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At York University, Orton was charged with responsibility for establishing the first university-based electronic music studio in the United Kingdom. The initial studio at York was an ad-hoc affair, with Revox and Ferrograph ¼” open reel tape machines, a small Uher mixer, microphones and contact microphones, and perfunctory editing equipment. Kiss (1968), work on which began at the start of September 1968 and which Orton described as his preliminary ‘essay in composition with recorded sounds’, was the first piece to be made in the first iteration of the studio. Primary materials were sourced predominantly from sounds made with the lips directly pressured onto a contact microphone or breathing into a microphone mesh, but Kiss also utilised a very different set of subsidiary sound sources, including a bowed suspended orchestral cymbal and a wire slinky toy.

Orton encountered difficulty in fashioning a timbral unity from these diverse sound sources while maintaining sufficient momentum and contrast to achieve a balanced variety. The composer ultimately maintained continuity by pulling the recorded tape of the granular ‘kiss’ sounds past the tape heads manually at varying speeds, re-recording the outcomes and subsequently remixing. The short coda of the piece is derived from attaching a contact microphone to the stretched slinky and tapping it: ‘[t]he timbre of the slinky and the manner of its [its] performance’, Orton notes, ‘is intended to suggest mediation and a resolution of the contrast and tension between the short, single kiss sounds and the sustained metallic cymbal sounds of the opening of the piece’.

In his 1974 review in Contact 9 of the seminal three-disc Electronic Music from York set, which included the three early Orton electronic pieces featured here, Peter Manning celebrated Kiss’s ‘simple and effective structures’, describing the piece as ‘remarkable for the variety of textures which are effected through transformation, ranging from light bubbling effects not unlike those to be found in Pousseur's Scambi to labyrinthed, slowly changing tone complexes suspended in the middle distance. The contrast of depth here with 'foreground' effects highlights a curious reluctance by some of the other composers to explore the possibilities of subharmonics and other lower frequency textures in their works’.

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from Hemlock Stone, released March 24, 2023

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Richard Orton Loughborough, UK

As a composer, performer, educator, programmer, and author, the contribution of Richard Orton (1940–2013) to the development of electroacoustic tape and computer music in the UK cannot be overstated.

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