Showing posts with label SIBERIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SIBERIA. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Now it's Siberia (slight return) / proto-Plunderphonics

 


Music by Daphne Oram - it is actually a varispeeded version of Sandy Nelson's "Teen Beat"





So she invented Plunderphonics  ahead of schedule - i.e. John Oswald's approach where your sampladelic ork is based entirely on and out of a single other work.  Indeed before he got hold of a sampler  Oswald used a variable speed turntable on Dolly Parton's version of "The Great Pretender"


(Actually there are some other composers who did the work based on a single pop cultural source thing quite early  - James Tenney might have pipped Oram there...



This is later I think but pre-Oswald



Then there was this from 1969 -  don't know if it's based on a single Laura Nyro or fragments across her discography 





Earlier "now it's Siberia" post - based on the best thing I have seen on TV all year, and like "Snow", it's from 1963 - a report on the Big Freeze that brought Great Britain to a standstill. 

Geoffrey Jones made another film about trains:1975's "Locomotion". This time the score was  radiophonic music composed by Donald Fraser and played by Steeleye Span of all people. 

Mordant Music reissued the music many years ago with remixes

BFI blurb about the film and the music:


In 1974 Geoffrey Jones was asked to submit proposals for a film to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and, having already been commissioned by Edgar Anstey to report in detail on the whole of BR’s film archive, he jumped at the chance. Anstey asked for three treatments of different durations. A 15 minute version was chosen, since the film was to be part of a travelling exhibition and a greater length would have meant unacceptable queues.

Again, a pilot film was made using library footage, much of it from one of BTF’s earlier productions Giants of Steam, cut to a music track that Geoffrey had arranged himself and electronically processed. A successful screening to a panel of BR officials clinched the support needed to get the film off the ground. Locomotion features over 400 separate images woven together with a strong continual accelerando arranged by Donal Fraser and performed by members of Steeleye Span. It combines traditional instrumental and compositional techniques with state-of-the-art, electronic synthesis. There then followed a period of hiatus until Geoffrey was appointed producer/director at the Thorn/EMI Video Productions Ltd. The company only lasted a few years, but during this time he made a pilot film, Season’s Project, with Donald Fraser and the English Chamber Orchestra still yet to be completed. In 2003 Geoffrey Jones received a grant from the Arts Council of Wales, enabling him to create A Chair-a-Plane Kwela and A Chair-a-Plane Flamenco from material he had shot nearly 50 years earlier. He refers to these two resulting films as ‘notes in the use of digital editing’. Geoffrey Jones has opened our eyes to the rhythm of film.


Actually Jones did yet another film on this subject, Rail - and this was in between Snow and Locomotion. It came out in 1967 and is said to also involve Daphne Oram's music, although it doesn't sound very electronic to me. 

But he wasn't completely mono-thematic




Now it's Siberia (slight return) / proto-Plunderphonics

  Music by Daphne Oram - it is actually a varispeeded version of Sandy Nelson 's "Teen Beat" So she invented Plunderphonics ...