walls/oram: sound houses

Sound Houses is an album that sees Walls exploring the sonic archive of the late Daphne Oram -- composer, inventor and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram's otherworldly sonic experiments with synthesis and music concrète primarily in the 1960s were decades ahead of their time, her musical legacy unjustly overlooked until recent years when the increasing fascination of modern culture with all things analog has cemented her status internationally as a pioneer and key figure in the development of electronic music and the recording studio. Anglo/Italian electronic duo Walls were permitted to select choice recordings from Daphne's voluminous tape archive of sounds following a commission from the BBC -- these fearsome otherworldly drones, alien FX and violin and cello-esque tones were harnessed, shaped and sculpted into new forms, with additional augmentation of further synthesizer wash, guitar loops, found sound and treated voice by Walls to create unique new pieces of music that join the dots between 1960 and 2013. Indeed, the duo through their reading discovered Oram's fascination with Sir Francis Bacon's noted tract from 1640 "Wee also have sound houses," which Oram had pinned to the wall of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop wall for inspiration. In his prophetic piece, Bacon predicts some of the workings of the modern studio, through flights of fancy and the idea of transformation of sound -- ideas which ring through the years still today. "We found the poem immensely alluring and inspiring" explains Walls' Sam Willis, "the language is so magical it really resonated with us in its primal, and imaginative description of sound." The resulting album, Sound Houses is a unique splicing of Walls' modern/vintage sound palette with Oram's 1960s futurism to create an unprecedented sonic journey for the listener. First pressing limited to 500 copies on clear vinyl.