The White Noise project had its origins in the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, whose previous claim to worldwide fame was the theme music to Doctor Who. The workshop was peopled by a small team of technical wizards and musicians whose principal function was to generate futuristic effects and music for BBC TV and radio. Among them was Delia Derbyshire, frequently championed by future generations as a pioneer of British techno. Derbyshire, Peter Zinovieff, and Brian Hodgson were also members of a group called Unit Delta Plus, formed in 1966 to promote the composition and performance of electronic music, and it was one of their lectures that inspired an American named David Vorhaus to start writing his own electronic music.

The son of a blacklisted film director, Vorhaus had come to the U.K. to avoid the draft and earn an electronics degree, while also studying classical music and playing the double bass.Vorhaus persuaded Derbyshire and Hodgson to collaborate on a more pop-oriented project with him while maintaining their day jobs at the BBC.

With two tracks in the can, recorded on a six-Revox setup synchronized by a single remote control, Vorhaus was introduced to Island Records' Chris Blackwell, who was so impressed that he commissioned a whole album. The team had been hoping to make a killing by selling the two tracks as a single, but Blackwell's advance of £3,000 prompted them to reconsider. They set about building their own studio-cum-science lab in Camden Town out of "borrowed" gear and improvised equipment. A number of friends were brought in to provide drums, lyrics, and vocals, but most of the team's time was expended on realizing the backing tracks.

With no keyboard-based polyphonic synthesizers available to them, every last chord had to be assembled from numerous tape edits painstakingly stuck together. Much use was made of musique concrète techniques, whereby physically generated sounds would be subjected to all manner of electronic distortion and tape manipulation. Vorhaus later ventured his opinion that An Electric Storm contained more edits than any other album in the history of recording.

The process had already lasted a year when Island — with Blackwell having departed — began to feel a little twitchy about their investment. Though at that point the album's second side was still only 11 minutes long, they demanded that Vorhaus finish it pronto. Having heard Pink Floyd's recently released A Saucerful of Secrets, a lengthy instrumental track on which a drum riff underpins a cacophony of noise, Vorhaus realized he might get away with something similar to finish his album. The result was the hair-raising — if faintly risible — "Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell," which replaces Saucerful's heavenly choir with the sound of souls screaming in eternal torment.

Inevitably, there was no way Vorhaus and his team could reproduce the album live, and with a similar vacuum on the interview front the album initially sold poorly. Yet through word of mouth it acquired a reputation that kept it selling in modest quantities throughout the '70s and beyond. Quite simply, it's an album that sounds like no other.

By 1970, however, White Noise had been overtaken by events. As the Moog synthesizer became widely available, the kind of equipment used by the Radiophonic Workshop team became obsolete almost overnight. And since it was this very equipment that gave the White Noise album so much of its charm, there was never any question of a full-scale follow-up.

However, several years later Vorhaus attempted to revive the White Noise name with a solo instrumental album for Virgin performed entirely on the Moog and called, somewhat portentously, White Noise 2: Concerto for Synthesizer. By then, though, the market was already flooded with synth albums and the record made little impact. A third album called Re-Entry for the Pulse label in 1980 met a similar fate, as did Sound Mind (2000) and Inferno (2001).

An Electric Storm (1969)

An Electric Storm is justly renowned among techno boffins as one of the first albums to fuse pop and electronic music before the advent of the Moog synthesizer. But you don't have to be versed in the language of sine waves and oscillators to enjoy this mostly delightful and hugely inventive album. For although the White Noise were almost exclusively composed of virtuoso knob twiddlers and tape splicers moonlighting from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, luckily they were no slouches when it came to penning a decent tune. There's also anarchic humor at play on the manic "Here Come the Fleas," which contains more edits in its two minutes than the whole of Sgt. Pepper. Yet it's the retro-futurist textures that still grab the ear most. These are sounds that will be familiar to anyone who knows the soundtrack of Forbidden Planet or the early series of Doctor Who, but they had never before been deployed in the service of pop music, nor have they since. And whereas the Moog would supplant all of these primitive, time-consuming techniques of sound generation and manipulation within the year, it also destroyed much of electronic music's spirit of adventure in the process. How could you boldly go where no man had gone before when your sound universe was suddenly overlaid by tram lines and route maps? So although most of the songs that make up the first half of An Electric Storm are pretty much your standard-issue polite British psychedelia (the somewhat embarrassing United States of America-style orgy of "My Game of Loving" aside), the way they're dressed up still sounds innovative decades later. Sometimes songs dissolve into bleeps, whooshes, and gurgles that hurtle between your speakers, but compared to the extended guitar and organ solos that were common currency at the time, they are the very essence of restraint. That said, restraint was put to the sword on the final two tracks, the 12-minute "The Visitations" and the seven-minute "The Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell." The former is a decidedly spooky "Leader of the Pack"-style drama with a supernatural twist. The biker, having departed this life, attempts to make one last attempt to cross over and console his grieving beloved, only to fall agonizingly short. If you can suspend your disbelief — and persuade yourself that the biker's departing spirit doesn't sound like a cappuccino machine — it's spine-tingling stuff that you won't dare listen to with the lights off. Which is more than can be said for the concluding track, a would-be satanic jam session botched together in a hurry to meet Island's suddenly imposed deadline.