Invention for Radio No.1: The Dreams

The Dreams (1964) is the first of Delia’s four Inventions for Radio produced in collaboration with the poet and dramatist Barry Bermange.

Part of the four programme «Inventions for Radio» series, created in collaboration with Barry Bermange, Dreams is a collection of spliced/reassembled interviews with people describing their dreams. Delia’s editing and repetition, together with her dissonant, often terrifying musique concrete soundbeds, make this distinctly uneasy bedtime listening. The entire piece is 45 minutes in length.

«The tapes were blended with admirable softness and skill, so that the bemused, repetitive, floating phrases did now and then achieve the numbness of a dream; and the Radiophonic Workshop put in only the discreetest accompaniment. It was ingenious, rather than inspired; but it did arrest the ear, and force recognition at a far more intimate level that radio usually disturbs.» – The Guardian, 1964

«This programme of sounds and voices is an attempt to re-create in five movements some sensations of dreaming—running away, falling, landscape, underwater and colour. All the voices were recorded from life and arranged in a setting of pure electronic sounds.» – The Radio Times, 1964

«The first of three Inventions for radio by Barry Bermange, in collaboration with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. More than ten years have elapsed since these ‘re-creations in sounds and voices’ were first broadcast. They introduced a fresh genre to the medium and remain classics of radio technique.» – The Radio Times, 1975

It also gets called «Within Dreams».

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