Interview by Andy Blinx. Grand Royal Magazine, Issue 3, 1990.
Switched-On Bach, the first fully synthesized album, simultaneously leveled the classical and pop music markets and established Wendy Carlos, as the leader in electronic synthesis. Though it spawned almost a generation of knock-offs and wannabee cover records (Switched-On Country, The Plastic Cow Goes Mooooog), those recordings never gained the singularity of SOB
Yet, there is another story to tell. The Switched-On-style of classical-meets-pop synth records are Incredibly Strange relics from a time long gone, and they still retain a haunting, sometimes daunting, quality. Their creator, Wendy Carlos, extended her vision far and wide into worlds most pop will never get a possibility to explore. Whether it be composing film soundtracks, working on solo projects, beta testing new synthesizers, or philosophizing and pontificating 20 minutes into the future, Wendy has much more to offer as an artist than just the person responsible for the music in Clockwork Orange, Tron, The Shining, and the idea that started it all, Switched-On Bach.
Is it okay to ask you about your family a little bit?
I'm a New Englander originally. I come from the greater Providence area.
Ethnically what roots do you have?
Totally mixed. My mother's parents were from two parts of Poland, one of which was right next to white Russia: the blonde, blue eyed type; the other type looked like Southern Germans: brown-eyed, shorter, broader-featured people. Then she married my father who is truly a mongrel. He was Portuguese which is where the name comes from. His dad, besides being Portuguese, was also English, and his father was a sea captain who knew how to navigate by the stars and understood a lot of whatever the technology they had in the late nineteenth century. So, I know my love of the science and math comes directly from that side of the family too. In my Mom's family the music side almost everybody played, sang, or danced, and played different instruments like drums, trombone, trumpet, accordion, piano, clarinet, etc. It was a nice culture to be brought up into. I was always being taken to weddings, parties and things where there was live music. They expected me to become literate in music, so I was given piano lessons since starting the first grade, age six. I was lucky that my parents cared enough, a little bit with the ruler and the knuckles routine, but I had to practice. I'm grateful for them having done that now, because I learned my ABC's and music to me now is natural. I really can't think of anything luckier for me but the breakthrough that came in the '60s and '70s. It's perfect background isn't it? I was very fortunate.
What about your early experiments with sounds? When did this start?
In high school, I was using tape machines and did a few electronic baby pieces.
Did you ever do tape loops?
Oh yes, of course. At the time, didn't know what the others were doing. There were no places to find out. There was no computer music channel, Keyboard magazine, no Studio Sound. There weren't the good people writing about it, so instead we had to invent it. Even if we were wasting time doing what somebody else had done better, we did it again anyhow. I went into college thinking I might go into physics, because I had done some electronic music when I was in high school, even when I was in grade school...
Like what? With oscillators?
In that case I didn't have an oscillator, but there were test tone recordings that you could play on a variable speed record player. I could get different pitches from that and figured out how to do tape echo before knowing...
Before Brian Eno...
Sure. Obviously I knew you could put a loud speaker in the stall shower, and with the microphone get reverb. I learned the tone controls and with a few other gadgets I made myself I could cobble something together. I made my own gear myself which was probably good training. But in college, I was getting bad grades and scuffling trying to keep up. Finally, I went to a professor who had invented the field of biophysics, Professor Nyborg. He said, "Why don't you combine physics and music?," and I was like, "Get out of here!" It ceased to sound funny after the fourth or fifth repetition. He called the music department people and suggested that I do this. They considered me a real weird, crackpot. I look back at that period with a lot of nostalgia.
Were you a nerd?
Sure, why not. I've played absent minded professor at times, I think that goes with the territory. What it indicates to me is a lack of a certain type of vanity that I think is probably a little healthy. I think it's rather good to have ideas that fascinate you more than just yourself, your body. It seems to me that's much less useful and more feather headed. So, if at times I turn rapidly and walk into a door or something like that, while that might be fodder for some amusement for others, it shows that my mind is not on myself.
Over the years, you've given feedback to a great many companies...
I love being a beta tester. I love it. It's a question of making tools. I want a tool that's bigger and better and capable, like a hammer you can build a house from it, you could even commit murder with it, or you could let it rust in the garage but anywhere within those extremes, there is a range of practical use, and that's the best kind of tools.
When you refer to your record Switched-On Bach as 'SOB,' is that an inside joke?
Oh yes, the name was never my own. I wanted to call it The Electronic Bach because somebody had done The Baroque Beatles Book. SOB came from CBS from the art director, John Berg. They had horrible names they wanted to call it, and we stopped laughing and we thought, well SOB might be better than The Electronic Bach. To me, the project had a smile around the corners of the mouth. I never considered Switched-On Bach to be pompous and awesome. It was good fun. I had fun doing it and expected people to smile when they heard it. It was a crossover record, when there was no such category.
Let's talk about "categories" for a moment.
Richard Rodgers once said, "What do you mean that popular music is different from classical? Are all classical pieces classics? Is all popular music popular?" It's just a foolish distinction. I love the way he went to the essence of the argument. It should all be eclectically put together. Like when people want to join such-and-such record label club the first thing they're asked is "Which category?" Is it New New Age, or is it Heavy Metal or is it Country, Western Funk or Country Religion or Gothic?
Can't forget Prog Rock in there.
They first give you the label which you don't want and then they continually re-use it as though somehow it's legitimate.
That's how Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull feels about progressive. He doesn't even know what that word means and he's by far one of the godfathers of the whole movement yet he never thinks of it in those terms. That's how he keeps it original. If you think of yourself in any category, you're kind of already shot and dead.
To me the whole thing is a wild universe of possibilities and the more possibilities you have, the better for you. The line you draw for each project should be inherent to the project. It should not come from without. You're not going to do a record, hopefully, because you wish to do a techno-country record. Whatever that may be.
Crossover could also be a metaphor for your background of combining science and arts...
I'm a hybrid of interests, like a lot of people are nowadays, but at the time I walked the path, it was considered very odd to be interested both in the sciences and in the arts. More than that, my interest in the creative side of the arts, as in my case I draw moderately okay for an untrained artist and I've always written music, is matched by the same passion I have for the sciences, astronomy. physics, and chemistry. All that stuff. It should be no surprise that a hybrid of interest is the entrance requirement to get into this field, if you're going to get into this field and make a difference. I know there's people out there who think I'm being elitist, but those who only know the computer side and could hide their musical inadequacies behind a computer. I am being a bit of a snob about it. How many people are out there that are obsessive as I am, I guess?
Well...
No, I'm not defensive about it at all, I am happy that I am an obsessive in a way. It's one of the few things in my life. As you can see my apartment is kind of a pig sty, but my music is not. I keep my files on tape, and the rest of my life is chaotic. You've got to have a mixture.
You're constantly going in and reorganizing?
I hate to do that, there's always housework. People don't realize that this field requires such intense bookkeeping and inner discipline. Everyone's talking about chaos theory nowadays. We can become total random city.
You got to regulate how much chaos you're going to be dealing with at any given time.
I'm a skeptic in so many areas and this is one too. People talk about fractals and chaos theory as though we can replace a human beings way of creating with random processes. There have been computer programs that pretended to generate music in the '80s and it's boring. Boring is the right word. Random is boring, and if you don't put anything in of yourself, don't expect anything but noise.
You might as well have a computer listening to it at that point.
That's just how I feel.
Like they did with the chess game this year-you're not playing against a computer, you're playing against a team of five programmers. It's just an elaborate way of covering up that it's five on one. It's still a computer coalescing it.
I'm a little bit disappointed. At some points I think that we're pretending that it's humanity versus the machine, and it isn't. It's a dedicated group of people who I think deserve to get their kudos now too. I was rooting for the programmers.
Maybe that shows you that the collective mind is not quite as acute or as capable of making the lightning like decisions that enter in with real inception and creativity.
Pattern recognition is something that we do so easily, that none of the computer systems that have of so called artificial intelligence can even touch. It might not happen in our life spans. Everybody predicts that we'll have HAL 9000. I'm not sure, I think it's a bit of a crock.
There are theories that the mind is a virtual reality machine and that your conscience is really an illusion.
Yes it is, I think that's true.
There are those people who aren't the slightest bit aware are going about their lives...
Yes, of course. Since I'm an eclipse chaser, back in 1970 there was one that went all over the eastern seaboard of the US. It was amazing for me to hear stories of motorists driving during totality who did not stop the car to look at this one-time unique thing, but turned on their headlights so they could keep driving, probably muttering something like...
"Dammit, what's going on! What's wrong with this lighting?!?"
I depend on a lot of my habits to get me through real world life so that my actual brain could be continually be thinking about a new theme or a new patch, sound, or a new idea on computer graphics. I guess I'm probably rather arrogant to think that I should have that right to continually do that, but I've gotten by so far.
Haven't you earned it?
I don't know when we earn anything. I think you're always proving yourself over and over during your life, and you never earn anything. I'm not very impressed by stardom either or success or fame.
We're kind of in the twilight of that phase.
Once you get into any business that looks comfortable, clean, and neat, the offices are organized...
Nothing's getting done...
It's a dying firm. Sell your stock and get out of there. When it looks like this apartment here, then it's something you want to be a part of. Jerry Pornell, a fine science fiction novelist, met Bob Heinlein as he was a struggling, beginning writer. Heinlein is the senior spokesperson for Science Fiction, and Pornell managed to wheedle a couple of hours one afternoon at Heinlein's home. Heinlein was charming with him and after having been wined and dined for a few hours, showing him his novels and his typewriter, talking philosophy and plots, as he was leaving Jerry asked, "Oh gee, just one thing, how could I ever pay you back?", and Heinlein said, slightly inferior, "You can't, you pay forward." I always loved that line, because it indeed is what I'm saying right now, with no patting myself on the back. I'm trying to pay forward, pay back for the people I had to lean on to get where I got, so the next steps could be done by the younger people who are coming in without having to pay the dues I had to pay.
People are buying any of the old Moogs and synths they can find. How do you feel about the whole retro of that coming back in such tremendous force?
Sometimes I see it backsliding, though, in some of the instruments and devices that come along that are clearly really retro. Retro in an unhealthy way. It's always good to remember your roots, that part of retro is good, but to throw away progress and what we've learned is a dangerous thing. If you could graft the good properties of those older machines onto what the newer machines were also offering. The Theremin, to me, is an exercise in frustration. Yet, historically, it's so important. It's a thrill to see Bob Moog building, like he started out, these beautiful instruments. I also smile at it all. How can you not smile? It's touching and sweet, like giving a nod of approval that had been forgotten. Thank god Leon Theremin lived long enough to see that Steve's movie [Theremin: An Electric Odyssey] was being made. Unfortunately, Leon died just before it was shown, but at least he knew somebody was paying him some respect.
Website: Wendy Carlos