ORAM, DAPHNE - Oramics

Young Americans

ORAM, DAPHNE - Oramics

2019 repress edition. "Originally released in 2010. Deluxe clear four-LP edition, 155 minutes/eight sides of vinyl mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering and housed in a heavyweight, 300gm gatefold sleeve featuring rare archival photographs. This hugely influential, definitive collection from electronic music pioneer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram, has been out of print on vinyl since 2013 and is now thankfully available again via Modern Love side-label, Young Americans. Throughout her life, Oram was a wildly original musician, inventor and theorist who refused to bow to convention. While Delia Derbyshire had more or less become a household name, it was only when Clive Graham compiled Oramics for a CD release in 2007 that Daphne's legacy started to extend beyond the fringes. In the intervening years (aided by the work of the Daphne Oram Trust and Oram's archive at Goldsmith's in London) there have been countless articles, features, a play, an exhibition at the science museum and even a creative arts building and several record labels and arts awards named in Daphne's honor -- going some way to restore her place as a recognized pioneer of electronic music. To recap, Oram was the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department she more or less single-handedly created in 1958 camping out at the BBC studios for nights on end splicing tapes and working with various modified machines to carefully arrange her abstract soundscapes. Eventually the BBC bent under her pressure and, in studio 13, created the soon-to-be-legendary Radiophonic Workshop -- with Oram its first director. Among her countless other achievements, Oram is also cited as the first woman to design and build an electronic musical instrument, one that worked around the "drawn-sound" technique whereby strips of 35mm film would be manipulated before being fed into her home-made "Oramics" machine which would convert and "read" the film into sound. She was also a prolific writer and lecturer on electronic music and studio techniques, developing concepts of spatial sound years before terms like "spatial sound" were even used. Despite her considerable and historic list of achievements, Oram's life and work remained largely unknown by the wider public for many years until Clive Graham compiled this set. Spanning 44 tracks, it demonstrates Oram's work as some of the most varied and groundbreaking electronic music ever made. As opposed to so much of the Radiophonic-era material that has surfaced over the last few decades, Oram's work is often characterized by a much more layered and introspective quality, offsetting playful interludes and commercial recordings with beautiful, immersive pieces like the breathtaking "Pulse Persephone" and "Bird of Parallax" -- highly atmospheric and experimental variants of musique concrète and tape music that still take our breath away 45 years later. It's impossible to over-emphasize the importance and influence of the material compiled on Oramics, a set that should be considered compulsory listening for anyone with even just a passing interest in electronic music."  - Young Americans.
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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

So—we suggest you take some time to dig through the site—even we’ve been surprised by what’s been turning up, and there’s much more to come.
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