Wendy Carlos: Every Album, Every Song

Wendy Carlos is one of the most influential electronic musicians of the 20th century, whose ground breaking LP, Switched-On Bach, was pivotal in elevating the Moog synthesizer to iconic status. At the same time, her highly evocative score for Stanley Kubrick’s film, A Clockwork Orange, redefined the sound of electronic music for a generation of popular musicians in the US and Europe. Known in particular for her adventurous sonic re-imaginings of the music of classical composers from Bach to Beethoven, it is often forgotten that Carlos was also an accomplished composer in her own right, whose original work on albums such as Sonic Seasonings, Digital Moonscapes and Beauty In The Beast deserves equal recognition for its progressive compositional innovations and sound design techniques. With the aim of addressing this imbalance, this book offers a detailed track-by-track survey of all Carlos’s unique album releases from Switched-On Bach to Tales of Heaven And Hell, placing each recording in context in relation to musical influences, technology and thematic concepts, as well as providing many analytical pointers to assist the listener in navigating her classically influenced musical aesthetic. To provide a fully rounded picture the last section of the book considers a number of Carlos’s miscellaneous one-off projects and evaluates the remastered editions of her earlier LPs released on the East Side Digital label during the early 2000s.

Mark Marrington is a musician, teacher and writer based in the North of England. He has a wide range of musical interests including the classical guitar (about which he has written an award-winning book), quirky electronic music (some of which has appeared on BBC radio and the Dr Demento Show) and heavy metal, on which he has written several articles for academic books and journals. He is currently an Associate Professor in Music Production at York St. John University in the UK, where he gives classes on the history of record production and the techniques of electronic music composition.