Delia

During the time the Beatles and the EMI engineers were looking for a new sound, electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire had been doing exactly that just around the corner from Abbey Road at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (see the fantastic book Re-Sister by Cosey Fanni Tutti). Delia had studied Music and Maths and she often thought in mathematical terms, like in the Fibonacci series (growing pattern in nature that can repeated in musical rhythm patterns) and she also thought that everyday sound could be made into music, it only needed to be organized. I was thinking how to get her into the radioplay.

When Delia was 14 she wrote a story in school. It was about a double bass that was living a little music shop and got mocked by the other instruments, calling him little Willie. The double bass was insecure and also bored that all the instruments played the same standards. Willie sighed, blowing dust in the air, making himself sneeze! Suddenly he made a sound he had never heard before, and the other instruments were scared, and then amused. Willie discovered a new sound.

I used the story as a guideline for the sound atmosphere and a song I wanted to record and I already knew where I wanted to record this idea. During the Corona years, I started studying for the second time (Musicology and Information Science). I came across the Media Archaeology Workshop at Humboldt University in Berlin that is based in a cellar just down the street from the Musicology Department (across from the Pergamonmuseum and on the same street where Angela Merkel is living.)

The Media Archaeology Workshop is one room where the Department for Media (and Musicology) collect all kinds of objects of media history. It’s not an archive, but more a loose assembly of objects put on shelves, numbered, ready to be used by students and anyone interested. The collections of universities are often rich and full of treasures.

I orderd a lot of stuff, from Overtone Generators, Toys with Computer Voices, Synths, an old Shellac Postcard, a Theremin, an Ondes Martenot (the oldest electronic instrument) and more. Thanks to Constantin Matt Roth and Loisa Liebchen for helping me set up. Special thanks to Dr. Christina Dörfling. She helped explain how the objects worked (and often the whole complicated inner technology of things) and let me use her self-built instruments. Christina Dörfling is working at the Musicology Department and researches about early electronic instruments and female instrument inventors. Thanks a lot for this great sound experience and all the support!

The final Song I prodcued with the recorded sounds, ‘The Sneeze’, was mixed by Filippo Schelde.