8 March 2023 12.00pm – 3.00pm

Join us to celebrate International Women’s Day with a look back at the ground-breaking work of Delia Derbyshire, the Coventry-born electronic music pioneer who inspired The City is Full of Noises Festival.

In honour of the occasion, we’ll be screening Kara Blake’s 2009 documentary The Delian Mode and The White Noise: An Audio Feature in Stereophonic Hell, produced for Delia Derbyshire Day 2019. 

THE DELIAN MODE (2009)

Taking its name from a piece of incidental music written by Derbyshire in the 1960s, The Delian Mode is an award-winning, experimental film profiling the pioneering Coventry composer Delia Derbyshire, who is now best remembered for her work on the Doctor Who theme tune. Created in the spirit of Delia’s unique approach to audio creation and manipulation, Blake’s 25-minute short illuminates her soundscapes on screen while paying tribute to a woman whose work has influenced electronic musicians for decades.

The film features interviews with Brian Hodgson and Dick Mills of the now defunct BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the founder of Electronic Music Studios Peter Zinovieff, musicians Peter Kember (Sonic Boom), Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Ann Shenton (Add N to X) as well as other friends and colleagues of Delia.

THE WHITE NOISE: AN AUDIO FEATURE IN STEREOPHONIC HELL (2019)

The White Noise: An Audio Feature in Stereophonic Hell is a collage of audio arranged and edited by David Butler with video by Andrea Pazos produced for Delia Derbyshire Day 2019, which honoured the 50th anniversary of An Electric Storm by White Noise (Island Records, 1969). The 23-minute film is made in the spirit of the four Inventions for Radio, a collaboration between Delia Derbyshire and the dramatist Barry Bermange. Using sounds and voices, the illustrates the story of White Noise’s album – how it came to be made, its distinctive qualities, cultural significance and ongoing influence on artists today.

All the voices were recorded from life and arranged in a setting of radiophonic sound in twelve movements. Drawing on music and sound design by Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and David Vorhaus from the Kaleidophon years when An Electric Storm was made and released, the feature includes interviews with Ian Campbell, Chris Carter, Ian Heliwell, Suzy Mangion, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Adrian Utley, Martyn Ware and Mandy Wigby as well as an original arrangement and performance of ‘Firebird’ by Morris Clarke.