Like Léon Theremin, an electro-acoustic pioneer and inventor whom the Soviets put to work developing surveillance technology, Daphne Oram seems like a star-crossed figure-- a visionary tripped up by circumstance and, perhaps, her own eccentricities. But a new anthology of Oram's work, drawn from over 400 tapes she left behind after her death in 2003, helps illuminate the depth and breadth of her legacy, suggesting her career as a kind of parallel history to electronic music's dominant narratives.

Oram's idiosyncratic methods and eccentric pursuits suggest the classic profile of the "outsider" artist, but she spent much of her career deep inside the system. When she was just 18, in 1943, Oram found work as a studio engineer at the BBC. Her official duties there were often unglamorous, but she took advantage of the studio to pursue her own experiments with magnetic tape and tone generators. The BBC's resources were actually quite meager, at least compared to the studios in European cities like Paris and Cologne, but Oram was resourceful: one story has her gathering all the BBC's tape machines together and working through the night on an electro-acoustic composition, then dismantling the array and putting its components back in their proper places before work the next morning.

Magnetic tape was a relatively recent medium, and electronic sound generation was still in its infancy, but Oram already grasped their enormous artistic potential. As she wrote in her 1972 book An Individual Note: Music, Sound, and Electronics, "In my work I am not concerned with synthesizing orchestral sounds-- we have excellent orchestras for making those sounds. My interest is in making new sounds which are musical." In 1957, she recorded the first all-electronic composition to be played on the BBC, and in 1958, she finally received funding to open an electronic-music studio, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram and her bosses had very different ideas about its purpose. She had imagined a research facility on par with the electronic-music studio at Cologne's NWDR or the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete at Paris' RTF, but the BBC was less interested in avant-garde composition than sound effects and background music, regarding the Radiophonic Workshop-- so named to appease the musicians' union and other music departments at the BBC-- as a kind of sci-fi Foley studio. (Indeed, today, the Radiophonic Workshop is best known for the music and sound effects it produced for Doctor Who.) After just one year, Oram left the BBC, setting up her studio in a house in Kent.

There, she pursued a range of work, both personal and commissioned, including sound effects for Jack Clayton's 1961 film The Innocents and various television commercials. The commissions, combined with a research grant, helped fund her main project: a home-built apparatus called the Oramics Machine, a combination synthesizer and sequencer that generated sound waves by "reading" hand-painted film strips with a reverse-engineered oscilloscope.

It looked like a gigantic Meccano contraption, and it was, by all accounts, a tremendously complicated device. What's more, it was a perpetual work in progress, under constant modification; only Oram and the engineers she employed really understood it. It's unclear when she stopped using the machine. By the late 1980s, she told an interviewer that she had moved onto working with computers, although she remained intent upon designing a system to read hand-drawn inputs. She suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s, and she died in 2003. The Oramics Machine was left gathering cobwebs in Tower Folly, which fell into ruin.

The Oramics Machine was recently restored for the London Science Museum's exhibition Oramics to Electronica: Revealing Histories of Electronic Music, coinciding with a growing re-appreciation of her work. But no matter how much biographical detail comes to light, Oram and her work remain shrouded in mystery.

This first volume of The Oram Tapes, compiled from a trove of over 400 tapes held by Goldsmiths College, reinforces that impression. Where 2007's Oramics 2xCD set brought together the quixotic warbles of her Oramics compositions with quirky genre studies and commercial commissions-- sound effects, advertisements for Lego and power tools-- this release emphasizes her darker, more minimalist and abstract sounds.

Across 44 tracks, the album is by turns hypnotic and jarring, veering from sinewy drones, suggestive of Kevin Drumm, to pieces that sound like icicles being cleared from the eaves of a wind-chime factory. The prevailing mood is dank and claustrophobic, however, fogged with clammy reverb and bristling with strange clicks and alien voices.

It sounds as futuristic as it did then, but don't expect hi-fi: despite mastering by renowned Berlin's Dubplates & Mastering facility, the audio can be murky. It's not hard to believe that the original tapes lay moldering in a box for years before their restoration. But that sense of decay actually contributes to the emotional resonance of the music. There's a veiled quality to much of it, and a sense that there's so much more there than meets the ear, as frequencies melt into the ether.

The anthology is thin on data; few of the tracks have dates attached, and there's little information on what Oram was using to make a particular piece-- or even why. Experiments with pulse and delay rub up against musical sketches, spoken descriptions, even a recording of a baby's birth. Two tracks titled "2001 Effects Tape" were presumably intended as submissions to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It all raises the question of how much of this Oram intended as music, and how much the tracks are simply fragments of her work, sketches torn from a notebook. But the compilers have made the most of the jumbled source material. In the liner notes, they write, "As most of the tapes in the archive contain limited factual information, descriptions or dates, a chronological assessment of Oram's work was impossible to present. It is for this reason that we chose to arrange the tracklisting with an emotional narrative in mind, as albums are often sequenced."

They've succeeded here. Purely as a listening experience, it's wonderful. I've had it playing on nearly constant repeat during days of below-freezing temperatures in Berlin, and there are times when I can't decide if the music is the perfect complement to the climate or vice versa. It's both gripping and distracting, fading into the background and then jumping back out at you. In the few segments where Oram speaks, detailing her craft, it feels less like an archival document than a kind of relic, a spectral emanation. Recalling the early belief in the phonograph as a spirit medium, and keeping in mind Oram's own esoteric interests-- she began An Individual Note by suggesting that "memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards meta-physics"-- only reinforces the idea that there's something truly auratic humming in the grooves.

In an Invisibile Jukebox feature in The Wire, People Like Us' Vicki Bennett said of Oram, "A lot of her music has got a melancholy to it. It's like a sad machine that exists on its own planet and just sings to itself." That likely has something to do with the way that Oram was tuned to her own, unique frequency, resonating at a pitch inaudible to few others in her time. The Oram Tapes reinforces the melancholy aspect of her work, but it also offers a kind of solace, drawing her planet closer to ours, and finally finding an audience for her one-of-a-kind music.