Radiophonic Workshop, Latency, review: like a Zoom call from another dimension

With a legacy that has spanned many decades of pop culture and tech innovation, the Radiophonic Workshop are long associated with travelling through time; after all, the collective’s influential soundtracks include classic BBC sci-fi series including The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Blake’s 7 and, most famously, the Doctor Who theme. Although the Workshop officially closed in 1998, after BBC Director General John Birt decreed that in-house departments had to financially break even, its influential status endured, and it regrouped to much acclaim in 2009, continuing concerts and compositions independently of the Corporation.

For this online “gig” streamed via its YouTube channel, and featuring its multi-generational current line-up (ranging from original member Dick Mills who joined in 1958, to newbie Kieron Pepper who also drums for ravers The Prodigy), the Workshop hitch-hiked through the internet, collaborating live from their separate locations around Britain, and playing around with the web’s tricky digital transfer delay, or “latency”, which lends this project its name.

Latency means an inevitable, unpredictable time lag in communicating data between its source and destination; it’s usually measured in milliseconds, and makes live music collaborations intensely complex when the players are in different places, because it’s so difficult to keep all the instruments in sync. In the Radiophonic Workshop’s hands, this obstacle naturally transformed into a possibility; they actually embraced latency for this set, extending the delay into several seconds, so that the band members could craft a sequence of musical loops. This distinctly intrepid approach invariably invited much tech geeking out, but more than anything, the set was characterised by its playfulness and joy, from an intro shrilly delivered by a Dalek voice, to the ensemble’s infectious pleasure at discovering and developing sounds together.

As Mills explained at the beginning of the set, Latency also connects to the collective’s original ethos of experimenting with time and sonic properties, and their earliest methods of tape manipulation (“We played backwards, forwards, at different speeds,” he told us).

Despite the fact that we were watching an all-male collective here, clear credit was also given to the Radiophonic Workshop’s integral female icons, including Daphne Oram (who co-founded RWS in 1957) and Delia Derbyshire, whose ground-breaking arrangements influenced multi-genre musicians. This set also celebrated Delia Derbyshire Day (November 23) and supported related charity The Girls’ Network, which provides mentoring to empower disadvantaged girls, by connecting them to training and role models across a range of careers across and outside arts/music.

Overall, the experience felt simultaneously futuristic and old school, with the latter effect heightened by kitschy split screen visuals and psych fractals last spotted on a Windows screensaver circa ’93. Yet when the Workshop got into collaborative flow, their electronic music gloriously transported you to science-fictional realms, across the dreamy atmospheres and trippy funk of established post-reunion tracks such as the haunting opener Wasted Plain, Incubus and Wireless (its samples of broadcasts from the Second World War and the always-hypnotic Shipping Forecast summoning nostalgia for RWS’s vintage BBC roots). The semi-improvised new work Latency  layered gradually, with each player adding elements: piano chords, skittering percussion, eerie effects, elegiac synths, steadily forming a mesmerising groove that could have blissfully extended for longer than this set. It was like a Zoom call from another dimension; the dissonance sounded uncannily romantic.

This couldn’t be likened to a conventional concert, and it’s tricky to rate as such; the live pieces were interspersed with archive footage and interview soundbites, which gave it a documentary feel at times. The Doctor Who theme is a perennial banger (famously covered by the likes of club duo Orbital), and it was slightly disappointing that it was presented as a concert clip rather than live rendition here – but then, judging by the jovial post-set Q&A, the musicians miss regular gigs as much as the fans do. Latency lingered long after the music faded; this was a joyous creative response to Lockdown constraints, testimony to RWS’s constant intuition and innovation, a scintillating fever dream on a school night.

Watch Latency on YouTube