Roberto Gerhard Electronic Explorations From His Studio + The BBC Radiophonic Workshop 1958-1967

During the 1950s and 1960s, Roberto Gerhard gathered a significant magnetic tape collection in his home studio, creating a major repository of early electronic sound recordings of his own works. The pieces on this record present a complex set of challenges for audio restoration, giving at the end a complete understanding of his compositional process and allowing the spirit and vitality of his electronic work to speak clearly to the listener. The versions of the pieces you will hear on this record represent an attempt to present Gerhard's musical thoughts as free as possible from distracting technical deficiencies that obscure the musical content of the tapes. To this end a number of processes have been employed to reduce tape hiss and broadband noise, clicks, crackle, mains hum, tape splices and low frequency thuds, ranging from automated algorithms to a more painstaking manual cleanup of the audio spectrum. Every process of musical audio restoration must seek a compromise between the removal of elements that are problematic to the modern listener, and the preservation of the vital sonic and musical characteristics of the recordings.