The John Baker Tapes

However much music you already have, there will always be something missing from your collection. And the John Baker Tapes fill a gap you didn't know you had.

John Baker was a pioneer of British electronic music, a cult hero on one hand (rumoured to have contributed electronic sound effects to the Beatles film 'Help!') – but also somebody whose music is instantly familiar to anyone of a certain age. If you watched the BBC from the early 60s to the late 70s, some of this will sound familiar.

Because Baker was a member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, experimenting with early attempts at multitrack recording, pre-synthesiser weirdness and strange electronic noises. The workshop is best known for the Dr Who theme and other science fiction soundscapes, but they produced masses of music. And 50 years on, the music Baker made for news programmes, radio stations, documentaries and dramas is being released on two CDs. As well as rare BBC recordings, there are cuts from Baker's home recordings and his experiments as a jazz musician.

There are nearly 90 tracks altogether, some just a few seconds long and others – often theme tunes – are much longer. The longest 'COI Technology Pavilion', starts with seven minutes of weird ambient electronica before finally turning into a laid-back jazz number. The shortest – John Baker Test Tone – is just eight seconds!

There is electro-acoustic music, jazz, strange sound art and freaky psychedelia. To make the noises here, Baker plucked rulers on desk tops, blew across milkbottle tops, pinged elastic bands and poured cider – and then sped the sounds up, slowed them down, layered them and reversed them. John Baker was clearly a master craftsman as well as an inspired musician, and as an artist was pushing the boundaries of sound as much as contemporaries The Beatles. It's great that he's finally getting the attention he deserves.