Living sound forever: The genius of Wendy Carlos

May 19, 2023 2:45 PM

Xtra Magazine profile of electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos by Kristen S. Hé

Best known for Switched-On Bach, Wendy Carlos was a pioneer in more ways than one. She changed music forever while undergoing her own transition.

posted by mpark (20 comments total)

My dad's Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita records are solely responsible for my lifetime love of electronic music.
posted by Dr. Twist at 3:30 PM on May 19, 2023 [9 favorites]

It kills me that Carlos's music is so hard to find. Tales of Heaven & Hell sounds like 100% my thing and I want to find a copy.

Her songs for The Shining are marvelously dark and menacing. It's tantalizing to read that some of her omitted tracks for that movie were a lot lighter in tone.

We do have a vinyl LP of The Well Tempered Synthesizer. The first time I ever listened to it, I was afraid that I wouldn't like it that much -- I expected an all-synth album would sound cheesy and dated to my ears circa 2020. But it was really good! The Brandenburg concerto excerpts and the Monteverdi piece in particular were really majestic.
posted by cubeb at 3:55 PM on May 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

This article is good. I'm a fan of Carlos since I first learned about her music in middle school (!) in the 80s. I've read a lot of profiles of Carlos. But I haven't read any that evaluated her work so well both on its musical terms and in combination with insight into her gender identity and the influence that has had on her career and public persona. Good queer writing!

It kills me that Carlos's music is so hard to find.

I agree. That's at least partly her own doing.

Carlos’ recordings are hard to find on streaming music services because she owns most of her catalog and has not authorized its release on those platforms.

Her own website has her discography but it's been 15+ years since it was updated and many of the Amazon links are dead or to outrageously priced out of print CDs.
posted by Nelson at 4:09 PM on May 19, 2023

The Xtra link to The Wire page contains a Wendy Carlos mixtape (~30m each side, nice). Although it looks like it's streaming, it is in fact only slightly obscured direct links to side A and side B.
posted by meehawl at 4:24 PM on May 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

It kills me that Carlos's music is so hard to find

That's at least partly her own doing

She's been a hero of mine for the longest time but after 3 or so decades of moving around the country I no longer have all the records and CDs I used to have. This breaks my heart because her music has meant so much to me. I mean, it was revelatory -- it didn't just open my ears to what electronic music could do, it gave me a way into so much wonderful classical music that young me would have ignored as stodgy and dull.

It's hard for me to not come to the conclusion that she simply doesn't want people listening to her music any longer, for reasons that will probably remain forever opaque. It's not like she's merely indifferent to it being in the world -- from what I understand, she very aggressively shuts down any appearance of it online
posted by treepour at 5:44 PM on May 19, 2023

It was about 1979. I had come to Ann Arbor to find some music for a six projector slide show. I found ‘Sonic Seasonings’ by Wendy Carlos. Listening to the music over and over again when I played the slide show about a few hundred times changed me. I just listened to again just now. I can see the slide images in my mind after all these years. (43 years)
posted by JohnR at 6:00 PM on May 19, 2023

My dad's Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita records are solely responsible for my lifetime love of electronic music.

Same.

The article is right about Digital Moonscapes being mediocre, but it still has a place in my heart. I've listened to it many times.

For the TRON soundtrack though, I heartily recommend Stemage's interpretation over the original soundtrack album.
posted by Foosnark at 6:18 PM on May 19, 2023

I still have the LP of Switched-On Bach that my parents gave me as a present when I was a kid. That album, more than any other, changed my life.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 9:53 PM on May 19, 2023

Let's not forget Weird Al and Wendy Carlos "Peter & the Wolf".
posted by DanSachs at 11:54 PM on May 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I can still hear her hilarious Pompous Circumstances in my head: daa da-da-da- (do-da, do-da) daa da-da-da (oh di-do-da-day). And her ferocious take on Eleanor Rigby! Wow!
posted by SPrintF at 2:02 AM on May 20, 2023

Kind of shocked that nobody has mentioned her iconic Clockwork Orange soundtrack. I have that on vinyl and it gets a lot of play.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:54 AM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

There's a whole section of the article about Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and the way Carlos' later film scores fit into her career. I thought the discussion of the early use of a vocoder was particularly interesting.

The 13 minute version of Timesteps the article talks about seems particularly hard to find online. There's an unauthorized copy on SoundCloud that I think is complete. It's an interesting bridge between the twisted classical soundtrack scores and her later ambient compositions.

In its uncut form, “Timesteps” is a 13-minute odyssey where, for the first time, Carlos bridges baroque virtuosity and avant-garde form, until harmony and synthetic textures become practically indistinguishable. Without question, “Timesteps” is Wendy Carlos’s greatest work of the 1970s, and the one track that best summarizes her entire career.

I think it's the Tron soundtrack that I keep coming back to, particularly the iconic scherzo. It's such an astonishing fusion of Baroque tradition with synthesizer modernity, it's just perfect for the movie. I thought it was audacious of Daft Punk to attempt making their own score for Tron: Legacy but I think it came out pretty well, if not as revolutionary as Carlos' composition.
posted by Nelson at 8:41 AM on May 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Back in ‘68, I was sitting in my high school library looking at Time magazine. There was a review of a new record that sounded really interesting. Switched-on Bach. I never heard any Bach before, but I went out that weekend and bought the record. When I put it on the first time it was like a new revelation. Those sounds! On the cover was a photo of the Moog. I wanted one! I saw the Bernstein Transmogrifications of Bach concert. I wanted one even more. But they cost as much as a house. My last quarter at UC Santa Barbara I got in to the first electronic music class there. They had just purchased a Moog. But only graduate students could touch it. Then my dream of having a Moog and creating electronic music faded under all the demands of real life. I was just left to listening to electronic music of all kinds. But in 1990 I finally got a synthesizer, a Roland D50, and my electronic music production period started. I even did a version of one of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. But 50 years after hearing that record, and thanks to the generosity of a friend and music co-conspirator, I built my own Moog style large format synthesizer. Just like the one on the cover of that record. But mine has patch cables. Wendy Carlos gave me a life long dream and for that I am really grateful. No other artist of any kind that I have been exposed to as had that impact on me. And finally my dream was realized (a use of that term I learned from the liner notes to that album) when a lot of the demands of real life have faded away and I have the time to actually pursue more of that dream. Thank you Ms Carlos, wherever you might be now. Possibly pursuing a solar eclipse….
posted by njohnson23 at 9:31 AM on May 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

Her performance of Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos" is considered one of the best by Glenn Gould.
posted by DJZouke at 11:01 AM on May 20, 2023

The quote in the fine article is more eloquent

In the liner notes of The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Glenn Gould, whose idiosyncratic piano recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations a decade earlier made him a classical megastar, declared, “Carlos’s realization of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto is, to put it bluntly, the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs—live, canned, or intuited—I’ve ever heard.”

posted by Nelson at 11:27 AM on May 20, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have the album in the cellar but was too lazy to retrieve the more eloquent quote by Glenn Gould.
posted by DJZouke at 11:41 AM on May 20, 2023

I may be the only one in the world who hears a little of the theme from TRON in Lin Manuel's song "How Far I'll Go" from MOANA, but I swear there's a little bit of similarity.
posted by replayer at 12:57 PM on May 20, 2023

No, I heard it too. I googled it and there was one person on Reddit with no upvotes commenting on the similarity. So there are three of us.
posted by johngoren at 2:19 PM on May 20, 2023

the theme from TRON in Lin Manuel's song "How Far I'll Go"

Now that you mention it, yes!
posted by Foosnark at 4:04 PM on May 20, 2023

A couple weeks ago I found the Switched On Bach LP in good condition at my local thrift store. I thought it would be great if I could find a copy of The Well Tempered Synthesizer too. Much to my delight I found one on my next trip to the same thrift store. Got them for 99¢ each!
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 5:44 PM on May 21, 2023