Dream Machines: Electronic Music In Britain From Doctor Who To Acid House

Matthew Collin

★★★★

Omnibus, £25

ISBN 9781913172558. 416 pages This is a journey into sound of the electronic variety Matthew Collin has form when it comes to writing about electronic music as the author of Rave On and Altered State, and he’s also homed in on the regional before, with the excellent This Is Serbia Calling about underground radio resistance during the tenure of

Slobodan Milosevic in the 90s. For his fourth book, Collin looks homewards, turning his scalpel towards the origin and augmentation of electroacoustic music in the UK, forensically examining everything from the Radiophonic Workshop to Orbital, with very little absent in between. Any frustration comes from the fact that the author’s parameters only allow him to mention key figures like the Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer in passing, though the topic is so vast that you have to set restrictions somewhere. As it goes, Dream Machines: Electronic Music In Britain From Doctor Who To Acid House is a comprehensive overview of postwar Britain’s multifarious sonic innovations, and its innovators you don’t hear about too often like FC Judd, the Workshop’s John Baker, and the criminally underappreciated Coldcut, whose key role in the sampling culture of the late 80s has so often gone uncommented upon. It’s a must-read for anyone seriously interested in the history of electronic music. Jeremy Allen