Allchival [All City Records] Proudly Announces the re-issue of Roger Doyle’s ‘BABEL’ on the 25th Anniversary of the Initial Release in 1999.
All City Records announce the re-issue of Roger Doyle’s ‘BABEL’, ‘BABEL’ is available on CD and VINYL, from All City Records reissue label “Allchival” , The new BABEL re-release comes as a double vinyl ‘best bits’ showcase 80 minutes, with the full 6 hours available with an individual download code printed on a postcard, launching in May 2024.
BABEL:
Returning to the well of Roger Doyle once again, his “Babel” project spans a decade of composition work before its’ initial release in 1999 as a 5CD set. With over 100 pieces and almost 50 collaborators, it marks a journey through a virtual tower of Babel, with each piece corresponding to a room within an imagined giant tower city. For the 25th Anniversary vinyl edition, Doyle has revisited it- remastering it and providing its first vinyl edit – 80 minutes spread across two 180gm LPs – rounding out the package with extended liner notes and a download code to the full 6 hours.
“An extraordinary achievement by award-winning Irish electronic composer Roger Doyle, in which he brings to life an imaginary world in the Tower of Babel, complete with radio stations, ghostly singers and violinists in stairwells, and all the life of a great city. Profound, funny and tenderly sad, this is music for a new world’” (Circa Art Magazine).
Roger Doyle:
Roger’s Operating Theatre days and the idea for this project came in the early nineteen eighties while Doyle was heavily involved with the experimental theatre group. Working with emerging technologies and across a variety of genres he realised that he would be unlikely to achieve an overarching compositional style. Instead of deciding to make a virtue out of the fact that he composed so schizophrenically, he wished to create a musical alphabet out of short abstract sounds, with these sounds being analogous to phonemes in speech. With Blade Runner and sci-fi embedded in the zeitgeist of the times he came to the idea of the Tower of Babel as both a futuristic skyscraper and an embodiment of language.
In the spring of 1990 Babel was finally begun and kept growing until it reached over 6 hours of music and was released in 1999.
A large-scale musical structure making use of many technologies and music languages, with each piece of music being thought of as a ‘room’ or place within an enormous tower city. Each track in the main section corresponds to a virtual sonic architecture. The pieces are divided into two kinds: aural representations of actual spaces like The Dressing Room, The Stairwell and Mr. Brady’s Room alongside internalised dream spaces like the Room Of Rhetoric, the Spirit Levels, and the Mansard childhood memory room. Listeners can navigate their way differently through this virtual building at each hearing. As a supplement to the Babel Tower KBBL – the fictitious radio station – broadcasts a number of shows. Each has its own style and atmosphere. Collaborating with DJs, actors, writers, and singers, KBBL is made to sound like a real radio station with ads, traffic reports and phone-ins.
Examples of the connections within the project can be found via the architecture were the saxophonist in the off-stage dressing room is rehearsing for her solo in the concert hall (heard in Pagoda Charm) or the room off the stairwell, where the sounds of piano lessons and apartment life can be heard and the apartment where a muffled KBBL can be overheard At a molecular level The Iron Language Alphabet is a sound alphabet containing tiny fragments of sound representing letters or characters of an alien alphabet. This sound alphabet can be heard scattered through other pieces like The Room of Rhetoric, Pagoda Charm and in KBBL in Johnny’s Body at 002. Other molecular scatterings can be found in Cantilena where two songs sung by Operating Theatre’s Elena Lopez in KBBL are exploded and re-arranged to form new entities.
Doyle’s Babel celebrates language – a slight variation on the Biblical morality tale – and musical expression in all its variety.
“The Tower Of Babel – a celebration of the multiplicity of musical language as the 20th century came to a close. 103 pieces of music, 48 collaborators and it took ten years for Roger Doyle to compose it. Re-released in a 21st-century mixture of vinyl and download code on postcards, this newly designed double gatefold Artifact comes with a new bonus track: “I am thrilled that BABEL lives again in an even more culturally fragmented world where we can communicate with each other through music” says Roger Doyle.
All City Records said of the 25th Anniversary release of ‘BABEL’ ”We’ve been working with Roger for over half a decade now, this is the third project we’ve done together. Roger’s enthusiasm for making and performing music is a joy to behold and it’s an honour to bring his music back out into the open again!”
In February 2024, Roger Doyle got some very exciting news about the Experimental Theatre Group, Operating Theatre’s ‘THE SPRING IS COMING WITH A STRAWBERRY IN THE MOUTH’. American singer, producer and songwriter Caroline Polachek (Charli XCX, Blood Orange & ‘No Angel’ for Beyonce ,as well as supporting Dua Lipa on her worldwide tour 2022) released a cover version of ‘THE SPRING IS COMING WITH A STRAWBERRY IN THE MOUTH’ to critical acclaim.
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