The rediscovered tapes of an electronic music pioneer

In 1986, American musician Beverly Glenn-Copeland went to a remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness to write a record. Composed on early digital equipment, the result was a short, experimental and oddly hypnotic album of six songs called Keyboard Fantasies. A few hundred cassettes were made, around 50 sold, and the rest were put in a box where they would stay for decades. Thirty years later, a Japanese record collector heard the tape by chance and was transfixed. He got in touch with the artist, who was by then going by Glenn after having transitioned in the mid-90s, and asked if he could share it. Those songs, which were composed in isolation soon began to travel, eventually finding thousands of devoted fans across the world and turning Glenn into an unlikely cult icon. Today, at 82 and with a recent dementia diagnosis, he is still writing and performing music. With his wife and creative collaborator Elizabeth, he spoke to Outlook’s Zoe Gelber about becoming a late-blooming star.

Marine ecologist Dr Pia Winberg has spent her life championing one of the planet’s most overlooked organisms: seaweed. It has a multitude of uses, from cleaning up and quietly restoring damaged ecosystems to being an important source of nutrition. But Pia's passion focussed on what seaweed could do for human skin. She started her own research project, extracting and purifying seaweed gels in a small factory on the coast of New South Wales, Australia. Pretty soon, her work caught the attention of a pioneering burns surgeon, Professor Fiona Wood, who was interested in how seaweed gels might help to promote wound healing in her patients – and Pia was more than happy to help. In 2019, while scaling up production in her factory, Pia suffered a devastating industrial accident that left her with severe injuries to her scalp. But, in a remarkable twist, the very gel she had been developing became part of her own recovery.

Presenter: Jo Fidgen
Producers: Zoe Gelber and Marcia Veiga

(Photo: Glenn Copeland, smiling and laughing. Credit: Wade Muir)