Early synth musicians Janet Beat’s recordings have been released for the first time.
Pioneering Knob Twiddler takes in seven electroacoustic recordings, captured between 1978 and 1987. It marks the first time Beat’s music has been officially released.
Beat was born in Staffordshire in 1937, and graduated from Birmingham University in 1960 with a BA degree in music. She owned the first synthesiser to be made commercially available in the UK, and also experimented with musique concrète and tape manipulation as early as the ’60s. Pioneering Knob Twiddler features some of the only music by Beat that survived a period in which a number of men attempted to hinder her path into electronic music. One of them, her father, had insisted that music was not a suitable path for a woman, and used the original tapes for some of her work to hold up his tomato plants in the garden, destroying them in the process.
Pioneering Knob Twiddler is out now on Trunk Records.
