Switched-On Wendy Carlos

Moog pioneer Wendy Carlos is a musician I’ve always been fascinated with. One, for her ability to emote so beautifully with the Moog synthesizers. And two, for the relative mystery around her. It’s nearly impossible to find her music available to listen to online. None of her albums are streaming, and the only way to hear some of her music is to scrounge around Youtube for videos. There is an amazing interview with her on the BBC from the 80s where she demonstrates her process and how she reinterprets the music of Bach via the Moog. There’s also this great video from 1970 that’s worth watching:

There is another way to hear the music of Wendy Carlos: buy the albums. I’ve found two out in the wild at a semi-local record shop. First was Switched-On Bach II, and I was so excited to find it in the newly arrived used music section of Ignition Garage in Goshen. I’ve found a lot of great used finds there over the years, but this was extra special. It’s the kind of album you think you’d need to locate on Discogs or some bigger city with a wider swath of musical tastes. It was a treat.

The music itself puts me in a different place in my mind. It feels like sitting in some grand library in an estate in upstate New York. A grand home lost to time as the electronic tomes transport you to some baroque universe. The synthesized sounds imitating reed and brass instruments so eloquently, but with a synthetic undertone. It’s like if some robotic entity or android began imitating the works of Bach. I mean, it kind of is that way. Except the Moog isn’t a sentient robot, but one run by a human with emotional connection and vast, musical knowledge. It feels old and new at the same time.

Not long after I found Switched-On Bach in some thrift store record shop in a small town just north of Indianapolis called Both Sides Now. Another bizarre but poignant easter egg in a town far too small and conservative to have such treasures in a used record booth. And again, the music was transcendent in a very dream-like way. Though I have no recollection of hearing Wendy Carlos as a kid(I had, more on that later), the music on Switched-On Bach was like a ‘Wayback Machine’ into my childhood. I think in part because the Moog was used so much in TV, commercials, and B-movie horror and sci-fi movies of the late 60s and 70s. It was always there in the background; from beer commercials to Doctor Who, the Moog was quietly rewiring my brain one viewing at a time.

I think another reason I was primed to lock into Wendy Carlos records was because I had heard her work at a much younger age in movies. The Shining, Tron, and in my teens A Clockwork Orange were all scored by Wendy Carlos. The Shining and its opening sequence of the Torrance family driving through the Colorado mountains on their way to the Overlook Hotel was made so much more eerie and ominous with Carlos’ monolithic electronic doom.

She invented the modern electronic film score.

Recently I’d had the itch to grab another Wendy Carlos record, so I found a copy of her 1980 album Switched-On Brandenburgs. It’s a collection of all of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos done only the way Wendy Carlos could do them. A double album that I’ve been listening to pretty much on repeat since it arrived last weekend. I took a little break yesterday and listened to some Deafheaven in anticipation of a new Deafheaven song dropping(possibly today.) But as I cleaned the kitchen I “switched-on” Wendy Carlos and zoned out to electro-Bach as I swiffered the dining room.

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Given the current situation going on right now with the Trump goons dropping executive orders like they’re going out of style, I wonder how Wendy Carlos would have fared had she been a new artist now. The administration declaring the US will only recognize two genders and all but ignore the those transitioning from male to female or vise/versa. There is a thing called gender dysmorphia. People are born biologically one gender, but their brains are wired the opposite. These folks are dealing with enough internally, but to have the government of your country pick you out on the first day of the new administration as someone to vilify I can’t imagine that feeling. The list of vilified people in this country is growing exponentially, but the transgender community is even more vulnerable.

Why do I bring this up? In case you didn’t know Wendy Carlos is transgender. She transitioned to living as a woman in 1968, and in 1972 had sex reassignment surgery. I’m not saying that Wendy Carlos never had issues or that she’d never been treated less than because she was trans, but the Government never put a spotlight on her and told her that they didn’t care about her and were not going to treat her equally or as she wanted to be treated. If that had happened to her we may never have gotten her wonderful and beautiful albums. She may have lost hope and given up. Much like so many transgender people might now.

There could be other Wendy Carlos’ out there losing hope, feeling scared about living as they want to live, and not feeling loved by their country. I blame it all on religion, but I know there’s other factors. Hypocrisy, ignorance, self-centeredness, and good old hate for starters. But religion seeping into the halls of the Capital and congress and the Senate cow-towing to the Christian Right with seemingly bountiful amounts of money to grease the wheels of democracy is a major factor in why the Republicans have become such a malignant force in the US.

For a country that puts individual freedom and government overreach at the top of their red, white, and blue to-do list, we sure do treat those that live differently from us like monsters. And for a party that will live and die on keeping the government out of their personal lives and freedoms(guns, God, greed), they’re more than happy to let the government write laws stepping on body autonomy for women, forcing kids to pray to the Christian-chosen God in school, and LGBTQ rights.

There’s many other abhorrent actions that have been taken in the last 4 days to mull over and feel sick about(like Trump attempting to erase the 14th Amendment altogether like a good racist/xenophobe would), but Wendy Carlos got me thinking about the transgender community.

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Anyways, really loving Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Brandenburgs. I’m not loving what’s happening to the country I’ve called home for 51 years.