f Desmond Leslie is spoken of at all, it’s usually for something unconnected to his musical life. Most famously, eleven million viewers watched him punch theatre critic Bernard Levin during an edition of early 60s satirical TV show That Was The Week That Was for savaging a show that starred his wife. Levin’s obituaries described Leslie only as an expert on unidentified flying objects. Check the Internet Movie Database and you’ll see him billed as a screenwriter and director. Second hand booksellers advertise his science fiction novels. This release, the first time his music has been readily and commercially available, will hopefully establish him in the slowly growing pantheon of UK electronic music pioneers.

In Europe, musique concrete and electronic music received serious critical attention as well as funding from the state and private sectors as part of an attempted break with a culture that had culminated in the Second World War. The Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958 featured a combination of Modernist architecture by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis and a multiple speaker presentation of the Poème Électronique for tape recorder by Edgard Varèse. In Britain at the same time, things were a little different. Composers interested in using new sounds and techniques ended up working for the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop or for library music companies. Like fellow Trunk Records reissuee Basil Kirchin, this is where Leslie’s music ended up. Whilst European students were attending summer courses at Darmstadt, Leslie was writing letters to the publishers of his music to complain that it wasn’t being used anywhere.

The tape music that he created is not forbidding or austere but raw and alive, with strong rhythmic motivation. The first tracks, “The Day the Sky Fell In,” bear a similarity with Jean-Claude Vannier’s recently reissued L’Enfant Assassin des Mouches. There the narrative told of a child torturing flies; here they are tortured by a scientist. Mixed in with the multitracked buzzings of the flies are motor drones, piano chords with the attack mixed out and sudden, vertiginous drops and climbs as the varispeed on the tape recorder is played with. “Sacrifice, BC 5,000” plays echoed drums against a fuzzy monophonic synth line, “a stone age reed” according to Leslie, before the listener is engulfed by reverbed, in-the-red recorder grot. “Death of Satan” takes the lift down into hell. Devils chitter all around and as a recurring motif there is the devil’s elevator music, a filtered melody that wouldn’t be out of place on a French house record. At the end of the trip, and the album, there are the bells of the dies irae, but the day of judgement now sounds like goofy fun.

Sitting at night listening to this record quietly enough on headphones that I can also hear the squeak of my turntable spinning and the sounds of voices and boats and geese coming through my open window makes this record sound open and beautiful. These are sounds with the ability to mix with the environment around them. As Desmond says at the end of his sleeve notes, “Sit back and enjoy yourself. My musique concrete is meant to be enjoyed.”