This past March, Liz Harris (aka Grouper) performed a live set of her signature choral drone at MoMA PS1, written specifically to accompany a sequence of 16mm films by the experimental filmmaker Paul Clipson. The pairing of Harris’ compositions—deeply human-sounding works built from tape loops and her layered and manipulated voice—with Clipson’s noisy projections of flickering, dreamy images of things like women in water and moonlit trees conjured a very modern yearning for sensory authenticity, something you’d find in an increasingly inaccessible natural world.
This performance came to mind the first time I watched Circle of Light, a half-hour-long 1972 film that compiles a slideshow-like succession of photographs on glass transparency by British photographer Pamela Bone, set to an abstract soundtrack by Delia Derbyshire. The setup for the two projects is similar, each reproducing an emotional reaction to nature, but their messages are quite different: While Harris and Clipson’s collaboration, emphasizing retrograde analog techniques, comes across as somewhat fearful of technology, Derbyshire and Bone seem fascinated by its potential.
An early pioneer in electronic music, Derbyshire, who passed away in 2001, is something of a cult figure. During a decade-plus stint at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop beginning in 1962, she produced scores and effects for television, including, famously, the original theme for “Dr. Who.” Her laborious and mathematical approach to composition there predated the use of synthesizers and even multi-track recording technology; her output, which at the Radiophonic Workshop went largely uncredited, is an eerie and dense musique concrete that, suffice to say, has stood the test of time much better than the rest of the special effects used on the shows she scored.
Derbyshire also composed under her own name and with David Vorhaus and Brian Hodgson as White Noise, and her soundtrack for *Circle of Light *(made with Elsa Stansfield), just now seeing its first proper release, is the longest single piece of recorded music that’s been recovered from her oeuvre. Bone originally wanted the film to be soundtracked by a reading of her own poetry, but director Anthony Roland pushed in the direction of a non-narrative audio score, introducing Derbyshire. Bone’s color images are of the natural world, but manipulated and layered to emphasize pattern and form. At the surface of Derbyshire’s score are also fragments from nature. Among the collage of sounds she applies are a number of field recordings, including, in the first minute, one of an owl hooting. A whorling texture underneath approximates an insistent wind or a soft tide; a synthesized chirp is reminiscent of a field of crickets on a summer day.
Alongside such recognizable sounds, Derbyshire’s sonic palette includes droning, alien, sometimes-tonal elements. These are fastidiously arranged such that the work, restrained as it is, takes on a remarkable spatial quality. (Among the effects here is a gorgeous stretched and filtered recording of a metal lampshade rung with a hammer, which she famously used in her work on “Dr. Who”). And while you could go on about the various purring and pulsing sounds throughout the release, her subtle pacing is just as key. The work, with its pockets of energy dissolving into washes of texture, creates a world rather than describing an existing one. Her output is often described in terms of its many innovations, but this recording underscores that Derbyshire was an artist skilled at constructing an evocative whole out of pioneering details, one that can be experienced on both technical and emotional registers.
The work is introduced with a brief description by Roland of Bone’s practice, and a brief artist statement by the photographer. “Inspired by nature, and being more responsive to feeling than to thought,” as Roland says, Bone notes that with her work she has set out “to overcome the limitations that photography would impose;” such a thesis could surely be extended to Derbyshire, whose work opens the possibility of sound far beyond imitating life. In a moment when artists like Harris and Clipson use vintage analog media to bring us closer to a ‘real’ that might not have existed in the first place, Derbyshire and Bone’s collaboration is a rich reminder of the mysterious and unnerving potential of both their respective technological mediums and nature itself.
