The Polish electronic music revolution of the 1950s

It was created in November 1957, a year before the BBC’s fabled Radiophonic Workshop, and was far more influential in shaping the development of electronic music, yet the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) is now virtually unknown even in Poland. Radio 3’s feature on Sunday night, Poles Apart (produced by Andrew Carter), made the case for its significance, taking us back to those early days of analogue bleeps, bongs, blurps and squelches. Robert Worby and the eerily electronic undercurrent to the programme gave us a completely new perspective on what else was going on in Poland in the 1960s besides the trouble at the Gdansk shipyards and the suppression of political thought.

Housed in a drab, high-security building with armed guards at the door, the home of state-run Polish Radio seemed an unlikely place for extraordinary invention. But, says Worby, the Black Room studio, so-called because of its black walls, was ‘a powerhouse of music… and a cultural beacon,’ providing the soundscape of countless sci-fi and animation films that have been watched around the world.