Oramics: Atlantis Anew

“We will be entering a strange world where composers will be mingling with capacitors, computers will be controlling crotchets and, maybe, memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards metaphysics.” Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1971).

Conceived of as an Artist’s film in homage to Daphne Oram, the pioneer of British Electronic Music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958, the film features a close-up encounter with her unique invention, the Oramics Machine, housed at the Science Museum in London.Oram used drawn sound principles to compose ‘handwrought’electronic music, and yet the visual nature of her work remains largely unseen and unsung. The film brings this obsolete technological fantasy briefly to back to life, enabling the visualisation of the drawn sound material, re-interpreting and translating it into new filmic sequences.The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Oram, interlaced with her voicover reading excerpts from a first draft of her book “An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics” (1971).