Fuck Yeah! Delia Derbyshire

1964

Delia Ann Derbyshire (1937-2001) is one of the true pioneers of modern day electronic music. Possibly best known as a part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and for her groundbreaking arrangement of the Doctor Who theme music - one of the first television themes to be recorded by entirely electronic means (years before synthtesizers came out). She was waaaay ahead of her time and it’s a shame she never got the fame she deserved until recently (she wasn’t even credited for Doctor Who). She has studied mathematics and was clearly one awesome lady. She should be totally the dream girl for every tech geek in the world as you can see here.

Delia Derbyshire

Dreams (1964) 1. Running 2. Falling 3. Land 4. Sea 5. Colour 6. Outro “Dreams” was made in collaboration with Barry Bermange (who originally recorded the narrations). Bermange put together The Dreams (1964), a collage of people describing their dreams, set to a background of electronic sound. Dreams is a collection of spliced/reassembled interviews with people describing their dreams, particularly recurring elements. The program of sounds and voices attempts to represent, in five movements, some sensations of dreaming: running away, falling, landscape, underwater, and colour. Delia Ann Derbyshire (5 May 1937 - 3 July 2001) was an English musician and composer of electronic music and musique concrète. She is best known for her electronic realisation of Ron Grainer’s theme music to the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and for her work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

What to make of this ongoing contemporary interest in vintage library music, BBC Radiophonic Workshop sonic doodles, and all manner of hauntological audio detritus? Discovering obscure music is exciting, but what can beat the thrill of discovering music that wasn’t even meant for popular consumption? Is virtual crate digging on music blogs a suitable replacement for the real thing? Has virtual crate digging become the real thing? How do you know you have genuine vintage music, and not some contemporary artists using a pseudonym and a fictional back story? Is it more emotionally satisfying piecing together your own narrative from historical fragments than accepting one handed to you? How is it possible to grow a cult from a single photo of a woman wearing a hair band, working at a tape machine?

More can be found on the Brighton Freaks website