This month’s Electronic Sound cover stars are the legendary WHITE NOISE – Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus – and we’re bundling the magazine with an exclusive seven-inch featuring previously unreleased RADIOPHONIC WORKSHOP remixes of two killer tracks by the pioneering electronic supergroup. 

Radiophonic Workshop mainstays Derbyshire and Hodgson formed White Noise in 1968 with American left-field musician Vorhaus. We’ve interviewed the band’s two surviving members for our cover feature, which is the story of their witchy and wonderful ‘An Electric Storm’ debut album. It’s an entertaining tale, with lots of strange twists and turns. Lots of sex and drugs as well. White Noise used reel-to-reel tapes and an early VCS 3 on the album, but it doesn’t sound the least bit dated. And while it wasn’t a commercial success on its release in 1969, it’s become hugely influential in the decades since, inspiring sonic adventurers like Throbbing Gristle, Aphex Twin, Broadcast and more. 

We have a truly exceptional record to accompany this month’s magazine – a White Noise white vinyl seven-inch featuring Radiophonic Workshop remixes of two of the pivotal tracks on ‘An Electric Storm’. The A-side is a glorious version of ‘Love Without Sound’, the album’s mesmerising opener, which has been remixed twice – initially by David Vorhaus and then by Radiophonic Workshop composer and archivist Mark Ayres. The B-side is ‘A Revisitation’, an intense overhaul of the chilling ‘The Visitation’ which somehow manages to be even more disturbing than the original. 

‘LOVE WITHOUT SOUND’ 

“This is a remix of a remix,” says Vorhaus. “Before Delia and I wrote the original song, I hadn’t written anything since I was around 12 years old. I thought that first song of mine was very good and so did my music teacher… until we realised it was the tune to ‘Yes! We Have No Bananas’.

“I got my friend from school, John Whitman, who had a great bass voice, to sing ’Love Without Sound’. After we played it back, we decided it was too slow and we sped up the tape. So that’s not John’s voice how it sounds in reality. It’s very android-like, somewhere between male and female. It was lucky everything seemed to work – including stuff that didn’t.”

“David had been working on updating the track for a while,” notes Ayres. “He gave me the stems, so I went away and came up with this version. It was supposed to have been a piece for a Radiophonic Workshop gig, with David and his current White Noise partner Mike Painter performing it, but the gig didn’t happen for some reason. This is going back a decade or so.

“Everything about ‘Love Without Sound’ was complicated. There was no multitrack when it was recorded, just a teetering pile of quarter-inch tapes in David’s studio. They were disposed of years ago, which is frustrating. So it was nice to strip the track down a bit for this version – the ambient section in the middle, for example – and let it shine.”

‘A REVISITATION’

“We put across the story of the song, with the dead motorcyclist and the weeping girlfriend, through the sounds,” explains Vorhaus. “The idea was to create something entirely new rather than just mimic acoustic instruments electronically. That would have been like artificial food flavourings, which is the last thing you want in electronic music.

“It took us three months to make ‘The Visitation’. We were cutting every single note together on tape. You don’t want to have to do it all over again, so you have to try and keep your vision for the end product in your mind the whole time. The crying was provided by a girl called Susie, who was John Whitman’s sister. Quite a lot of the contributions on the album came from family and friends.”

“I worked on it using the demixing algorithms we have now,” says Ayres. “I think it feels like a very dark version of The Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader Of The Pack’ – you know, with the guy dying and the girl sobbing. I did remove quite a lot of the sobbing, though. I felt that there was too much of it and it was a bit exploitative.

“‘An Electric Storm’ is a brilliant album, but some of the aspects are a little troubling by today’s standards. You have to bear in mind the changes that have happened in society since then. With ‘A Revisitation’, my intention was to do something that had the same effect… although with a post-feminist perspective. Delia Derbyshire did say she was a post-feminist before there was feminism, which I think is true, but we are where we are now.”

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