CD – Public Information
Appearing on CD and vinyl (500 copies) and adorned with a small but interesting booklet of rare vintage photos, “Electronic Without Tears” takes us back to the epic times of the first concrète tape music, celebrating the work of a master and pioneer of sound art. Often forgotten, F.C. Judd was a composer and investigator from London’s East End and a contemporary of Daphne Oram (may we remind you of our review of her “Oramics” published by Paradigm Discs). Frederick Charles Judd was in the RAF during WWII and urban legends suggest that he worked with highly secret radar devices: this has probably influenced some of the atmospheres here, which are full of futuristic fascination, pulses and “alien” emissions. His research – even in those times – wasn’t without “commercial” spin-offs. In 1961 Judd published his book “Electronic Music and Musique Concrète” and, like Oram, collaborated with the BBC on projects that delighted film audiences with futuristic sound structures and space-age narrations. The effort made by Public Information to collect these 35 tracks is certainly praiseworthy, presenting to a “different” audience the intricate mix of patterns and influences, his taste for rhythm, dark constructions, the unusual and the eccentric (a rigorously “British” tradition).