The venue (The Fly on New Oxford Street) wasn't the best place to see Alasdair Roberts, but happily the audience were really paying attention, so it turned out well. He must have played seven or eight songs from the forthcoming album Amber Gatherers, and was bemused that people were calling out requests for songs that weren't out yet, including Firewater (which I don't think he played) and Where Twines the Path (which he did). The new material sounds good, but will probably improve with age and familiarity. I liked the introduction to Let Me Lie and Bleed Awhile: "It's like I Will Survive". For the time being I got more out of Carousing and Sweet William. The last song was A Lyke Wake Dirge, which segued into Kraftwerk's Radioactivity. Very topical since a Russian journalist recently died of radioactive poisoning in London.

Good support by Mary Hampton, which set the tone with a version of Pretty Polly.

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dj ivi says:

a folk band cover of radioactivity? how did this sound? how did they perform it? you have piqued my curiousity.

Posted about 1 year ago | Delete

DJ Alchemi says:

Well, it wasn't a folk band; just one guy with a guitar, playing and singing. From what I remember, it was just slow (part of a dirge, after all). The last part was sung in German (Roberts is Scottish, but his mother is German).

Posted about 1 year ago | Delete

I've seen Sonic Boom a few times, playing with Yo La Tengo, Luna, and (back in the '80s) as part of Spacemen 3. But I've never caught on to his approach as well as I did last week at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop event, where he played solo for half an hour or so.

To be honest, I'd assumed that most of the fuss about the most famous Radiophonic Workshop staff, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, was down to the romantic and slightly kinky idea of these blue-stocking women with horn-rimmed glasses making radically avant-garde music along outlying corridors of the BBC . I still think that's part of it, but now I understand the substance as well. Part of it came out in a panel session before Sonic Boom's set, when someone asked the ex-staff of the Radiophonic Workshop about the arrival of the Fairlight synthesiser in the early '80s. One of the staff suggested that the Fairlight was the beginning of the end for the Workshop, because it marked the point where sound manipulation moved inside the digital black box of the computer. What made the BBC Radiophonic Workshop stand out in its first decades was its work with physical and analogue manipulations of electronic sounds, at a time when this was labour-intensive and there was no other British equivalent to places like IRCAM in France.

It's the analogue approach to electronics that Sonic Boom is continuing, and it makes for a more physical performance style, with more scope for improvisation than you might get with standard digital software. The sequencer programs like Logic Pro encourage you to think in bar lines, but there are no bar lines with the old equipment.

My old friend Jeremy wasn't keen, but I really enjoyed Sonic Boom's performance, and I'll probably be digging out one of the Experimental Audio Research albums of his in the not-too-distant future.

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Spencer Owen says:

I have a significant interest in the avant-garde (for a pop-and-rhythm guy), and I have never delved into the BBC Radiophonic; in fact, this is the first real description of it that I've encountered, and I took a class in the history of electronic music, too! Time to, indeed, delve. Thanks.

Posted about 1 year ago | Delete