Langham Research Centre

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Langham Research Centre
Langham Research Centre with tape spools, in 2011.jpg
Langham Research Centre with empty tape spools
Background information
Genres Musique concrète, experimental
Years active2003 (2003)–present
Labels Sub Rosa, Nonclassical, Econore, Never Anything Records
Members
Website www.langhamresearch.co.uk

Langham Research Centre is a group devoted to authentic performances of classic electronic music, and the creation of new music from their instrumentarium of vintage analogue devices. Founded in August 2003, they comprise the composers / producers Felix Carey, Iain Chambers, Philip Tagney, and Robert Worby. Their new music follows in the traditions of the Radiophonic Workshop, using reel-to-reel tape machines, sine wave oscillators and other vintage machinery abandoned by the BBC.

Radiophonic works include two editions of BBC Radio 3's Between The Ears: guest+host=ghost, [1] featuring Peter Blegvad and Nick Cave; and Gateshead multi-storey car park, [2] featuring the infamous building from Get Carter. [3]

Their work includes OBAMIX, a musique concrète chorale for treated soprano, setting extracts from 3 of Barack Obama's defining speeches. This premiered in February 2013 with soprano Alwynne Pritchard performing alongside Langham Research Centre at London's Kings Place. LRC have since performed OBAMIX at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and at the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.

In March 2013, Langham Research Centre's new work, Eschatology, was performed with Peter Blegvad at Borealis festival in Bergen, Norway and later broadcast live in 2014 on BBC Radio 3.

In April 2013 LRC performed music by John Cage at London's Barbican Centre alongside pianist Ian Pace and mezzo-soprano Catherine Carter, as part of the Barbican's Bride and the Bachelors exhibition, featuring the work of Marcel Duchamp, Cage, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

Langham Research Centre released John Cage - Early Electronic and Tape Music, an acclaimed LP/CD of new realisations of John Cage's music on the Sub Rosa label in April 2014. [4]

In May 2014, Ny Musikk Oslo commissioned Langham Research Centre to write Muffled Cyphers, a new work in response to J. G. Ballard's 1970 modernist novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. The piece - for amplified small sounds, sine-wave oscillators and tape - was premiered at the 2014 Only Connect festival in Oslo, Norway, with slide projections by Jeremy Welsh.

In 2016 the group presented The Dark Tower, a new concert work for Spitalfields Music Summer Festival, responding to the life and work of Nikola Tesla. The work was premiered in the Pathology Museum of St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. They toured the UK with the Goldfield Ensemble, performing repertoire inspired by Cold War era technology.

In 2017 Langham Research Centre appeared at Tower Bridge's Bascule Chamber Concerts as part of Totally Thames Festival, creating a contemporary response to Handel's Water Music, exactly 300 years after that work's premiere on the Thames. [5] The concerts featured a second new piece by the group, a work for clarinet and electronics, performed by LRC and Kate Romano.

2017 also saw the release of the first album of Langham Research Centre's own studio work, Tape Works Vol. 1, on the Nonclassical label reflects a range of works from LRC's early “musique concrète” miniatures to recent modular works of extended duration. [6]

In 2021 the group released Tape Works Vol. 2, [7] also through Nonclassical. The album has a focus on space and architecture, and features location recordings at Tate Modern, Orford Ness, Barbican Centre, and brutalist buildings at Ivry-sur-Seine and Bobigny in Paris. The track Dinotique also features extracts from composer Luc Ferrari's 2002 work, Les Anecdotiques.

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Electronic music is a genre of music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments, or circuitry-based music technology in its creation. It includes both music made using electronic and electromechanical means. Pure electronic instruments depended entirely on circuitry-based sound generation, for instance using devices such as an electronic oscillator, theremin, or synthesizer. Electromechanical instruments can have mechanical parts such as strings, hammers, and electric elements including magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Such electromechanical devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, electric piano and the electric guitar.

Musique concrète is a type of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material. Sounds are often modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and may be assembled into a form of sound collage. It can feature sounds derived from recordings of musical instruments, the human voice, and the natural environment as well as those created using sound synthesis and computer-based digital signal processing. Compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, and metre. The technique exploits acousmatic sound, such that sound identities can often be intentionally obscured or appear unconnected to their source cause.

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References

  1. ↑ "BBC - (none) - Between The Ears - Guest + Host = Ghost". Bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 27 June 2020.
  2. ↑ "'Doors are an ongoing interest'". The Guardian . 15 June 2005. Retrieved 27 June 2020.
  3. ↑ "Radio review: Storeys to tell". The Guardian . 20 June 2005. Retrieved 27 June 2020.
  4. ↑ "Sub Rosa - John Cage". Subrosa.net. Retrieved 27 June 2020.
  5. ↑ "Iain Chambers returns to fill the atmospheric subterranean space at Tower Bridge". Totallythames.org. Retrieved 27 June 2020.
  6. ↑ "Tape Works Vol. 1, by Langham Research Centre".
  7. ↑ https://nonclassical.bandcamp.com/album/tape-works-vol-2%7Ctitle=Tape Works Vol. 2 - Langham Research Centre
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