Any mention of Woodstock calls to mind imagery so time-worn that it doesn’t bear elaboration here, from an era so steeped in lore that future generations would scarcely be able to see past its myth to a more insightful understanding of its musical predilections. It was at this easy to identify cultural moment that psychedelic music became synonymous in the American popular imagination with flower power, muddy hippies, and utopian left-wing politics. While a lighter, more accessible kind of psychedelic music enjoyed popular acclaim in the late 60s, thanks more than anything to Woodstock and festivals like it, the roots of America’s fascination with the psychedelic can be traced to a much headier and technical kind of musical experimentation—one that was less reliant on overt political messages than its festival-hopping counterparts. Today, an imbalanced view of psychedelic music as little more than the preferred mode for students with acoustic guitars and protests to stage has become an ever more rose-colored kind of nostalgic historical glasses, obscuring our view of just how profound the cultural foment of the 60s really was.

Before psychedelic music came to be primarily identified with Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” it was the sole province of the most serious experimental avant-garde music collectives, artist communities, and professional projects. One of the earliest of these, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, was created in 1958 to produce sound effects and new music for the BBC’s radio broadcasts. The techniques initially used by the Radiophonic Workshop were closely related to a technique called musique concrete, a genre founded by Pierre Schaffer in 1948 based in the use and manipulation of actual (“concrete”) sounds sampled or recorded from everyday life, as opposed to musique abstraite, “abstract” classical music which is traditionally composed by writing down a score that is later performed by musicians. In the Workshop, new sounds for programs were created by using recordings of everyday sounds such as voices, bells, or gravel as raw material for “radiophonic” manipulations. In these manipulations, audio tape was played back at different speeds (altering a sound’s pitch), reversed, cut and joined, and often processed using reverb or equalization.

These techniques were employed by Workshop heavyweights Delia Derbyshire, who has been called “the unsung heroine of British electronic music,” and Unit Delta Plus bandmates Peter Zinovieff and Brian Hodgson. Among the group’s most well-known creations using “radiophonic” techniques was the Doctor Who theme music, which attracted wider attention to their experimental sound. American David Vorhaus, classical musician who dodged the draft by coming to the UK to study electronics, was so inspired by a lecture given by Unit Delta Plus that he persuaded Derbyshire and Hodgson to collaborate with him on a pop-oriented release. The early stages of the project, what would eventually be entitled An Electric Storm and recorded under the moniker White Noise, impressed Island’s Chris Blackwell so much he commissioned the entire album.

Its first track, “Love Without Sound,” co-written by Delia Derbyshire, was the first song completed by White Noise and the one that got them the Island deal. All strings are double-bass parts played by David Vorhaus, sped up to sound like violins, cellos and violas. “Firebird” has a sweeping cinematic feel that dissolves into bleeps, whooshes, and gurgles that (to contemporary listeners) will sound reminiscent of Broadcast’s work on Haha Sound. “The Visitation” is a psychedelic reinterpretation of “Leader of the Pack” with an otherworldly twist. In this version, post-sexual revolution, the dead rebel attempts to cross over and console his grieving girlfriend, only to fail rather miserably.

Even to many who feel familiar with psychedelic music, White Noise will provide an introduction to the world of the frequency shifter and signal generator—a world that existed before the advent of synthesizer, where a sample was the length of a recording tape deftly spliced in place. An Electric Storm is justly celebrated among electronic music buffs as one of the first albums to fuse pop and electronic elements before the Moog, and is still prized among collectors and lovers of space-rock. It is the sound of a culture on the verge, treading bravely into the unknown, an imaginary future that is, thankfully, far spookier than our present.

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