How I Met Wendy Carlos
(AS TOLD TO ALAN MCGEE’S POPTONES)
Poptones: You were connected with Wendy Carlos, who scored Stanley Kubrik’s incredible film A Clockwork Orange amongst others– how did that come about?
G. Raphael: I was mesmerized and transformed the first time I saw A Clockwork Orange at the cinema in Seattle. I was 16, on LSD combined with Mescaline tripping my balls off, and that film put me into an orbit that I’ve never really come down from.
It was the brilliant music; electronic Moog synthesizers singing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in German that really did it to me. That and the fact that I’d never seen a naked lady on screen before! Wendy’s synthesizer explorations and discoveries combined with her incredible ability as a keyboard player, really changed my thoughts and the creative direction of my life. From then on, anything with Moog or Arp synthesizers captured my attention, illuminating a new way to focus my life’s energies.
I’d been kicked out of many music shops because I would go there to try out those blessed machines that would later become my greatest musical strength. I had no money and looked like a long haired bum with spaced out hallucinogenic eyes, “Hands off that keyboard –boy, come back when you get a job!” That sort of thing.
My Seattle friend Serge Gubelman sent me in 1996 to meet Tom O’Horgan. He was the OUTRAGEOUS Broadway director / genius of both Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar in the 1960s as well as a founder of Manhattan’s experimental theatre company, La Mama.
Tom’s apartment, an entire floor of a building on Broadway in downtown NYC, is filled with about 2000 historic musical instruments from around the world. He has a Glass Harmonica which is a keyboard invented for Mozart that plays spinning glass bowls submerged in water!! A hallway of gongs in various sizes, wooden frog percussion instruments from Polynesian islands , a pipe organ, Steinway grand piano and on and on. I was hypnotized by his loft home and the man is a true sweetheart.
I told Tom that I played keyboards in (band) Sky Cries Mary and that I performed with a bank of synthesizers and samplers. He smiled, replying that he had a neighbor named Wendy and she was also a synthesizer player. My ears burned and I exclaimed, “Is that Wendy Carlos??!!”– he answered yes, and that she’d been after him for a while to come visit to discuss something related to sounds. I then begged him to set up a coffee date with me, him and Wendy, and he actually set about doing that!
That same night Tom, Wendy, her partner Anne-Marie and I were walking towards a Jamaican restaurant on 14th Street in Manhattan. I had been rehearsing all the questions I had been asking for half of my life, the secrets I wanted to find out from her: the synthetic voices singing in German, the huge synthesizers Robert Moog custom made for her, the hows and whys of her knowledge. Tom introduced me: “Wendy, this is Gordon– he’s from Seattle and also makes electronic music”. Wendy, alarmed, replied, “Well, dont come to me with your problems!”. She said it rather irritatedly, as if to say “back off !”.
I was crestfallen and depressed. I couldnt help but notice that all through dinner she seemed only interested in talking with Tom, and she probably wished I hadn’t tagged along. She mentioned how she travels all over the world to photograph solar and lunar eclipses. She had just returned from the Sahara Desert and was in fact wearing some kind of “eclipse T-shirt”. I tried to make a joke about not thinking the electrical power in the Sahara was stable enough to run her synthesizers, and she shot me a look that could have frozen hell! Not funny. After that I was sure that I’d never connect with Wendy and learn all I wanted to know about her work.
After dinner, Tom and I were invited back to her studio. I walked into a space lab like I’ve never seen or imagined. She designed and built it herself. The historic Moog Modular system was there along with a C-3 organ and four giant handmade speakers hanging in the air, “surround sound” style. I saw a hand-built mixing console and other keyboards I didn’t recognize, some with peacock feathers in them, and some with unusual looking, beautiful exotic cats lazing about on top.
Her goal was to ask Tom O’Horgan to help her identify sounds in a computerized library that she had collected. Tom being an expert in world instruments and a music historian himself was the perfect person for this query, so I sat in the “back of the class” while they went to work. I recognized many of the sounds from my own sampling work in Seattle with Sky Cries Mary and my other band, Absinthee. I knew that these were mostly normal drum sounds, tom-toms, snares, etc, slowed down significantly and played lower in pitch. I spoke up a few times to identify the noises, and sometime during my third correct answer it was as if….. little bells were going off, in a magical fairy tale land.
Wendy looked at me for the first time and said, “Well, Gordon you really do know your stuff!”. Tom smiled and made an excuse to leave, so I stayed with Wendy in her wonderful studio. I pointed to everything I could see in the room, asking, “What is that?”. She graciously explained many things, seeming to enjoy our conversations. I saw a “Russian Dragon” (pun on rushing / dragging!) which is a machine that tells you with lights if you are speeding up or slowing down your rhythm! I saw a keyboard that she invented that automatically re-tunes all the other keyboards in her studio to ancient and exotic tuning systems, like the ones Bach himself used. I saw her hand built Theremin that has a controller shaped like a circular keyboard so she can pinpoint exact pitches while controlling that ethereal Theremin sound.
Now here’s the amazing magic part, pay attention please:
I noticed a modern Kurzweil K2000 sampler laying against a wall and asked her what she used that for. She said it was a gift from the Kurzweil company because she had designed a special Wendy Carlos tuning system for them. She said she’d never used it, that she believed sampling was pretty much a non-musical gimmick. After all, real instruments permit an incredible range of expression and variations, therefore sound more vibrant than any digital sample. I told her that I’d like to check it out and see how good the Kurzweil was compared to the Ensoniq ASR-10 sampler I had at home. I tried to impress her with my quick knowledge of samplers and attempted to turn on the Kurzweil. Well, I couldn’t figure out how to even boot it up!, becoming rapidly frustrated. I asked if I could please borrow the instruction manual and return the next evening to give her a demonstration of that keyboard.
Within a few minutes of page turning in the quietude of Tom’s place I found out how to operate the Kurzweil and sure enough I went back to her place to try it out. Wendy had set up an autoharp with a good microphone to send into the sampler. It quickly booted up and we recorded ONE STRUM of the autoharp. When we pressed the Kurzweil’s keys and played back the sample, she was very quiet and said, “Oh, Gordon, I had no idea they’d gotten this far with it!” She noticed the clear overtones and wonderful rich sound which the Kurzweil had captured from her vintage autoharp. We were on the way to becoming friends!
After I returned home to Seattle, I sent her a sample library that my dear pal Scott Levitin had created by recording single notes from the finest orchestral instruments in the most beautiful concert spaces in the world. (The First series of PROSONUS discs)
A year later, Wendy showed me large notebooks filled with scientific printouts from MIT of different instrument’s overtone series when played at different volumes. She then spent the next four years creating a digital orchestra with her Kurzweil* that could represent as close as humanly and mathematically possible the behaviour of real instruments. She added choir voices, priestly orations and theremin sounds to this and released her “Tales of Heaven and Hell” CD around the year 2000. Much to my delight and surprise, she put my name in the credits as a thank you for helping out with the Kurzweil. My dreams had come full circle and I am still positively misty eyed about it!
*Wendy recently corrected me, saying : The GDS/Synergy sounds on Digital Moonscapes, Beauty in the Beast and Tales of Heaven and Hell were all generally speaking, additive voices with complex FM overlay, with intricate enveloping far more than the halcyon daze of ADSR, and a whole world between acoustic and electronic sound-making”
Poptones: And what is that person like?
G. Raphael: Wendy has been remastering and polishing up many original recordings that she’s made during her life, releasing them in expanded and new versions one by one, sometimes in sets, like the Bach Box. She has a work aesthetic that is both intensive and disciplined, spending almost every night from 6 pm til 6 am working away like crazy on her musical inventions. I believe this has been her pace for most of her working life!
About a year ago I visited and she had invented a multi layered pipe organ / theatre organ based on multiple Kurzweil samplers running in tandem with some stunning old organ footpedals retro-fitted with midi controllers under each one. No one has ever done anything like this before, and she performed for me several pieces she was writing for this new instrument. She just keeps on going and breaking new ground at every turn. Her website is very extensive and vast for those truly interested in learning more.