In 1964 British composer Delia Derbyshire collaborated with the actor and director Barry Bermange collaborated on Inventions for Radio, a piece made from Bermange’s recordings of dreams. The dreams they collected were examined for common themes, and the sections relating to each theme were extracted from individual dreams and edited together into montages. The sections were Running, Falling, Land, Water and Colour. Derbyshire added eerie electronic drones.

Our piece, Dreams for Delia, is a re-staging of this piece, a kind of psychic group portrait. Radio Valerie’s listeners were invited to ring us and leave a voicemail message detailing one or more dreams. The themes which emerged from our listeners’ dreams were Friends, Families, Flying, Fear, Forgetting and Animals.

Melbourne composers who either had shows on Valerie or were otherwise connected with the station were then invited to compose music for one of the voice montages. The montages which – and composers who – made it into the episode were, in order:

Animals, Steven Harris

Fear, Byron Dean

Families, Jason Heller

and Flying, Marcus/Default Jamerson