Aeolian Tones (Village of the Angels)

It’s November 21st, 2021. Adele and Ed Sheeran remain, but they’re joined this week by Taylor Swift’s ten minute expansion of “All Too Well” along with Sam Fender and Switchotr featuring A1 and J1. In news, Russia nearly fucks up the International Space Station by blowing up a satellite, the UK government ditches large swaths of its high speed rail plans in the north, and the US government passes the Build Back Better Act, a massive post-pandemic spending bill. Alex Jones is found liable for defamation against the parents of Sandy Hook children, while Kyle Rittenhouse is found not liable for murdering people in Wisconsin. Two days later, as this airs, another right-wing terrorist drives an SUV through a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, killing six.
On television, meanwhile, Village of the Angels, which, as the saying goes, if I had a nickel for every time in 2021 the BBC aired a program about Doctor Who and psychic messages sent across time via analog media I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. The other time came back in May, when BBC Four aired Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. This is a strange film—a hybrid of an older short film by director Caroline Catz (who portrays Derbyshire) that has been expanded with a swath of talking heads footage (David Vorhaus, Peter Zinovieff, Madelon Hooykaas, and, most notably for Doctor Who nerds, Brian Hodgson) and a separate thread tracing Throbbing Gristle alumn Cosey Fanni Tutti’s creation of the film’s soundtrack via manipulation of the eponymous legendary tapes—a collection of 267 found in Derbyshire’s attic following her death in 2001 and subsequently housed at the John Ryland library in Manchester. The result is strange, surreal, and ghostlike, which is to say utterly appropriate for a study of Derbyshire.
Catz’s Derbyshire is a sort of frustrated visionary, seeking only, as she explains in her job interview for the Radiophonic Workshop, to “create sounds that have never existed in the world before.” Which, of course, she did, and spectacularly, most obviously with Doctor Who theme, which the film devotes a sizeable chunk of time to. It starts from Ron Grainer’s scant account of the tune—the film depicts it as a hastily scribbled score and a set of adjectives like “wind bubbles” and directions that it should sound “familiar but different,” and be comparable to the well-funded twenty piece French ensemble Les Structures Sonores. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to be clear, is a bunch of low paid weirdos in a basement with a bunch of aging radio equipment. Derbyshire volunteers for this plainly nightmarish job, and, of course, absolutely crushes it.
But what the film does a remarkable job of highlighting is the scale of how she accomplished this, creating individual pieces of tape for each of the notes she wants to use, at times calculating both the setting for her oscillator to produce the note she wants and the amount of tape needed for the duration.…