Richard Orton

Richard Orton is known for developing early electronic music in the UK, establishing the country’s first university-based electronic music studio, writing seminal texts on tape composition, then overseeing the transition from analogue tape to computer-aided composition.
In 1986 Orton introduced the UK’s first Music Technology course, and authored music software as co-founder of the influential Composers Desktop Project (CDP).

As a composer, Orton’s music often ranged beyond electroacoustic music – the focus of this album. He was a founding member of Gentle Fire – the electronic music ensemble including Hugh Davies and Graham Hearn – and of the Monteverdi Choir.
The earliest piece here is Kiss from 1968, using open reel tape machines and contact microphones, often pulling the recordings through the tape heads manually at varying speeds.

The most recent work on this album is its near title track, Three Monoliths: No.1 The Hemlock Stone, from 2004. This is the only piece on this collection to use tools developed by the CDP – a composers’ collective responsible for generating a vast collection of non-real time signal processing software.