The career of Daphne Oram, a pioneer in electronic composition who worked at the hallowed BBC Radiophonic Workshop in its heyday, remains tangled up in tiny mysteries. A 2007 compilation titled Oramics—named after her studio and the Oramics Machine she created, in which sound could be manipulated by drawing on 35mm film strips—pulled together some of Oram’s post-BBC commercial work, her ventures into musique concrète, and a number of studio experiments. But the exhaustive 2012 compilation of her material, The Oram Tapes, Vol. 1, had the odd effect of making her work harder to read, largely because it showed how Oram had funnelled her work in a near infinite number of directions. It’s a thrillingly heterogeneous listen, full of moments that can make you think, laugh, and occasionally jump out of your skin when great slabs of avant garde noise rupture from the surface.
If The Oram Tapes thrived on a sense of cheery disorder, Sound Houses heads in the opposite direction. This project, commissioned by Oram’s former employers at the BBC, takes elements of her extensive sound library and throws a frame around them with the involvement of Alessio Natalizia and Sam Willis, who make thoughtful electronic pieces as the Kompakt-signed Walls. Here, they test how Oram’s forward-thinking sound pallette holds up when knotted together with contemporary equipment. At times, it’s easy to spot Oram’s hand ghosting behind them—”Rendering the Voice I” begins with a sample from her “Fanfare of Graphs” that’s situated at the same place in the track and remains largely unmanipulated. In those moments, where Walls directly skingraft the 1960s onto the 2010s, the timelessness of Oram’s pieces are thrown into stark relief, with her work immediately feeling at one with the present day.
Most of Sound Houses blurs the lines further than “Rendering the Voice I”, with the sounds of Natalizia, Willis, and Oram entering into an uneasy symbiosis. Walls are careful to make sure there’s some conflict involved, often letting the tension simmer just below the surface as it occasionally does in Oram’s own compositions. “Some Shriller, and Some Deeper” bristles with unease as it slothfully lumbers on its path, while “Rendering the Voice II” perfectly works off the earsplitting electronics Oram would often use. Natalizia and Willis have dialed down the playfulness a touch, perhaps to keep it routed in a world they feel more comfortable in, although elements of humor do emerge; the lumbering drone that’s twisted through the center of “A Very Large Metal Box” is just the right side of clumsy, bringing with it an oafish weight and sense of imbalance that’s positively Beefheartian in outlook.
Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, mastered Sound Houses, helping lift it away from the degraded atmosphere of some of The Oram Tapes, which was largely due to the fact that much of the material had languished in dusty boxes for years. His part here forms a loop back to his work with Oram’s fellow Radiophonic Workshop colleague Delia Derbyshire, who contributed to his EAR project and was memorably interviewed by him. It feels like Kember and Oram’s contributions were key at this stage in Walls’ career, whose second album, Coracle, showed plenty of promise without ever feeling like they’d fully inhabited the world they were trying to create. Here, their curatorial skills guide them in relation to the sound sources, helping fill in the blanks when they hit them, causing them to get lost in inspiration instead of scrabbling around for it. It’s also another fascinating twist to Oram’s story, adding a touch more weight to her legend by making this music breathe once again.
