The American composer, engineer, inventor and author of genre Wendy Carlos is one of the greatest avant-garde figures in the world of synthesizers and electronic music.
After studying physics and music at Brown University, Rhode Island, she became a mastering engineer and pursued a more compositional role in New York. She became fascinated with timbre and used much of her clinical education to apply it to the art of sound.
She met Bob Moog on one occasion from the Audio Engineering Society and ended up acting as his advisor as he developed his modular systems and helped bring his hardware synthesizer vision to the masses.
“They’ve had this collaboration,” Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory said in a videocast for the British Library, embedded below. “Moog was one of the few synthesizer designers who listened to musicians. Many synthesizers were difficult to play, some didn’t even have a keyboard. I think the functionality and gameplay aspect: you have to thank Wendy a lot for helping bring that. I don’t think we would have had the Minimoog then.
However, it was Wendy’s career-defining album, 1968’s Switched-On Bach, that ended up doing even more for the synthesizer’s popularity; In fact, the recording can be regarded as the album that literally introduced the device to the world. Using Moog’s fully monophonic modules and a very old 8-track recorder, Carlos meticulously recorded synthesized versions of outstanding Bach compositions.
What was even more common was that she and her musical wife at the time, Rachel Elkind, made the decision to use the album to bring Bob’s synthesizers to a wider audience, one of the reasons they chose well-known Bach compositions. exposure trick for Moog, as the album replaced his ridiculous number (it eventually went double platinum only in the US). USA) and won 3 Grammy Awards.
He did his job, introduced the synthesizer to millions of listeners and musicians, added the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, to mention influenced countless electronic music manufacturers in the decades that followed, everyone from the aforementioned Will Gregory to Giorgio Moroder cited Switched-On Bach. as a massive influence.
“It was a seismic shift in how everyone felt about electronic music,” says Gregory. “It gave other people a massive, charming insight into what polyphony could be. The marriage of the monophonic synthesizer and polyphony is the main genius of this album. »
“It was a seismic shift in how everyone felt about electronic music. “
Switched-On Bach’s good fortune meant that Wendy Carlos has become a composer of film music in high demand, and in addition to making more recordings of “synth makes classical music”, she also released several albums of her own compositions that took a very different tack. road. There’s the “environmental rather than environmental” release of 1972’s Sonic Seasonings, but perhaps the risk and terror it brought to Kubrick’s cinematic paintings is probably his legacy.
However, it is a shame that so little of this vast catalog is found on major music sites. years and an attempt at biography, Wendy Carlos: A Biography through Amanda Sewell, rejected by Carlos.
However, this is also understandable. As one of the first high-profile people to make the transition, she had to, in some tactics, innovate in her private and musical life, so it’s only herbal that she gets the intimacy she deserves.
Carlos’ ultimate purpose is to help make synthesizers more available, and in doing so, we wouldn’t have much of the music we have today, let alone the machines that make it. You can literally draw a line from this first album completely synthesized through the works. from The Beatles to dance music and many of the current soundtracks that were once played by the influence of Carlos. The greatest living pioneer of music and technology?Effectively.
The album that Wendy Carlos explained and that brought both electronic music and synthesizer is a curious mixture of novelty and legend. There is no doubt that Carlos faithful to him paints, nor to his importance in the history of music, but in fact, many of the paintings of Carlos Later paintings are more interesting from the sound point of view.
Carlos not only helped unleash synthesizer and electronic music in the world, but also played a vital role in advancing the ambient music scene with this 1972 release. composers, but remains a favorite among Carlos fans.
The official soundtrack of this arguable film is a series of old pieces by composers such as Purcell and Beethoven. Carlos’ electronic tweaks and the original Timesteps track. Not all were used by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, so Carlos has released this definitive version.
Daft Punk may have provided impressive tracks for the TRON film of the moment, but the first release hired an even greater electronic music pioneer since Wendy Carlos drafted for this 1982 score. The soundtrack still fits well into a sci-fi film that used some of the earliest CG effects to be mixed with Carlos’ score to create wonderfully captivating, if perhaps dated, moments.
Andy has been writing about music production and generation for 30 years in Music Technology magazine in 1992. He has edited Future Music, Keyboard Review, MusicTech magazines and lately runs Computer Music, which he helped launch in 1998. Too many synthesizers.
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