Langham Research Centre

Six Hands at an Open Door

2023

Six Hands at an Open Door is a new collaboration between Langham Research Centre and John Butcher.

Tape Works (Vol. 2)

2021

Tape Works (Vol. 2) presents recent concert pieces that utilize recordings made in specific locations, in addition to an array of analogue devices and sound producing objects, some of which feature in the album’s cover art.

Brutalist buildings are a recurrent feature on the album. They are an architectural manifestation of late modernism: the arts and ideas movement that has long fascinated the group.

On Tape Works (Vol. 2) there is a parade of inspirational concrete structures, from the echoing ramp of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (Terminal Voltage Traces) to the Paris architecture of Le Corbusier, Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet (A Return to Spatial Futures).

Dinotique features recordings from London’s Barbican Centre, whilst in Accarezzo even the remote shingle of Orford Ness is accompanied by recordings from the site’s concrete ‘pagodas’ in which the UK’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment once worked.

Quanta / Signal / Noise

2020

Quanta / Signal / Noise follows in the musical tradition established by mid-20th century composers, who shifted the focus away from the conventional building blocks of music: notes and harmony articulated by rhythms mapped onto grids of steady pulses. Instead, they focused on a fascination with sound itself: its unfolding textures, shapes, energies and dynamics.

Four orchestrations follow similar compositional contours that combine into one interactive work in a free iOS app, "Langham Research Centre: Quanta / Signal / Noise”, produced in collaboration with London College of Music at the University of West London. The app enables users to explore the four realisations of Quanta / Signal / Noise.

A Return to Spatial Futures

2019

Music created from location sounds recorded in and around key brutalist buildings in Paris, taking inspiration from the utopian concepts found in these late modern designs. The geometry of the buildings informs the structure of the music. Both visual and acoustic observations of line, plane, volume, scale, proportion, location, intersection, superimposition and interaction within space all impact on what can be heard. This is music derived from sound actions that convey the experience of these buildings aurally.

Gateshead Multi-storey Car Park

2018

Gateshead Multi-storey Car Park was a polarising brutalist structure designed by Rodney Gordon, Owen Luder and Rob Worthington of the Owen Luder Partnership in 1962. Despite its widespread prominence after its use as a key set in the 1971 crime film 'Get Carter', the structure soon fell into dilapidation.

Before teardown commenced on July 26th 2010, Langham Research Centre composed a piece made entirely from sounds of the car park.

Tape Reworks

2018

Langham Research Centre’s radiophonic experiments are twisted into new shapes on Tape Reworks Vol. 1, a split EP featuring remixes by renowned experimental musician Jim O’Rourke and Berlin-based industrial band group A.

On Side A, Jim O’Rourke uses ‘Quasar Melodics’ as his source material, transforming fizzing grains of sound into an oceanic swirl of noise. On the flip, group A find metallic rhythms and eerie melancholy in ‘Perpetual Motion’.

Tics and Ampersands

2018

This music is made using ¼” tape recorders, cassette machines, sine tone oscillators, shortwave radios, and contact microphones. From composers John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pauline Oliveros, Else Marie Pade, Iannis Xenakis, and other modernists, Langham Research Centre have learned much.

Tape Works (Vol. 1)

2017

Tape Works Vol. 1 stands alone as a collection of modern musique concrète. Created with rare and obsolete machinery and inspired by early electronic composers including John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, Tape Works Vol. 1 is the modern incarnation of the work of the original BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Tape Works Vol. 1 documents the origins of Langham Research Centre as a late night experimental gathering in BBC Studios, through to their present day long-form radiophonic works including The Dark Tower, inspired by the life and work of Nikola Tesla, and Muffled Ciphers, inspired by J G Ballard’s most experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). From doors to laughter, field recordings and found sound, nothing is out of bounds on this unique sonic journey.

John Cage

Early Electronic and Tape Music

2014

‘I believe the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.’ — John Cage, 1937