I Hear A New World / The Pioneers Of Electronic Music

A presentation featuring Joe Meek's fantastical lunar stereophonic sound adventure, I Hear A New World; both the celebrated 1991 RPM restoration and the original unreleased 1960 concept album; placed in broader international context alongside seminal works by other pioneers of electronic music; from Daphne Oram to Edgard Varèse. Considered in this context, Meek's masterpiece seems less an oddball pop novelty than a daring and visionary electronic sound exploration. The legendary British pop producer came to prominence during the repressed monochrome days before the Beatles arrived to change everything; an era of fascination with all things Space Age and nuclear; a mood Meek encapsulated with his biggest hit, Telstar by the Tornados; a million selling chart-topper on both sides of the Atlantic and the first British pop single to reach Number One in America. Electronic gear and studio techniques were Meek's obsession. He would dismantle a piece of equipment and modify it in order to ramp up it's capability and thought nothing of building his own compressors, equalisers and echo units. The trademark Meek sound combined an extra-terrestrial keyboard, brittle guitars awash with reverb and a spectral vocal all fiercely compressed. He constantly pushed at the frontiers of his studio's technical potential, using it as an instrument in it's own right and often applying authentic musique concrète procedures in the perpetual search for new sounds. His knowledge of electronics was as advanced as anyone in Britain at the time. The establishment record labels were intimidated by Joe's inventive genius and moody eccentricity; embarrassed that he could outdo them by producing hit records from a glorified home studio above a leather goods shop on the Holloway Road. Meek's emergence coincided with the advent of stereo sound and investigations by serious composers into the artistic potential of electronic technology. There was great enthusiasm for the new medium in part because the composer was no longer dependent on the interpretation of the performer. Electronic studios were founded across Europe; in Paris, Cologne, Milan and Eindhoven, at radio stations or research laboratories where the necessary technology was already available. Pierre Schaeffer's studio for musique concrète in Paris was the first, attracting Boulez, Messiaen, Milhaud, Stockhausen and Varèse, but these composers were frustrated at Schaeffer's emphasis on the manipulation of everyday sounds rather than those that were electronically generated. On the other hand, the Studio for Electronic Music of the West German Radio in Cologne, founded by Herbert Eimert & Robert Beyer and eventually dominated by Stockhausen, set up in opposition to Paris and in favour of music generated exclusively by electronic means. At Radiotelevisione Italian in Milan the composers Bruno Maderna and Luciano Berio embraced and went beyond both disciplines. John Cage flew in to visit the facility and create the dizzying blur of sound that is Fontana Mix and win a local TV quiz show on his specialist subject 'poisonous and edible mushrooms'. At the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, Tom Dissevelt and his assistant Kid Baltan (Dick Raaymakers) conducted their interplanetary sound experiments on the fringes of pop, only marginally to the left of Meek. In London, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop assembled a team of gifted composers including co-founder Daphne Oram, Madallena Fagandini and Delia Derbyshire to create sound effects, rhythmic interval signals and music for radio and television productions. Their work was created anonymously at the service of the corporation, nevertheless it came to the attention of the head of Parlophone Records and soon to be Beatles producer, George Martin who collaborated with Fagandini to make a catchy single of Time Beat: "Electronic music - that slightly disturbing sound of our times which is produced amid a complex of tape recorders and electric wiring - is about to attack the hit parades. " exclaimed one newspaper. Between 1964 and 1967 pop music changed more radically than it had in all the years since it's inception in the 1950s and the long playing record became it's main product. Once the Beatles determined to devote themselves to working in the studio with George Martin on music with increasingly ambitious, conceptual themes, it was inevitable that they would need to be able to draw on a wider and more eclectic range of materials. Paul McCartney chose to engage with electronic art music of Berio and Stockhausen, attending lectures and performances of their work in London. Their influence opened up a new world of sonic possibilities for the Beatles that can be heard in the backward tape echo, vocal manipulations, loops and sound collages of Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields Forever, Penny Lane and I Am the Walrus, culminating in Revolution 9 which has been described as "the world's most widely distributed avant-garde artefact. "