Radiophonic Workshop: Brian Hodgson

Born in Liverpool in 1938, Brian did his National Service in the RAF and trained in the theatre before joining the BBC drama department in 1961: "I was a studio manager. I showed some creative initiative with effects so was asked to go to the Radiophonic Workshop [RW] for a three-month attachment in about February 1963".

He first heard about Doctor Who later that year when producer Verity Lambert and director Waris Hussein arrived to discuss their new programme with RW boss Desmond Briscoe. "They were both charming, amazingly attractive and full of confidence that the series would run", recalls Brian. "And a delight to work for because they knew exactly what they wanted. "Verity really wanted a Ron Grainer signature tune played by Les Structures Sonores [French musique concrète exponents], but Ron had turned her down because he didn't want to compose any more TV sigs. However, Desmond knew Ron would like to collaborate with the Workshop so he offered to ring him".

Brian didn't work on the ground-breaking theme music; that was realised by RW colleague Delia Derbyshire - "I only helped Delia add a few 'sparkles' when the graphics changed" - in 1967, shortly after Patrick Troughton became the Doctor. Nevertheless, Brian devised many of the iconic Doctor Who sound effects. "Yes, the Tardis take-off, Dalek voices, the Dalek control room… which are still used today".

So what inspired the groaning racket the Tardis makes? "I remember a phrase about the 'rending of the fabric of time and space'. So I wanted a sort of tearing sound. What we definitely didn't want was a sound like an ordinary space rocket. When I first sketched it out there wasn't a rising note, but Desmond insisted we needed one or else it wasn't saying "spaceship" enough. So we put that in".

The sound was generated using a broken-down piano frame. "It was standing up in the corner of the workshop with its strings exposed and I scraped a front-door key down the bass string. We recorded that and added loads of feedback". There wasn't much discussion in 1963 about how the Dalek voices would sound. "I'd done a voice for a robot butler in a children's radio series and used a ring modulation system. So we used that again and just had to make sure that [voice artist] Peter Hawkins gave a monotonous delivery. So it was a blend of my treatment and Peter's performance".

Some of the later Troughton stories (The Wheel in Space, The Dominators, The Krotons) and an early Jon Pertwee (Inferno) eschewed incidental music altogether in favour of a Radiophonic sound design. It was partly an aesthetic choice but, says Brian, "Sometimes it was because they'd run out of money. And people wouldn't have called it "music"; they'd say it was "atmosphere". The fact it was atmospheric music was beside the point; we never got paid extra".

By 1967, Brian was also collaborating with Dudley Simpson on such classics as The Evil of the Daleks and Fury from the Deep. "Dudley was a great composer and musician but he didn't have any technical side. He'd start with musicians in a studio session and sometimes we'd treat the recording later electronically on a multitrack".

Producer Barry Letts opted for all electronic music for Jon Pertwee's 1971 season, including the fabulous Master theme. "By then I'd quite a rapport going with Dudley. And we'd started using synthesisers. The VCS-3 was a bit tiresome because if somebody opened the door, it would go out of tune. We had to keep retuning it all the time. Later we had the Synthi 100, the big Delaware synthesiser".

He left the RW in 1972, founded his own recording company Electrophon and composed for the Rambert Ballet.

In the late 70s, he was invited to return to the RW as "organiser", in effect Desmond Briscoe's deputy, a post he accepted "more out of devilment than anything else. It didn't matter to me whether I got the job or not".

He eventually became department head and stayed until 1995, taking early retirement a few years before the place was wound down. A lot of people lamented the Radiophonic Workshop's closure. Brian believes "it was inevitable. Originally, we were the only place that could do that sort of work. By the 90s, kids had more technology on their own computers".

In a complete career change Brian spent a few years as a hypnotherapist and counsellor, but now lives in retirement in the Norfolk Broads. "I am eternally amazed that people seem to value my contribution so highly", he says, "and I'm proud to have been associated with such a significant part of television history".

Patrick Mulkern, 12:00 AM, 30 July 2009.

Attack Of The Alien Minds - From ESL 104.


Homeric Theme - From ESL 104.




Further information here, here and here.

J. G. Ballard

Novelist, essayist and short-story writer James Graham Ballard was born in Shanghai, China on 15 November 1930.

His family was interned by the Japanese during the Second World War, returning to Britain in 1946. Ballard read Medicine at King's College, Cambridge, and later studied English at London University.

He worked as a copywriter and was stationed in Canada with the Royal Air Force. His first short story was published in 1956. This and many other short stories were published in science fiction magazines and were heavily influenced by the surrealist movement. The short story is seen by many critics as central to Ballard's work, originating and developing themes and obsessions that progress through into his novels. The dislocated sense of time and space in these stories is located in his childhood experience of war and provides many of the images that have become associated with Ballard's fiction: wrecked machinery, deserted beaches, crashed cars, abandoned buildings and empty, desolate landscapes - 'still-life arranged by a demolition squad' as Ballard himself described his settings in an interview with BBC Radio 3 ('Nightwaves' 30 October 2001). Complete Short Stories was published in 2001, and a second volume of stories in 2006.

His early novels include The Drowned World (1962), The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drought (1965) and The Crystal World (1966). These were followed by more experimental novels, such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), establishing Ballard's reputation with both readers and critics as a cult avant-garde writer. His 1973 novel Crash, in which a car-crash provokes a disturbing series of obsessions in the narrator, was made into a film by David Cronenberg.

Ballard's acclaimed and best-selling novel Empire of the Sun (1984) brought him to wider public attention. The novel drew directly on his childhood wartime experiences and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1988.

Cocaine Nights (1996), a thriller set in a community of expatriates living on the Spanish Costa del Sol, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. His novel, Super-Cannes (2000), a vision of corporate dystopia set in the south of France, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). His novel Millennium People (2003), is a tale of violent political protest and social change. J. G. Ballard's last novel was Kingdom Come (2006). In 2008, his autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published.

J. G. Ballard died in April 2009.

Selected bibliography, in reverse order... 2008 Miracles of Life, Fourth Estate. 2006 Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate. 2006 Complete Short Stories: Volume 2, Harper Perennial. 2005 Conversations, with V. Vale, RE/Search Publications. 2003 Millennium People, Flamingo. 2001 Complete Short Stories, Flamingo. 2000 Super-Cannes, Flamingo. 1996 Cocaine Nights, Flamingo. 1995 A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, Harper Collins. 1994 Rushing to Paradise, Flamingo. 1992 The Voices of Time, Orion. 1991 The Kindness of Women, Harper Collins. 1990 War Fever, Collins. 1988 Running Wild, Hutchinson. 1987 The Day of Creation, Gollancz. 1984 Empire of the Sun, Gollancz. 1982 Myths of the Near Future, Cape. 1981 Hello America, Cape. 1980 The Venus Hunters, Granada. 1979 The Unlimited Dream Company, Cape. 1976 Low-flying Aircraft: and Other Stories, Cape. 1975 High-Rise, Cape. 1974 Concrete Island, Cape. 1973 Vermilion Sands, Cape. 1973 Crash, Cape. 1970 The Atrocity Exhibition, Cape. 1967 The Overloaded Man, Cape. 1967 The Disaster Area, Cape. 1967 The Day of Forever, Panther. 1966 The Crystal World, Cape. 1965 The Drought, Cape. 1964 The Terminal Beach, Gollancz. 1963 The Four-Dimensional Nightmare, Gollancz. 1962 The Drowned World, Gollancz. 1961 The Wind from Nowhere, Gollancz.

Further information here, here & here.

Video content here, here & here.

Children's TV: The Changes

"They're awful, they frighten me, they're evil and wicked and dangerous!"

Writer: Anna Home. Director: John Prowse. Story: Peter Dickinson, Raghbir Brar. 10 episodes: The Noise, The Bad Wires, The Devil's Children, Hostages, Witchcraft, A Pile of Stones, Heartsease, Lightning!, The Quarry & The Cavern. Production location: Bristol and the surrounding area. Original broadcast channel: British Broadcasting Company. Original run: 6 January 1975 – 10 March 1975.

The Changes was broadcast in early 1975 and was one of the BBC's first post-apocalyptic TV series which paved the way for the likes of Survivors and Day of the Triffids.

The children's TV series depicted the breakdown of society after people are compelled to reject and destroy technology such as cars, bicycles and alarm clocks.

This violent reaction and people's subsequent desertion of the country is triggered by a sound seemingly emitted by electricity pylons. Schoolgirl Nicky Gore played by Victoria Williams is caught amidst the chaos and gets separated from her parents who are heading to France in the hope of finding safety. Throughout the course of the 10-part series we follow Nicky's journey to be reunited with her parents and seek an answer to the cause of The Changes.

The series was an adaptation of The Devil's Children - the first of three novels in The Changes trilogy by author Peter Dickinson which also included Heartsease and The Weathermonger.

The Changes was broadcast in ten parts every Monday from 6th January to 10th March 1975. Filming took place over the summer of 1973.

The series was shot in the West Country, namely Bristol, the Forest of Dean and Sharpness. Although playing a schoolgirl in her early teens, Victoria Williams celebrated her eighteenth birthday during filming. Theme and incidental music composer Paddy Kingsland went on to score both the radio and TV adaptations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for the BBC. He also provided incidental music for a number of Doctor Who stories in the early eighties.

Futher information here, here & here.

Video content here, here & here.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders - A film by Jaromil Jireš

Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Vitezslav Nezval's Valerie a týden divů, better known as Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood on the night of her first menstruation.

Referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Marquis de Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu, Nezval employs the language of the pulp serial novel to construct a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with an insatiable appetite for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, a malicious grandmother, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister.

Imaginary Penguin paperback: Gregory Boerum.

Jaromil Jireš' Valerie a týden divů, better know as Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, (Czechoslovakia, 1970) is one of those haunting, dream-like films that once seen is difficult to forget. The sexual awakening of adolescent Valerie (Jaroslava Schallerová) provides the major theme, ornately rendered as a symbol-soaked gothic fairytale. Elements drawn from the horror genre operate in conjunction with the type of gentle soft-core art imagery that can be found in other European sexual initiation films of the 1970s, such as Emmanuelle (1974), Bilitis (1977) and The Story of O (Histoire d'O, 1975).

One of the seductive attractions of Valerie a týden divů is its magical trance-inducing quality.

The carefully-crafted sets, the hypnotic harpsichord, flute and choir-based music, and the predominance of thematically significant white in the colour co-ordinated palette all add to the film's particular audio-visual ambience of artifice.

In addition to the use of elliptical editing, the crystalline quality of the photography is simply stunning, capturing in some scenes the beauty of early summer light sparkling on water and illuminating the pastoral landscape, which is set against dark, decaying, cobweb-strewn crypts.

The film bears some resemblance in stylistic terms to the East German fairytale films made by DEFA (such as The Singing Ringing Tree [Der Singende, klingende Bäumchen, 1957]), sharing the use of fantastic, almost surrealist imagery.

That the film makes the sexual subtext of many fairytales overt in transgressive terms is perhaps what attracted UK-based Redemption, a company that specialises in sexploitation and horror films, to release the film on video in 1994. With its non-linear story structure and characters that transform in the blink of an eye, Valerie a týden divů twists and turns much in the irrational manner of a dream. Events unfold from Valerie's subjective point of view, beginning when her brother (if he really is her brother) steals the pearl earrings she inherited from her apparently dead mother. The theft coincides significantly with the onset of her first period.

From then on, Valerie is plunged into the strange world of adult desire, with its terrible and intriguing secrets.

Valerie's burgeoning sensuality is established in the opening credits: the camera lingers with fetishistic fascination on her mouth, face and hair.

Variously, she tastes the bright water bubbling from a fountain, eats ripe cherries, nestles a dove against her chest and drinks in the scent of a bunch of small, white, wild flowers.

Everything in Valerie's world becomes full of wonder, which she experiences in an invigorated and heightened manner. Like the heroines of pre-sanitised fairytales, she faces all the mysteries that come her way boldly and with wide-eyed curiosity.

Tailing the opening sequence is Valerie's contemplation of her bell-like earrings, which carry magical powers. While there are many enigmas in the film, the earrings seem somehow key to the events which follow.

Their symbolic significance is underlined early on, as the aural motif that represents them (a series of sing-songy notes played on the glockenspiel) also accompanies the fall of a few drops of Valerie's first menstrual blood onto a daisy. The earrings have a central place in the film's "family romance." Valerie's white-haired, smooth-faced grandmother tells her to get rid of them, as they are a danger to her; she claims to have bought them from the vampire-priest-constable who acts—albeit slightly ambiguously—as the villain of the film (and who may or may not be Valerie's father)... Tanya Krzywinska.

Finders Keepers make musical history once again with what they regard as their very finest, darkest and most magnificent hour as they release Lubos Fiser's delicately haunting and sacred score to Jaromil Jires' essential Eastern European hallucinogenic-baroque-witch-flick 'Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders'.

It has taken Andy Votel almost 12 years to finally get his grubby vinyl-magnetic mits on the original studio recordings of this previously unreleased score. A futile decade of Eastern European phone calls, continental crate digging and eventually wicked web scouring confirmed that like most Czechoslovakian film scores 'Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders' never benefited from a commercial vinyl release and was condemned to a life imprisoned in the vaults of the original film production company sheltered from political duress and controversy for ever more... until now.

“Joseph Gervasi and I had been talking about doing a synergistic film/music project for some time, and both of us brought up Valerie. it so happened that Joseph owned a 16mm print of the film. I was blown away by its dreamlike imagery, old-world purity, psychedelic candor and mesmerizing soundtrack”.

Greg Weeks (of Espers) is describing the genesis of a new musical review entitled The Valerie Project. Inspired by a classic of Czech new wave cinema, Jaromir Jires’ Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970), Greg, joined by members of Espers and other philadelphia groups such as Fern Knight, Grass, Fursaxa, Timesbold, Woodwose and Rake (as well as enigmatic electronicist Charles Cohen), conceived a new soundtrack to the film. Key to The Valerie Project’s conception is how reframing the film’s action with an alternate soundtrack draws new interpretations from a work of depth and changeable meaning.

Lubos Fiser’s original score is lovingly recalled and ambitiously targeted by the group as a sound cycle to be equaled every time they play it. The tone is dense and ornate, expansively acid-charged — “a symphonic version of magma” at its zenith.

Further information here, here and here.

This time last year...

This time last year, I took it upon myself to start The Hauntological Society. Opinion is divided as to what is and isn't Hauntological. Twas ever thus and ever thus will be. Over the past year, we have tried to reflect the many aspects of hauntology, as best we can. I would like to think that we have had some success in this endeavour, however, as the song says "We've Only Just Begun". I thank you all for stopping by during 2011, and look forward to seeing more of you during 2012. What can you expect from The Hauntological Society in 2012? Who can say. To round the year out, and start the next, I have reproduced (below) the piece I wrote for Warren Ellis...

September 8th, 2011 | Guest Informant: Richard J. Lockley-Hobson of the Hauntological Society asked me to write something for them. I had to point out that I am not very clever, and in fact it would be a much better thing if he wrote something for you. So he did:

“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal”.

You have just read a section from Vladimir Nabokov’s 1966 (revised) autobiography ‘Speak, Memory’. It touches on many of the themes that can be considered Hauntological. Hauntology, a word you’ve no doubt heard before, but as an ‘ology’ you feel it has yet to coalesce into something you can fully understand.

Lets start at a literal beginning…”To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a Hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration”. This is a section from Jacques Derrida’s 1993 work, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, pg 202. This is the origin of the word, and the idea(s) behind the word.

Suffice to say, since its conception, the word, or term (and the ideas behind it), have taken on a life of their own. Although much maligned by almost every other deconstructionist philosopher, Derrida’s Hauntology, now filtered through a hundred other ideas, interlinked and contradictory, has taken root in many different fields.

Considered by some to be a kind of Backward Looking-Forward Thinking/Backward Thinking-Forward Looking philosophy, the term, is more often than not, applied to what could be referred to as unpopular culture; a mix ‘n’ match of analog electronics, suburban witchcraft, unsettling children’s TV, faded visions of the future and the great outdoors – amongst other things. This New Hauntology seems to have little or nothing to do with its namesake, and there appears to be much that can be considered Hauntological.

There will always be a question of interpretation, of application. This so-called zeitgeist is the spirit of all times, the past, and the future, converging in the present. Although it can sometimes seem that this New Hauntology is constantly being trivialised, there will always be a line that leads you back to Derrida, and back further still.

In it’s purest form, that which can be considered Hauntological has been with us for a long, long time. Long before Derrida. He has just given us a word. In a 2010 interview, author Alan Garner talks of “a sense of otherness, that goes right back”. Garner is of course the author of the 1973 children’s book ‘The Owl Service’. Itself a much referenced and key work, in Hauntology’s post-Derrida world. “Yesterday, today, tomorrow – they don’t mean anything. I feel they’re here at the same time: waiting. How long have you felt this? I don’t know. Since yesterday? I don’t know. I don’t know what ‘yesterday’ was. And that’s what’s frightening you? Not just that, said Alison. All of me’s confused the same way. I keep wanting to laugh and cry. Sounds dead metaphysical to me, said Gwyn”.

I will refrain from discussing or listing further themes, key words, or phrases, prevalent in Hauntology, new and old, as I’m aware that you are probably still none-the-wiser. Instead I shall hand you over to our friends at The Hauntological Society. Their aim is to curate the sum of Hauntology’s parts, from the available information, so as to give you a better understanding, over time.

However, before I go – It is my considered opinion that Hauntology will eventually come together as a Social Science, that will explore this ‘otherness’ that makes us who we are. Individually and as a group. As an ‘ology’ it will find its place.