Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Original Electronica, 16 Nov 2002
This is a legendary album in the eyes of the small group of people that have heard it. It was the brainchild of David Voorhaus, a classically trained bassist who dabbled in electronics. He made his own synthesizers (at that time they didn't have keyboards attached), and along with a couple of part-time members whose full time jobs were with the BBC Radiophonics Workshop they created this from laboriosly splicing pieces of tape together.It's a very unique album that often falters at the songwriting, but the main attraction is the soundscape that has been created in exceptional circumstances. Each track took an eternity to create, and in the end they had so little material for an album that they recorded one track ('An Electric Storm in Hell') live with a drummer. The first side (of the original vinyl version) is an eye opener for sure! It covers a wide variety of moods, subjects and styles. The second side is the real gem here though... 'The Visitation' is a track about a road accident that leads to an out of body experience. It's one of the most fightening tracks that you can ever listen to, coming second only to 'A Black Mass in Hell' which follows it. Someone that I worked with a few years back told a story of when him and his friends used to take large quantities of LSD and one by one sit in his wardrobe with the stereo speakers playing 'The Visitation' and 'A Black Mass in Hell' at full volume. He said that very few of them got to the end before bursting out of the wardrobe screaming... This really is a must for anyone that is interested in the roots of electronica though.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Samplers? What samplers?., 22 Aug 2002
This short (36min) CD was made by moonlighting musicians who had day jobs with the BBC's famous Radiophonic Workshop Musically, it sits at something of an intersection for post-war experimental electronic music... On the one hand, it's possible to hear kinship with Joe Meek's 1960 LP "I Hear A New World" and 50's musique concrete, but also to hear prototypes of some of the more electronic bands of the 70's and 80's, such as Can and Amon Duul II and even, suprisingly, a little 90's dance stuff.
And of course, when this record was made in 1968, the experimental mind-set of psychedelia was still exerting an obvious if waning, influence. A strong album generally, but the best (and trippiest) tracks are The Visitation and the last track, An Electric Storm In Hell. Both very Pink Floyd influenced and using a multitude of primtive elecectronic effects. Here Come The Fleas is possibly the weakest track on the CD, but even that ain't bad once you get past it's novelty comedy value. A unique & unclassifiable record, then. If you consider yourself to be a bit of a fan of electronica, then this CD is a must. And I'll bet my left leg that it's already beeen sampled to hell by those with only a tiny fraction of the imagination & technique. And to think it was all done with the aid of nasty, old-fashioned tape, physically edited, processed, filtered and with not a piece of digital gear or editing software in sight... RIP, Delia Derbyshire. A true pioneer.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Proto electronic psychedelic strangeness from 1969, 4 Aug 2007
I couldn't tell you much about The White Noise - though the sleevenotes to 'An Electric Storm' are more informative- I came to this record through the Delia Derbyshire-connection (Derbyshire, who sadly died a few years ago, was a pioneer most famous for her work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop - recent documentary 'Alchemists of Sound' showed she was making music like Pink Floyd's 'On the Run' in the late 1950s/early 1960s). David Vorhaus, an American-born electronic-enthuasist, is the principal member of The White Noise...
Like the wonderful Silver Apples, The White Noise fused psychedelic elements with experimental electronic music- some of this may sound dated (like Joe Meek, like Silver Apples, like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, like United States of America), but it's always interesting. An album as odd as this you would be hard pressed to find - it certainly predicts such avant-delights as Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV & AR Kane, sometimes drifting across several genres...
'My Game of Loving' sounds like you imagined The Beach Boys' 'Smile' would, drifting off into a series of orgasmic moans amid drum clatter. It's probably worth buying for this alone- the snoring at the end and sampling would be picked up on by Pink Floyd for the silly 'Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast.'Here Come the Fleas' is a comic-slice of pop-oddness, an electronic pop-advance on Van Dyke Parks' 'Song Cycle' and a cacophony of looped-voices colliding...
Delia Derbyshire co-writes two tracks here, the opening 'Love Without Sound' & the fantastic 'Firebird' - the latter sounding not unlike Syd Barrett with strange-futuristic music, which like Silver Apples' 'Program' sounds like a dial of a radio being turned randomly (a history of popular music lurking in the background of a pop song?).
The album gets stranger following the electronic-chanson of 'Your Hidden Dreams' with the 11-minute-plus 'The Visitations' & the closing 'Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell.' These tracks are truly demented, and are multi-layered disturbances that predict the work of Throbbing Gristle - sinister avant noise, screams & moans - the last thing you want to hear alone in the darkness (though 'The Visitations' drifts off into strange fairground music, semi-classical & has prog-ish sounding drums). 'Black Mass...' is pure horror, sounding not unlike a cross between a Gregorian-choir and the sinister voices found in 'The Evil Dead.' Apparently influenced by Pink Floyd's 'A Saucerful of Secrets', it veers off into drum-clatter, alien-drones & the kind of moaning you'd expect to find in an Edgar Allen Poe short-story ('Premature Burial'). 'Black Mass' is one to truly test people and the kind of thing that should be looped with 'Metal Machine Music','Frankie Teardrop','Persuasion','The Cockfighter' & 'Flowers of Romance' if you want to clear the area...
'An Electric Storm' demonstrates how eclectic Island Records was - offering up artists as diverse as Traffic, The Slits, Nick Drake, John Cale, Richard Thompson, Bob Marley, Free, 10CC & Linton Kwesi Johnson. Anyone interested in the roots of electronic music should look here, and if there's an album of proto-electronic psychedelic strangeness from 1969 you want, this is IT!
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