to buy elderly studio gear with fashionable associations*. After Kraftwerk's vocoder and The Radiophonic Workshop's patchbay, comes Conny Plank's Entire Studio. Conny started his career as a sound man for Marlene Dietrich, before producing all the important krautrock albums by Kraftwerk, Neu! and Can. He died in 1987, but his studio continued, until his widow died on 1st June. Now the entire contents are up for sale in this auction, which seems slightly shambolic: "We will collect all the bids and offers over a couple of weeks and after a while the highest bidder will be the lucky one" but there is some great stuff on offer, including the hand-built console, some nice synths, and an instant collection of super-cool rack gear (1 and 2)... (Thanks, Samuel and Zanf) *I guess that's all of us, really.
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