Sonic Router

Practical Electronica: The Work of F.C Judd

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Early one morning in late December, after waking up to an impending hangover and a spectacular bout of heartburn, I sat up watching countless television spots and documentaries about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the forgotten composers whose pioneering work in electronic recording techniques often gets a little overlooked. Amongst the footage of John Baker, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and the like, somewhere within the reams of tape and the clunky, primitive instruments strewed around the rooms, it was easy to see the majesty of the processes they were toying with; and it’s impossible, even for me, to gloss over the affect that musique concrète, and the other sounds they championed, has had on modern music.

Those early electro acoustic experiments and the ones like it that were researched and constructed across the world in sound laboratories much like the BBC’s fabled Workshop, really do go a lot further, and a lot deeper than the warbles on episodes of the Clangers or the Doctor Who theme tune. Their work infected a lot of young minds and it continues to inspire people to think outside of the realms of Logic’s in-built synthesizers. There’s a method and a deep involvement that went into the aural (and tape) manipulation of the sounds that everyday objects make when you hit them and it’s a process that’s fascinated me since as a teenager I heard the end squall of Queen Of The Stone Age’s ‘I Was A Teenage Hand Model’ – not that the noisy ending of the said song has anything to do with the concrète approach, per se; it’s just that the oscillations really penetrated something in me; and looking back at it now I can kind of draw some kind of a shallow parallel.

Without veering off into completely irrelevant territory, it’s amongst these first experiments into sound processing that the work of one Frederick Charles Judd should exist. A lost British electronic music pioneer and a Radiophonic contemporary, Judd was locked into building machines and a wide range of electronic activities during the 1950s and 60s. The author of 11 books on the subject of his work he also made a synthesizer that pre dates anything like the Moog etc without having any formal training. He devised Chromasonics, a way to visualize sound in full colour using an old television and signals sent from tone generators or tape recorders; he recorded the first entirely electronic soundtrack (using no conventionally scored music) for British Television, on a science fiction puppet show called Space Patrol and he was, rather fittingly, made editor of Amateur Tape Recording magazine in 1963, after a three year period as technical editor.

Electronics was simply Judd’s overriding passion. And it’s that passion that the guys behind the Public Information label seem to share as together they’ve spent 18 months trawling through Judd’s personal archive to produce Electronics Without Tears, a 60 minute collection of the man’s experiments in sound.

“Me and Lionel (co-founder) get the buzz from an awful lot of musical styles, genres, tips,” label spokesman Alex Wilson explains. “We’re coming at it from different, but inter-connected angles. I’m incredibly privileged to work at the British Library and the Sound Archive, a place where I’m enveloped by four million recordings: a sound-utopia. Whereas Lionel is working daily alongside the new music world, yet we share similar tastes. We’re equally comfortable in the Berghain Techno cauldron as the Classical Concert Hall… we’re also format-heads… that perfect symphony of art and design on wax and disc. Public Information exists to chase these passions and serve them up to as many as possible.”

The story behind ‘Electronics Without Tears’ is fascinating. I mean as a character integral to the progression of British electronic music he was something of an unsung hero right? A genius machine maker and experimental sound designer rolled into one…

You’ve put it beautifully there; Fred was indeed a genius… Lauded by a small army of Radio /DIY Electronics enthusiasts in the sixties, but few others, it was nevertheless his most fertile period. Working away feverishly in his front room, building proto-drum machines, crafting one of the very earliest synthesizers in the world (pre-dating Moog), using his innate electronics/physics background to build all manner of generators, oscillators, sound-shapers. And then came his most cherished, a bold very 60’s idea – Chromasonics… a fusion of trippy avant-garde light projection with sound… in Fred’s system, tones would trigger images, a mad psychedelic riot. From the few reels of it I’ve seen, Chromasonics looks incredible.

By the early seventies, disillusioned, he’d pretty much given up making music altogether, yet was still heralded by a burgeoning consumer electronics industry. I’m told by Freda (his widow) that a young Alan Sugar once came to their house asking Fred to join his “Computer” company and that “they’d be millionaires”, the Judd’s were instantly put off by the brashness of this young man, and rejected his approaches. But this just shows how highly regarded he was outside of music. Sadly, he has been overlooked by the established Electronic Music Canon and indeed the wider British Music History, Electronics Without Tears hopes to resolve that.

How did you come across his music yourself?

A close colleague at work alerted me to a project a friend of his (Ian Helliwell) was up to. Namely making a film, that would later be called Practical Electronica, about some 60’s electronics nut called Fred. I was fairly obsessive about the [Radiophonic] Workshop at this point and decided to chase it up. 18 months later, through many reels of tape we’ve both travelled, by many emails shared, by countless clicks and pops we’ve traversed, and with un-ending enthusiasm and support from the Judd’s we’ve finally arrived at something manageable and exciting. It’s been well worth the graft.

The Workshop is something I’ve been making a concerted effort to research. The general consensus feels like the pioneers weren’t given that much, or anywhere near enough, credit for what they were doing at the time, pre-synthesizers. Where would you put Judd’s work amongst that batch of artists like Derbyshire, Oram, Baker et al?

Fred was just one of many “Backroom Boffins” operating in the 60’s and 70’s -in this country and beyond; but as is often the case, history has largely pointed its lens to those established institutions and figureheads like Scott, Stockhausen, Moog, et al, leaving the marginal characters resigned to the footnotes – and none more so than in this country. Whilst the Radiophonic Workshop was a truly pioneering zone of innovation, it was very much rooted in BBC internal politics and circumstance, closed off to all but those who were employed within. Daphne Oram got disillusioned so soon departed the body she co-founded, while Fred hovered at its fringes and was never subsumed into its inner circle.

Regardless of all that, the pre-synth world, making stuff with tape, electro-acoustics and musique concrete is just incredible, mind-melting music. It’s obvious to point out, but what can be done in minutes through a program like Logic, was incredibly labour intensive to these cats. According to notes, Fred’s own ‘Tempotune’ (a two and half minute electronic-rhythm-pop ditty) took over 100 hours to compose. That’s many days of cutting and splicing, of tape manipulation, of recording cardboard boxes, bongo drums and any other household object with percussive potential to create something that still to this day sounds vibrant and alien and thrilling.

This project has been made in close proximity with his widow Freda and Judd’s own personal sound archives. How did you guys find the archive? Where do you even start trying to collate such a compendium from what I imagine to be an incredible body of work?

Ian Helliwell has been instrumental in this process; it’s his baby really. He’s made myriad trips up to Freda’s house in Norfolk, pulling together tapes, documents, illustrations, Fred’s writings for magazines like Practical Electronics, all sorts of ephemera and Fredribilia. Alas many of Fred’s machines were lost in the seventies/eighties and likewise whole swathes of tapes were lost to flood waters, but what has survived we’ve managed to digitise. We have hours of material; field recordings from all over the country, crazy DIY sound FX, Fred at the lecture booth giving sermons to hordes of enthused amateurs about musique concrete and this “new Radiophonic thing”; plus reels of Fred loops and oscillator experiments.

Ultimately the physical collection is gonna live at the British Library Sound Archive, in optimum conditions, away from the perils of any flooding/natural disaster. Hopefully.

What was Ian’s involvement in it? His commitment to it seems to be just as integral to the project as the sounds Judd produced…

Ian is everything to the Judd project, without his determination and amazing breadth of knowledge it wouldn’t have happened. In the Practical Electronica documentary’s opening frames Ian shows super8 footage of Fred’s home studio in East London, he then bookends the film with footage from his own studio in Brighton. It’s a nice bit of visual poetry that draws subtle parallels between the two men. Both tireless experimenters battling away in the circuit boards, in the generators, in the sine tones… despite the decades which separate them, their spirit to this electronic art was/is remarkably alike.

Fred was the quintessential bedroom boffin, doing it all off his own back, and it’s this same restless courage to experiment that has coursed through electronic music over the years, it’s those characters doing it in the bedroom, those with minimum resources that really appeal to Public Information. We can trace a path from Fred to the Vinyl Scratch to the 303 acid line to Helliwell’s homemade machines to a kid knocking out beats on Fruity Loops. It’s a mad ride…

After modern day made releases from people like ADR and No UFO’s does this project mark the start of many restorative projects? I mean, I fully realise the depth and scope of effort thats gone into this Judd album, what’s next?

I don’t wanna say too much at this point but we do have a few more “archival” releases lined up for this year, with some more in the early research stages. There’s some Canadian Library Music set for late spring and then another Big Early Electronics Find compiled by Ian Helliwell set for end-of 2012 drop, it’s staggering, heavy tackle. Aside from that the next release will be from Bristol, from way inside the Ekoplekz and then we turn our attention to techno/house projects and then…

It’s about striking the right balance, Public Information wants to serve up these archival releases in the midst of the new stuff, without the blink of an eye, old-meaning-new and vice versa.

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FC Judd’s Electronics Without Tears is out 16th January through Public Information. For further reading head to www.fcjudd.co.uk.

Helliwell’s documentary Practical Electronica is being screened at WIRE Salon at Cafe Oto in Dalston, London on 9th of February. More info on that here.