FEATURE:
The Lockdown Playlist
IN THIS PHOTO: Wendy Carlos in her New York recording studio in 1979/PHOTO CREDIT: Len DeLessio/Corbis/Getty Images
Great Synth Tracks
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I want to grab from…
PHOTO CREDIT: @a8ka/Unsplash
a terrific article in The Guardian regarding the synth genius, Wendy Carlos, and how she helped transform music. This Lockdown Playlist is dedicated to songs that feature synthesisers or some form of the technology – although there is a wide array of music, I shall try and narrow it to an extent. as The Guardian explain in their feature, “She (Carlos) went platinum by plugging Bach into 20th-century machines, and was soon working with Stanley Kubrick. But prejudice around her gender transition pushed Wendy Carlos out of sight”. She is a hugely important figure that, perhaps, does not get the credit she deserves:
“This summer, an 80-year-old synthesiser pioneer suddenly appeared online. She had been silent for 11 years, but now something had appeared that she just wouldn’t tolerate. “Please be aware there’s a purported ‘biography’ on me just released,” wrote Wendy Carlos on the homepage of her 16-bit-friendly website, a Siamese cat and a synthesiser behind her portrait. “No one ever interviewed me [for it], nor anyone I know,” she went on. “Aren’t there new, more interesting targets?”
Given that Carlos is arguably the most important living figure in the history of electronic music, it’s remarkable that Amanda Sewell’s Wendy Carlos: A Biography is the first book about her. This is the musician who pushed Robert Moog to perfect his first analogue synthesiser, from which pop, prog, electronica and film music flourished. Her smash-hit 1968 album Switched-On Bach made the Moog internationally famous and became the second classical album ever to go platinum in the US. Then came her extraordinary soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron. She made an ambient album five years before Brian Eno did, and jumped from analogue machines to do leading work in digital synthesis, but worried that her status as one of the first visible transgender artists in the US would overshadow it.
Carlos’s high standards and industrious work ethic began in her childhood. Born in 1939 into a working-class Rhode Island family, her music-loving parents couldn’t afford a piano: her father drew a keyboard on paper so she could practise between lessons. She built a hi-fi system for her parents by cutting wood and soldering wire and won a science contest at 14 by inventing a computer. She then made her first tape machine for music-making, after falling in love with the early electronic music of Pierre Henry and Bebe Barron.
By the time she found Robert Moog napping on a banquette at a New York audio conference in 1964, she was a music and physics graduate of Brown and Columbia. Moog soaked up her suggestions for sound filter banks and pitch-sliding controls, which became original features of his synthesiser; Carlos also wanted a touch-sensitive keyboard, not standard on the instrument until the late 1970s.
By 1981, Carlos was known everywhere as Wendy: she had completed her gender confirmation surgery in 1972, and talked about it for the first time in a 1979 Playboy interview. Only two columns were devoted to her music in the piece, which she saw as a betrayal. Nevertheless, she revealed just how much “forced secrecy” had affected her career. Switched-On Bach’s popularity had made things hard for her, she said. She had “lost an entire decade” avoiding live performances and connections with other artists because she didn’t yet feel ready to disclose her gender transition publicly. Once, Stevie Wonder came to check out her synthesiser set-up, and Carlos hid as he knocked. Sewell writes in her book how Carlos still faces prejudice from record companies today: Warner Music has not still corrected her name on the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange”.
In honour of a great figure who revolutionised music, I want to dedicate a Lockdown Playlist to her and wonderful music that features the synthesiser. Through the years, it has been deployed in so many classic tracks and, as you will hear, it can elevate a great piece of music…
PHOTO CREDIT: @didierjoomun/Unsplash
TO the next level.