Tag Archives: music

Daphne Oram's Oramics

Absolutely brilliant documentary on the Radiophonic Workshop last weekend, which I missed (well, it was on Radio 3) and have therefore just listened to on the iplayer, Wee Also Have Sound Houses. Focusing on Daphne Oram, one of the founders of the Workshop there’s lot of interesting tales of the early days mixed with appreciation for these pioneers from Mira Calix and a few others. Her primary interest, from as far back as the ’30s, was in converting images to sound, something she achieved using her Oramics machine.

You’ll have to hurry to listen to it, though, because our beloved BBC takes it off the iplayer at 10:32pm on Sunday 10th August exactly. Is a week really long enough to keep this stuff up for a public service broadcaster I wonder… anyway, do hurry and listen. In the longer term, the BBC Programmes page should list any future broadcasts, shame you can’t sign up for an e-mail alert for future broadcasts… or even request.

Now to order a copy of her album, though I’m not sure why HMV makes a lewd suggestion when I search for it there (though amazon is similarly clueless)…

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…so it appears to be only really availabile online via Boomkat in mp3 or CD.

There is a bit of Oram on Late Junction from Wednesday as well, skip to 57:40 or so – youve got longer to listen to this, until 1:02am on Thursday 14th August. And if you want to read up even more on her work there’s a lengthy article from Hugh Davies on sonic arts network in the internet archive.

If you're wondering about the name change…

Astute, observant or just plain obsessed readers may well have noticed that after many years of calling this Alex’s Blog I’ve finally decided to change name to nutty’s nuggets. I’d love to claim that this change was precipitated by weeks of research or even some discussion. But no, instead it’s me ignoring what made this happen:

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Above is a chart of my views by week, as you can see 2007 was barely scraping along fed in part thanks to my total lack of blogging at times. Then I made my annual blog about music of the year a month early. As of today that post has had 1,078 views on the site here, more than 10 times the next most popular post which is merely a couple of linked Gondry youtube clips. Now I think some of what caused that success was calling the blog Alex’s Blog which made it float up to the top of largeheartedboy‘s roundup which fed me nearly 1,000 of those 1,078 views! However, I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m going to get linked elsewhere I should have a snappier name hence nutty’s nuggets, which at least is as endearingly rubbish as my site design.

On an interesting side note, I was also linked from and had my data scraped for Hype Machine’s 2007 roundup, which includes their rather nice visual version of my top 10 albums of 2007, which they explain a bit in their own blog.

Anyone who’s been following the blog since then, don’t panic!, musical content here will ramp up as I get off my arse to go to gigs and as the new albums by Devotchka, Misty’s Big Adventure and Madness turn up…