Published
Fri, Aug 13, 2021, 10:21
- Pioneering Knob Twiddler is a collection of recordings made in the '70s and '80s.
Janet Beat's music is being released for the first time.
Pioneering Knob Twiddler is an album of seven electroacoustic recordings from between 1978 and 1987. It marks the first time her music has been released, with the collection now available on vinyl and digitally via Trunk Records.
Beat was born in Staffordshire in 1937, and graduated from Birmingham University in 1960 with a Bachelor of Music degree. A pioneer of British electronic music composition, she owned the first synthesiser to be made commercially available in the UK and experimented with musique concrète and tape manipulation as early as the late '50s.
Her interest in electronic music was met with much resistance throughout her career. Her father insisted that music was not a suitable path for a woman, and used her original tapes to hold up his tomato plants in the garden—destroying them in the process. While playing events in later years, Beat said that male musicians would often sabotage her equipment or steal power leads. Pioneering Knob Twiddler is a collection of some of the only music which survived this period.
Listen to "A Willow Swept By Train".
Tracklist
01. Dancing On Moonbeams
02. Lighthouses
03. Lighthouses Waltz
04. Echoes From Bali
05. A Willow Swept By Train
06. Shirabe
07. Piangam
Pioneering Knob Twiddler is out now.
