When the warm, war­bly, slight­ly-out-of-tune sounds of the ear­ly Moog syn­the­siz­er met the del­i­cate fig­ures of Bach’s con­cer­tos, suites, pre­ludes, fugues, and airs in Wendy Car­los’ 1968 Switched-on Bach, the result rein­vig­o­rat­ed pop­u­lar inter­est in clas­si­cal music and helped launch the careers of sev­en­ties Moog syn­the­sists like com­pos­er of instru­men­tal hit “Pop­corn,” Ger­shon Kings­ley; occultist and com­pos­er of TV themes and jin­gles, Mort Gar­son; and pio­neer­ing dis­co pro­duc­er Gior­gio Moroder. These were not the kind of musi­cians, nor the kind of music, of which Car­los approved. She was mor­ti­fied to have her album mar­ket­ed as a nov­el­ty record or, lat­er, as instru­men­tal pop.

The reclu­sive Car­los’ inter­pre­ta­tions of Beethoven and moody orig­i­nals defined the sound of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing. This sound­track work may be one of the few things Car­los has in com­mon with leg­endary BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop com­pos­er and cre­ator of the eerie Doc­tor Who theme, Delia Der­byshire. But where Car­los’ film scores evoke an omi­nous, oth­er­world­ly grandeur, Derbyshire’s sound­tracks, made for radio and tele­vi­sion, use more prim­i­tive elec­tron­ic tech­niques to con­jure weird­er, and in some ways creepi­er, atmos­pheres.

The 1971 com­pi­la­tion album BBC Radio­phon­ic Music, for exam­ple, con­tains music from three of the Workshop’s most promi­nent composers—Derbyshire, John Bak­er, and David Cain—and fea­tures one of her most famous themes, “Ziwz­ih Ziwz­ih Oo-Oo-Oo,” which crit­ic Robin Car­mody described as “her most ter­ri­fy­ing moment, tum­bling into a night­mare, the sound of child­hood at its most chill­ing.” The work she did for the Radio­phon­ic Work­shop was not intend­ed to be par­tic­u­lar­ly musi­cal at all. Work­shop employ­ees were instead expect­ed to be tech­ni­cians of sound, employ­ing new audio tech­nolo­gies for pure­ly dra­mat­ic effect.

“The only way into the work­shop was to be a trainee stu­dio man­ag­er,” Der­byshire remarked in a 2000 inter­view. “This is because the work­shop was pure­ly a ser­vice depart­ment for dra­ma. The BBC made it quite clear that they didn’t employ com­posers and we weren’t sup­posed to be doing music.” Nonethe­less, she applied her tape loops, oscil­la­tors, and oth­er musique con­crete tech­niques to at least one clas­si­cal piece, Bach’s “Air on a G String.” The result­ing inter­pre­ta­tion sounds entire­ly dif­fer­ent from Car­los’ elec­tric Bach. It is, Car­mody writes, “an ice-cold noc­tur­nal rewrite… the stuff of a sev­en-year-old child’s most unfor­get­table night­mares.” The piece does not seem to have been made for a BBC pro­duc­tion. Der­byshire her­self dis­missed the record­ing as “rub­bish,” though she admit­ted “it has a fair num­ber of admir­ers.”

Soon after its release, in a 1:44 snip­pet on the com­pi­la­tion album, Der­byshire left the Work­shop to pur­sue her own musi­cal direc­tion. She com­posed music for the stage and screen, then became dis­il­lu­sioned with the music indus­try alto­geth­er. The avail­abil­i­ty of the ana­log syn­the­siz­ers pop­u­lar­ized by Car­los’ record had ren­dered her way of mak­ing music obso­lete. But as the many recent trib­utes to Derbyshire’s lega­cy tes­ti­fy, her work has been as influ­en­tial as that of the ear­ly ana­log synth com­posers, on every­one from the Bea­t­les to con­tem­po­rary exper­i­men­tal artists. Der­byshire’s play­ful weird­ness has been oft-imi­tat­ed over the decades, but no one has ever inter­pret­ed Bach quite like this before or since.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Doc­u­men­taries Intro­duce Delia Der­byshire, the Pio­neer in Elec­tron­ic Music

The Fas­ci­nat­ing Sto­ry of How Delia Der­byshire Cre­at­ed the Orig­i­nal Doc­tor Who Theme

Lis­ten to an Archive of Record­ings by Delia Der­byshire, the Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer & Com­pos­er of the Dr. Who Theme Song

Wendy Car­los’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Clas­si­cal Synth Record Intro­duced the World to the Moog

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Bri­an Eno may not have invent­ed ambi­ent music, but he did give it a name. What bet­ter to call an album like his 1978 Music for Air­ports, whose slow­ly shift­ing pieces forego not just melody but all then-accept­ed meth­ods of com­po­si­tion and per­for­mance? The result, as its title sug­gests, is meant not to occu­py the inten­tion of the lis­ten­er but to col­or the atmos­phere of a space. This marked one evo­lu­tion­ary step for an idea Eno first essayed in 1975’s Dis­creet Music, issued on his own label Obscure Records in an era when much of the music peo­ple lis­tened to was any­thing but dis­creet. Record­ing tech­nol­o­gy first made ambi­ent music pos­si­ble; by the mid-1980s, video tech­nol­o­gy had devel­oped to the point that it could pos­sess a visu­al dimen­sion as well.

Just as Eno’s ambi­ent music was­n’t made for lis­ten­ing, Eno’s “video paint­ings,” as he called them, weren’t made for view­ing. 1981’s Mis­tak­en Mem­o­ries of Medieval Man­hat­tan, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, cap­tures the urban land­scape out­side from Eno’s New York win­dow — iron­i­cal­ly, with a por­trait ori­en­ta­tion, so that any TV dis­play­ing it had to be turned on its side.

Thurs­day After­noon, the next in the series, looks not to the built envi­ron­ment but that oth­er tra­di­tion­al sub­ject of paint­ing, the female form: specif­i­cal­ly that of Eno’s friend, pho­tog­ra­ph­er Chris­tine Ali­ci­no. Here video mak­ing pos­si­ble some­thing tru­ly new, with no artis­tic con­nec­tion to, as Eno put it, “Sting’s new rock video” or “bor­ing, grimy ‘Video Art.’ ”

But just like a Hol­ly­wood movie, Thurs­day After­noon had an epony­mous sound­track album. Released in 1985, it cut the 80-minute video paint­ing’s ambi­ent score down to an unbro­ken track of near­ly 61 min­utes, a length made pos­si­ble by the recent­ly intro­duced Com­pact Disc. “Played” on an acoustic piano and syn­the­siz­ers, the music shifts sub­tly in tex­ture through­out the hour, cre­at­ing a son­ic envi­ron­ment that many have found high­ly con­ge­nial for work­ing, think­ing, and relax­ing. I myself have lis­tened to it hun­dreds of times over the past twen­ty years, and in the form of a Youtube video paint­ing made by fan Jonathan Jol­ly, it’s racked up more than four mil­lion views. The col­or-treat­ed time-lapse footage of pass­ing clouds fits right in with the spir­it of the music, and it cer­tain­ly seems to do the trick for the video’s com­menters, grate­ful as they are for reduced anx­i­eties, recov­ered mem­o­ries, increased focus, and even altered con­scious­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Decon­struct­ing Bri­an Eno’s Music for Air­ports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Ground­break­ing Ambi­ent Music

A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Ver­sion of Bri­an Eno’s Music For Air­ports: Med­i­tate, Relax, Study

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.