Get a Musical Education From Early Electronic Pioneers, the Radiophonic Workshop

When was the last time you spoke to your grandfather? I mean spoke to him properly, not just mumbled a "thank you" for the WH Smith voucher he gave you for Christmas, or asked him to pass you a burnt Chipolata at a family barbecue. You don't know do you?

Rectify that right now if you can. Ring him, Skype him, ping a carrier pigeon into his bedroom window at three in the morning. Do whatever you can to get his attention. Once you have it, ask him the following question: "Grandad, can you tell me a little bit about what electronic music was like in the old days, before we had Eats Everything and Elrow?"

Invariably, the old sod will dredge a pack of tissue-coated Murray Mints from the pockets of his newspaper-bought slacks, have a good, long suck, cough a bit, wheeze on his own perfumed saliva, and eventually tell you all about the Radiophonic Workshop, the absurdly influential BBC sound effect squad who twiddled knobs and plugged and unplugged wires, going on to become one of the most admired early electronic compositional teams of all time.

Names like Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire will be familiar to anyone who's ever flicked through a copy of The Wire at a train station before putting it down and buying The Beano instead, but you'll be more familiar with the Workshop's output then you thought, thanks to their soundtracks for TV hits such as Doctor Who and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy .

The BBC closed the Workshop down 40 years after it had opened. Which was terribly sad of course, but here in the future of 2017, we've been blessed with a whole new batch of haunting synth strangeness courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop's first LP since 1985, the stupendous Burials in Several Earths, which arrives on May the 19th on their very own Room 13 imprint. If you've been waiting 30 years for a synth record about Francis Bacon's poetry, you'll be over the moon.

The group, now comprised of original members Peter Howell, Roger Limb, Dr Dick Mills, Paddy Kingsland and long-term associate Mark Ayres, will be rocking up to the Science Museum next month for a very, very special performance at the venue's IMAX cinema, looking back at 60 years of boundary-pushing. Ahead of that, the lads have very kindly put together this list of their favourite relatively early electronic pieces, from the Beatles through to Stockhausen.

Tuck in below.

This is the first truly imaginative use of voice manipulation. We take it for granted now with samplers and computer DAWs but then it was revolutionary and a little bit dangerous. Listening now it still sounds fresh.

A seductive montage spawned by the LSD culture of the 60s (possibly), but regardless it was the first time that the kind of things we were doing in the Workshop were heard out to a mass pop audience. This strange and evocative mix of sounds and cut ups was hugely influential. (Sadly, though, it isn't on YouTube).

Hearing Tomita's extraordinary work I realised how powerful electronic music could be and just how evocative and expressive synth technologies were in the hands of someone who knew what they ere doing. These are electronic renditions of Debussy pieces and are, to my mind, extraordinarily powerful.

The first track on the Yellow Brick Road Album (1973). I loved the use of ARP synthesisers here with piano in a commercial context, and then with rock sounds. In a way it did the same thing for me as the Tomita album, only in a rock context. In the hands of great musicians all music technologies become expressive tools.

John was a wonderful composer and manipulator of sound. He understood it in a way that brought humour and mood to the point where he was able to inject a jazz feel into tape manipulation techniques. That was an extraordinarily hard thing to achieve. Machines are not very good at 'swing' and he made tape loops dance and syncopate. Rhythm was very much part of his work.

Desmond Briscoe, the original founder and manager of the Radiophonic Workshop, also made music too. In this case it was the music that really did give Quatermass that dislocated eeriness that people remembered. It made the drama twice as frightening with the sounds he made just using oscillators, tape, feedback and tape delay. (This one isn't on YouTube either!)

In this year that we celebrate what would have been Delia Derbyshire's 80th year there has been a lot written about her pioneering work. Sometimes it can be overlooked that her work was an extraordinarily subtle emotional response. She was very human and achieved it all by using complex abstract layers of sound created on tapes. It is her sophisticated understanding of emotion rather than just her skill with a tape recorder that I find fascinating. She understood the layers of emotion and that aspect is there in all her great work.

Back in the pre-synthesiser era, electronic music was a real art, but not, according to the American Federation of Musicians, real music. "Forbidden Planet" by the Barrons was the very first entirely electronic music score for a film but was not credited as music; instead, it was "electronic tonalities". The Barrons were American, working out of their own studio in New York's Greenwich Village, much as Tristram Cary was working out of his London flat. Like Cary (and, later, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) they built their own devices to create the sounds they imagined—a far cry from adjusting the controls on pre-built, preconfigured circuits. Ground-breaking, and utterly original.

The archetypal electronic theme tune, composed by Ron Grainer (famous for "Maigret" and "Steptoe and Son") and "realised" from hundreds of tiny pieces of magnetic recording tape by the late, great, enigmatic Delia Derbyshire (personal friend and inspiration to many of us in The Radiophonic Workshop), assisted by Dick Mills (who still haunts our stage in his "the original Sonic Solution" lab-coat!). Again, totally original, and so effective in conveying the wonders and occasional terrors of free movement in Time and Space. The foundation of many of many composers' interest in electronic music, it's not been bettered.

Tristram Cary was a radar specialist in the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War, and left convinced that there was music in electronic circuits. He spent his demob money on somewhere to live, marriage to Doris, and "the machine", his music-making laboratory in the corner of the living room in their flat. His first proper electronic commission came in 1955 (one year before "Forbidden Planet" and five years before the opening of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) for radio play "The Japanese Fishermen", about a fishing boat caught up in the Pacific hydrogen bomb tests of 1954. Tristram combined a successful career and Film and Television (including "Doctor Who"; he composed the music for the very first Dalek story), with concert and art music. "3 4 5" is all about limitations—composed entirely of the frequencies 3Hz, 4Hz, and 5Hz and their multiples by the first four powers of ten, in durations which are drawn from lengths of recording tape of 3, 4, and 5 inches. The tones, incidentally, were created on the EMS VCS3 synthesiser, which Tristram helped design.

In 11 movements, this piece (the title translates as "Very Soft Earthquake") came out of the influential GRM studio in Paris, which Bayle led from 1966-1997. The principle sound sources are spirals of crystalline electronics, the rolling, shocking and locking of metallic balls, and soft "bellows" of female voices. Entrancing.

The Radiophonic Workshop play the Science Museum on the 16th of June .