White Noise – ‘An Electric Storm ’69’: an ambient album in the era of analogue
It’s hard to imagine ambient music as we know it arriving in the late 1960s. The genre has seen a steady boom recently thanks partly to our hectic modern lifestyles lending themselves to moments of sonic becalming at the click of a button, but also because of the technology available. That luxury wasn’t afforded to White Noise, and yet this little-known band still managed to painstakingly make a masterpiece that kickstarted the genre long before the event.
The world was on the brink of synthesised keyboards, but they hadn’t yet arrived. Nevertheless, the band looked to tap into the zeitgeist of experimentation and offer a change of pace in the process. This notion came to the London-based band when their American leader, the physicist and classical bass player David Vorhaus, attended a lecture by the electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire. Presently, pioneers like Derbyshire operated as lone outlaws, but Vorhaus wondered what would happen if you applied her wisdom to a band.
So, he approached her and asked if she wanted to join him in a new venture. She said yes. He then asked her fellow BBC composer Brian Hodgson, who had worked with everyone from The Beatles to Dr Who, whether he would like to join. He said yes. Now, you had three of the era’s greatest visionaries forming one of the very first electronic bands ever. The project they had in mind was massive.
Initially, they figured they would produce just one single showcase, a vinyl with an A-side and a B-side, and then perhaps wait for the technology to catch up with them. But when Chris Blackwell of Island Records heard their otherworldly sound, he persuaded them that an album would go down a storm. So, they set about fulfilling that promise and making it an electric one.
But electric records were not a thing. So, they had to endlessly splice everything that they wanted to throw into the mix, such as secret orgasms, by hand. As Vorhaus would explain: “I use voices a lot too, but not as conventional vocals. I always use a lot of voices, and if somebody having an orgasm in the background is used as part of one of the waveforms, it makes the sound more interesting without the listener actually knowing what they’re hearing.”
However, it wasn’t just the yelp of a quivering spasm chasm that he threw into the mix. There is an assortment of instruments that could make up an alien orchestra. These all had to be recorded onto magnetic tape and then cut and spliced precisely to make a uniform orchestration. They had to do this at constant intervals as there were fears at the time that too much exposure to electronic music could cause brain damage. Thereafter, the spliced tapes were then further edited in an analogue fashion by feeding them back through Derbyshire’s bespoke oscillator.
The result is not only an awesomely impressive creation, but a window of history: it is to modern music what ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ was to the internet. Although we have since far surpassed the record, and that can be detected in the deficiencies of the sound compared to modern ambient music, ironically, An Electric Storm is far more unfathomable. And no ambient musician I spoke to knows just how it was made either.
So, while its sound may be imperfect, there is an alchemy to it that flaws you. Of course, it’s nerdy and highfalutin at times, but it is also entrenched with a deeply human pursuit at its core, making it a force to behold. The irony is the album that brought the concept of the band to electronic music also brought about technology that meant modern stars, like Ryan Dann, can now effectively have an orchestra in his bedroom alone, as he poetically put it in our recent chat.
