Music Arcades: Experimental Audio Research: Beyond the Pale

If you ever listen to this, make sure you do so on a proper music system. Play it on a proper music system, because a portable player or a computer will lose all the textures and resonances that are its main pleasure. (Don't even think about trying to listen on an iPod when you're walking around town.) I tried both options today and if I'd listened on computer first, I might have given up too quickly.

I'd forgotten that E.A.R. isn't just Sonic Boom, but also involves the impressive and diverse talents of Eddie Prévost, Kevin Shields and Kevin Martin. Though it's impossible to tell who's doing what on these extended analogue drones.

I saw Sonic Boom play a solo set last year, the evening I celebrated completing the first draft of The Book (which is now at the printers). This is what I wrote the day after.

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 aboutthe 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.

It took eight months and the prompting of a random number generator for me to get round to doing that digging out, but here we are.