Switched-On Bach 9781501320286, 9781501320316, 9781501320293

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SWITCHED-ON BACH Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rockgeek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http:​//www​.bloo​msbur​y.com​/ musi​cands​ounds​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner Timeless by Martin Deykers Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick xx by Jane Morgan Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett Suicide by Andi Coulter The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier Blue Moves by Matthew Restall Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tapestry by Loren Glass The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski Vs. by Clint Brownlee and many more …

Switched-On Bach

Roshanak Kheshti

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Roshanak Kheshti, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 91 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-2028-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-2029-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-2030-9 1

Series: 333

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Contents

Switched-on Prologue The Original Synth Switching-on Switched-on Studio Switched-on World Epilogue: Cats on Keys and Total Eclipses

1 13 33 55 73 87

Acknowledgments Notes

91 92

Track Listing

Side one

1. “Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29”—3:20



2. “Air on a G String”—2:27



3. “Two-Part Invention in F Major”—0:40



4. “Two-Part Invention in B-Flat Major”—1:30



5. “Two-Part Invention in D Minor”—0:55



6. “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”—2:56



7. “Prelude and Fugue No. 7 in E-Flat Major” (from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier)—7:07

Side two

1. “Prelude and Fugue No. 2 in C Minor” (from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier)—2:43



2. “Chorale Prelude ‘Wachet Auf ’”—3:37



3. “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major: First Movement”—6:35

T rack L isting



4. “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major: Second Movement”—2:50



5. “Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major: Third Movement”—5:05

vii

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Switched-on Prologue

Wendy Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in November 1939—two months after the beginning of the Second World War. During the early years of the Cold War, she wrote her first composition. In 1962 Carlos graduated from Brown with a dual degree in music and physics, and in 1965 she earned her master’s degree in music composition at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. By 1968, with the release of her groundbreaking electronic album Switched-on Bach, Carlos had tamed a postwar, antisocial, and paranoid spy technology (what would eventually become the vocoder and the Moog synthesizer) and given it a social life. With her unique background in both the sciences and musicology, she trained the prelinguistic grunts of tones pushed through filters to speak to masses. Switched-on Bach (hereafter endearingly referred to as S-oB) brought science to the “end user” in a way that is not prefabricated and preset— that is dynamic and interactive. S-oB forged the sounds that have now become standard in modern electronic music and engendered a curiosity about the analog world through the synthesizer. The analog synthesizer is hardly an “intuitive” instrument—requiring

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endless tweaking, twirling, and futzing—yet, after its massively popular debut on S-oB, it beckoned everyone, from the expert musician to the novice, to tweak its knobs. Despite all this, there is no mastering the instrument; not even Wendy Carlos—who Glenn Gould hailed as the most virtuosic of all Moog performers, declaring S-oB in 1968 the “record of the decade . . . certainly one of the great feats in the history of keyboard performance”1—was its master. Analog synthesizers are almost impossible to keep in tune and are unpredictable in live performance settings, giving them a strange autonomy and making them notoriously difficult to tame. Unlike the majority of other musical instruments, designed to function in sacred worship or ritual ceremony, the synthesizer was born as a result of happy accidents that arose in the development of war machines. They are instruments that can’t be mastered, because there is no master religious or ritual narrative on which they are based. The analog synthesizer is a wild electric animal, the sci-fi creature no one saw coming. As I will discuss in the following pages, Carlos’s interpretation of Bach’s greatest hits was only possible thanks to Bob Moog’s willingness to design a spec model to suit her needs and the experiments that Carlos and engineer/ producer Rachel Elkind were performing on multitrack magnetic tape. S-oB is a product of tireless experiments with studio design, multitrack recording, and analog synthesis; it is a signature of Carlos’s well-known obsessive attention to detail and her painstaking interpretation of symphonic sounds through orchestration. A whole lot of technical, unglamorous tedium somehow managed to result in a record 2

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that became a requisite item in not only the most discerning record collections but also the more mediocre ones. It was a sign of the times—this record becoming a means to imagining other worlds at a moment in history when the fate of the current one was dubious. A part of its appeal was the album cover, which prominently featured a modular Moog synthesizer set in contrast to a more traditional backdrop— ornate wooden furniture, a “Persian rug,” and a figure evoking Johann Sebastian Bach himself, in full Baroque attire. This instrument, which some interpreted to be a “computer,” was clearly something fantastic, and likewise inspired fantasies in its listeners. From its debut as the sound defining S-oB to its current mass popularity among synthesizer aficionados and electronic music fans, the analog synthesizer made these sounds of fantasy. Whether in sci-fi soundtracks or space pop, its sounds transported listeners to another world; Carlos’s recordings translated these otherworldly sounds into music. The first time I consciously heard the Moog synthesizer was my first Stereolab show. When I arrived, local neighborhood residents were sliding quarters into the washers and dryers at Cincinnati’s Sudsy Malone’s Rock ’n’ Roll Laundry and Bar while members of Stereolab casually lounged around the bar area, in no real hurry to set up their instruments. The late afternoon had an air of the quotidian—long-overdue laundry to be done; the stale smell of spilled beer from many shows ago—hardly the prelude one might expect to a life-changing event. I watched as the petite Morgane Lhote wrestled the beastly twin Farfisa organ (a hallmark of the band’s sound in the 1990s), balancing it on its side as she teeter-shimmied it in 3

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slow motion across the scratched up, sticky floor. Then came the Minimoog and Opus 3. The image of those instruments became branded on my mind. What were they? Who played them? What sounds did they make? This was before Google, before dot com, before Wikipedia (Wendy Carlos—self-proclaimed early netizen—only began her website in 1996). When I listened to Stereolab prior to seeing them live, I couldn’t have told you what instruments made those sounds. I was twenty-one years old and the entire world was in Technicolor for me. It was 1995, everything was something I knew almost nothing about, and I was desperately hungry to learn. Fast-forward two hours and there I was, standing about two feet from the Minimoog being played by Sadier, who I had seen earlier as “tall French woman” and who I now saw as Synth Goddess. The krautrock-piety, the metronomic groove, the oscillations—over and over—put the audience into a trance, creating just the right foundation for the liftoff on the Minimoog. Around me were other passengers packed shoulder to shoulder in this tiny all-ages venue, bobbing heads in lockstep with the groove and gaining altitude just as quickly as I was. With the help of the Minimoog, we had departed Cincinnati in the mid-1990s to a different planet altogether. On that day I discovered I was, like Erykah Badu, an “analog girl in a digital world” and Stereolab became my gateway drug to Wendy Carlos (their albums Switched On and Switched On Volume 2—hardly subtle homages to Wendy Carlos—were the only albums in my car CD player from 1994 to 1995). It wasn’t merely the instruments themselves, which were of course fascinating oddities in their own right, but 4

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also the natural and commonplace way in which they were handled by Stereolab’s Lhote, Laetitia Sadier, and Mary Hansen. That the custodians of these odd instruments were women particularly arrested my gaze and, later in the evening, my ears. At the time I was in the midst of a burgeoning music scene in Bloomington, Indiana, that begot the likes of the Secretly Canadian label, and the scene was—like most indie rock music scenes—very white and very male. The sight I beheld at Sudsy Malone’s that night was one I had never bemused. Indulging in the spectacle of the analog instruments and their female handlers was just the beginning; later that night I freebased the Moog and was hooked. Wendy Carlos put it perfectly when describing her own love of electronic music: “I didn’t decide. It chased me.”2 I would spend the next twenty years seeking (or being chased by) the euphoria produced by the timbres of that instrument and the context of its performance. This book is a culmination of that ever-elusive search. Like a girl My association of the Moog with performers like Sadier, Hansen, and Carlos reveals it as not just any instrument of fantasy but one that specifically indexes a cyborgian, feminized, and modern one. This sound of fantasy arose at the juncture between the instrument and its performers, women who seemed to intersect with the instrument, causing a resignification of not only the Moog but also of womanness; the women players altered the Moog, but the 5

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synthesizer also altered them. Together, performer and instrument would merge into something more than their composite parts, synthesizing all their complexity and contradiction to create something new. Physicist Karen Barad describes this process as an “intra-action,” which for her “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction [i.e. a human actor who deliberately decides to tweak synthesizer nobs], the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action.”3 As a result of Carlos’s intra-actions with the synthesizers she played, womanness came to mean something different for me, and electronic music was changed altogether. From that moment forward, when I listened to the Moog, my aural imaginary heard otherworldly glitch bubbles frothing out of a blow-dryer sitting in a bath, the sound of an electrocuted beauty ideal.4 The tweets, chirps, and pulses of the oscillator decay began sounding like a sinister bird mocking humans. The bleeps and bloops of voltage-control filters dove to the bottom of the infrasonic pool and then shot up like sea mammals breaching just for the fun of it. My aural imaginary squarely placed these women performers in an alternate reality, one that wasn’t dominated by men but also one that wasn’t preoccupied with womanness (because in a fantasy not dominated by men, being a woman is not a preoccupation). This was a fantasy of sound as a medium of transport, of tweaking knobs, and of bending pitches, opening portals to new dimensions. 6

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This was a fantasy that allowed me to make music that wasn’t referred to as “women’s music” because, after all, “women’s music” in the early 1990s was a euphemism for uncool. The homo/transphobia and misogyny of most music genres dictated that if you were a woman you had a limited number of roles you could perform (i.e., vocalist, or vocalist), otherwise you ran the risk of being seen as less-than, a wannabe, perpetually limited to “playing like a girl.” But women performing on the Moog could break out of this trap because, thanks to Wendy Carlos, the authentic Moog player was, in fact, a maestra and thus subsequent women on the Moog were a natural evolution. But women were not only the instrument’s first players in the popular imaginary; women contributed substantially to its development and design behind the scenes. The Moog synthesizer was refined through collaboration, with Carlos giving expert user feedback as well as technical assistance to Bob Moog as he perfected his new instrument. And, when Carlos popularized electronic music for the masses through the wild success of S-oB, Moog Inc. had to respond to this new interest by creating a new type of synthesizer that was more user-friendly: the Minimoog. Whereas the early modular units had patch bays with highly variable connections between filters, oscillators, and the like (see Figure 1), a representational schema was needed for the Minimoog that could be intuitive to the uninitiated. Experimentation and collaboration with Carlos and Elkind during the making of S-oB set the stage for the natural next step for Moog, and the Minimoog was released just two years after the album. 7

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Figure 1  Moog Modular unit illustrating patch bay. Photo by author.

Robert Moog has testified to Wendy Carlos’s important influence on the popularization of the Moog synthesizer, writing: To appreciate the historical significance of Switchedon Bach, one must remember that in 1968 most people thought that electronic music was an avant-garde endeavor that had little connection with traditional musical values. Commercial musicians generally felt that the electronic medium in general, and synthesizers in particular, had no place in the production of high quality music of 8

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wide appeal. [Wendy] knew better. . . . Throughout the world, far more people know of electronic music and the synthesizer through Switched-on Bach than through any other musical endeavor.5 Because current technology, computers, and electronic music are catered to and dominated by men, the feminization of the Moog player seems anomalous. But, the association of music, sound, and specifically technology to masculinity is in fact idiosyncratic to the latter part of the twentieth century. The Moog’s predecessor—the theremin—had been widely associated with early twentieth-century female musicians: Lucie Bigelow Rosen and Clara Rockmore being two of the most popular. Early telecommunications technology in general is inextricably linked with the history of women switchboard operators. When we listen to some of the earliest wax cylinders made in the United States, we find female comparative musicologists conducting recordings in the field. So in some ways, my own experience of seeing women playing Moog synthesizer as something anomalous was only possible through the careful covering over of this prior history and a postwar resignification of these technologies as masculine.

From resonation to oscillation Resonation and vibration are at the heart of all music;6 in 1964 Bob Moog and Don Buchla used voltage control to electrify resonation and vibrancy for use by musicians and sound 9

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designers in highly improvisational and abstract ways. The Moog represents an important pivot from electromechanical instruments (i.e., electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano, electric organ, etc.) to synthesized electronic music. An important evolutionary phase in a genealogy that includes the avant-noise of the Italian Futurists, the theremin, tape music, music concrete, Jamaican dub, the ring modulator, and German elektronische musik, the synthesizer represents a paradigm shift to a new era of popular music and a new popular musical instrument. According to Bob Moog, “Before the 1968 release of Switched-on Bach, not much popular music had been made with electronic instruments; S-oB proved you could make real music that had wide-spread appeal with electronic instrumentation. And I think that was the first real shift in people’s perception of synthesizers and the whole electronic medium.”7 Prior to S-oB, Bob Moog encountered an at best chilly and at worst hostile reception from music industry insiders and acoustic society purists. But as he describes, after S-oB, rock musicians like Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, and others brought the Moog sound to arenas of listeners, indicating that it was “clearly a human activity. I think the idea that it was something dangerous and fake and nasty died away.”8 Moog insightfully reads the threat posed by the synthesizer, how it was representative of the antihuman, automated postwar world. Speculation soon ensued: Was it a form of artificial intelligence? Did it simply play prerecorded sounds? If so, what exactly was the musician’s role? Did playing it require any skill? Rock music’s incorporation, and hence normalization, of the synthesizer was dependent on Carlos’s work as translator for the music 10

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industry and for musicians like the arena rockers who would catapult the instrument to its ultimate popularity, making the Moog synthesizer a household name. This book tells a story about an album that encapsulates that paradigm shift. It is a book about a social text and the cultural event it spawned, which is neither authorized by, nor a biography of, the creators of the social text. It is not a historiography of the era or the instruments used to make the social text, though I will mention these histories throughout. This is a book about a thing—the S-oB LP— written by a scholar of popular culture insofar as this thing can teach us about the popular and what happens when the marginal becomes unexpectedly centered, and the populace begins to embrace social marginalia. In this book you will find numerous main characters: cats, recording studios, “Persian rugs,” oscillators, voltage-control filters, synthesis, and of course the S-oB LP and its creators, Wendy Carlos, Benjamin Folkman, and Rachel Elkind. It is a book about how the act of switching on a musical instrument rendered audible a new state of being.

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1 The Original Synth

“WENDY CARLOS IS THE ORIGINAL SYNTH,” declares the gleaming banner that opens the biography page on Carlos’s expansive website, proclaiming an identity for a figure notorious for disidentifying with proclamations made by journalists and scholars about her.1 Carlos’s weblog charts a kind of coming into being through sonic synthesis; part archive, part blog, Wendy Carlos’s many sides come together in a carefully curated website that includes solar eclipse photography, an annotated discography, rare photographs from the sets of The Shining and Tron (for which she scored soundtracks) along with details of her recording studio design and configuration. At once fiercely private and transparently on display, Carlos’s personal relationship to media and representation is not unlike her aesthetic one: carefully synthesized. An active netizen long before the dawn of the social network, Carlos has confounded, wowed, and entertained generations of viewers, fans, drifters, and surfers who have visited her labyrinthine web portal, which hosts a copious-yet-carefully curated documentary accounting of her status as “Original Synth.”

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The seventeenth-century origins of the term “synthesize” include “‘deductive reasoning,’ from Latin synthesis ‘collection, set, suit of clothes, composition (of a medication),’ from Greek synthesis ‘composition, a putting together,’ from syntithenai ‘put together, combine,’ from syn- ‘together’ (see syn-) + tithenai ‘put, place’ (see theme). From 1733 as ‘a combination of parts into a whole.’ Earlier borrowed in Middle English as sintecis (mid-15c.). Plural syntheses.”2 In its period of coinage, to synthesize was to engage in the paradigmatically rational, Enlightenment practice of producing new knowledge through reasoning.3 It is only in the postindustrial age that it came to assume its more commonplace meaning; in the twentieth century, something that is synthesized becomes “synthetic,” or artificial. As musician and historian Tara Rodgers has put it, Synthesized sounds and synthesizer instruments are routinely associated with notions of the synthetic: contrasted to the so-called natural sounds of acoustic instruments or ecological domains and considered to be artificial substitutes or imitations of them. Such associations have a long history, as electronic and synthesized sounds and synthetic materials emerged alongside one another in contexts of nineteenth-century scientific research and industrial capitalism.4 In the evolution of the concept synthesize, the preoccupations of modernity—a mastery and control over nature—became superimposed on a concept that originated as making anew. Having perhaps grown tired of the cursory mentions of her role in the history of electronic music (none of which 14

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seemed to recognize her foundational presence) Wendy Carlos reclaimed that original meaning when she coined a new moniker for herself: Original Synth. Like a plaque certifying the authenticity of the biography page it frames, the claim “Original Synth” establishes electronic sound synthesis as an oxymoron, while also laying claim to it as identity. If an oxymoron, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, is “a figure of speech in which a pair of opposed or markedly contradictory terms are placed in conjunction for emphasis,” then “Original Synth” reveals through juxtaposition that origins are synthetic; they are artificial and manufactured-yet-necessary myths made real for the purposes of rationalizing the present. Yet the phrase also subtly points to the original meaning of “synthesize”— the deeply human act of creating new knowledge—revealing the contradictions inherent to a reading of electronic music as that which is artificial and in direct opposition to the “natural” sounds of the acoustic. “Original Synth” is also a pun, riffing on the Christian origin myth in which the desire for knowledge and the knowledge of desire—in the allegorical form of Eve’s feminine sexuality—narratively function as Christian man’s downfall. This playful, pun-full decree could refer to the obsession journalists have had with Carlos’s gender identity. It could also be read as representing an experience characteristic of the times to which S-oB became a soundtrack, the oxymoron of a postwar world defined at once by civil rights and postcolonial liberation struggles and the apocalyptic scenes of war. After all, the arc of Carlos’s career reveals her to be a composer of film scores, S-oB being perhaps the first. 15

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To reimagine S-oB as a soundtrack to a moment is to think of it as both a sound of a moment and a sound making that moment meaningful. The film soundtrack was an as-yet new aesthetic and sensory innovation, having been inaugurated in 1927 with the talkie The Jazz Singer. It wasn’t long before the musical score became a key element of the film soundtrack and narrative. In 1956, not too long before Carlos began her experiments with Moog synthesizers in earnest, Charlotte Wind (a.k.a. Bebe Barron) and Louis Barron co-composed the first completely electronic music score for the science fiction film Forbidden Planet, credited with producing “electronic tonalities,” instead of music.5 This set the stage for the confused reception for S-oB, leading many critics to wonder: Was it music? For instance, in 1981, Don Snowden wrote for the Los Angeles Times: “Synthesizers acquired a controversial reputation during the ‘70s. Many rock and jazz keyboard players quickly embraced the instrument for the flexibility and extra textural properties it offered. Others, however, felt that twisting knobs to create unusual sounds was tantamount to musical cheating.”6 But whether in spite of or because of the controversy over whether or not it counted as music-making, the otherworldly sounds signified by the Moog synthesizer made it the default instrument of science fiction and the space age. This historical setting laid the groundwork for S-oB to become a soundtrack representing social, scientific, political, and aesthetic rupture. If time, then, is audible, we can hear the radical political, intellectual, and economic uprisings of 1968 in the noises of dissent filtered through the technologies considered necessary, relevant, and contemporary to those times; S-oB is a sound sign of the times that exists at the sonic borderland between fiction and reality. 16

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When Carlos embarked on her career as an electroacoustic music composer in the 1950s, the instruments at her disposal were machines designed to serve the cold war agenda, and the figures who dominated this avant-garde musical movement were men. After a chance encounter with a young Bob Moog, who was presenting a prototype of his synthesizer at the 1964 Audio Engineering Society conference, Carlos would go on to collaborate with Moog on developing a custom unit, which would change the course of electronic music history. The chance encounter, ties to war industries and the unlikely propulsion to superstardom and pop iconicity set Carlos’s career on a course no one could have dreamed. The spotlight and the at-times unwanted attention that came with it caused Carlos to reject claims circulating about her and retreat to a private life. Carlos would eventually reemerge from that retreat as “Original Synth.” The oxymoronic identity “Original Synth”—evoking the image that Carlos herself was the instrument—presents us with a seeming contradiction not unlike the contradiction Donna Haraway proposes in her famous 1985 essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs.” Agitated with the political dead ends of a feminism debilitated by its wish-yet-inability-to speak for all women, by a science completely focused on military and defense industries, and by a socialist movement incapable of expanding essentialist ideas about the laborer and labor more broadly, Haraway presents the cyborg as a figure that encapsulates the contradictions inherent to living in a postmodern era where all materials, politics, and ideas are polluted. She writes, By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids 17

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of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resources for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machines has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This essay is an argument for the pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.7 Haraway’s insistence upon the “pleasure” in the confusion of boundaries speaks to Carlos as Original Synth—an identity that seems to intentionally collapse nature and culture, masculine and feminine, and aesthetics and politics. For Haraway, the cyborg is what remained after so many dreams deferred: world wars, hydrogen bombs, and the broken promises of liberal democracy; no wonder one of the soundtracks to this moment sounded like science fiction.

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Starting with a manifesto, Donna Haraway went on to develop her cyborg politics over the course of several decades, tracing it through all manner of biological, cybernetic, linguistic, and fantastical objects and systems concluding that cyborgs are always both fiction and reality. Like Haraway’s cyborg, Carlos as “Original Synth” can also be read as a manifesto. It is a manifesto that challenges widely circulated claims about Carlos’s gender and sexuality, calling into question the limited, binary way Carlos has been defined, given the speculations about her nom de plum “Walter Carlos.”8 To be “the Original Synth” is to do away with that binary logic, just as Haraway proposes the cyborg imagines a “world without gender.” The cyborg is a figure Haraway offers feminism at its moment of implosion in the mid-1980s; it is a counterintuitive concept that she is careful to describe in all its contradictions, beginning with this simple definition: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”9 She writes, “The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,”10 concluding, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”11 Her interest in fiction is both literal—as in science fiction—and symbolic—as it is influenced by the transformations in humanistic thinking of the late twentieth century with its emphasis on symbolism, the hugely influential media economies structured on fantasy as well as on how this has come to merge with predictions made in science 19

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fiction. So in this same tradition, we can appreciate Carlos’s identification as “Original Synth” to be both fiction and reality. Like science fiction, it is a fiction that is speculative and imaginary rather than false, foreshadowing and anticipating a near future in which it is in fact no longer fictional. And if we consider the intra-action (Barad, 2006) between Carlos, the Moog, her studio, and the incredible life of S-oB, we can interpret “Original Synth” as a nonfiction, lived identity claim that attempts to chronicle these entangled agencies. In her own reflections on Haraway’s famous manifesto, queer theorist Jasbir Puar urges that we reconsider even the figure of the goddess as one that can be assembled alongside the cyborg, writing, “Certainly it sounds sexier, these days, to lay claim to being a cyborg than a goddess. But why disaggregate the two when there surely must be cyborgian goddesses in our midst?”12 Wendy Carlos was for me a cyborgian goddess who shepherded my self-discovery through the Moog synthesizer. As a young, queer musician in a scene dominated by straight white men, I became aware of Carlos’s influential place in electronic music history at a time when I felt like I was a lone woman synthesist. The hidden history of her role in bringing the Moog synthesizer on its circuitous path to me was critical to how I would come to relate to the instrument and its gendering. Wendy Carlos was also the cyborgian goddess that pop music was waiting for in 1968 when she ushered in the popularity and cult status of a then-obscure musical instrument with S-oB. This platinum selling album won 3 Grammy awards in 1969, entered the top 40 charts, stayed there for 17 weeks, and remained in the top selling 200 20

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albums for over a year. Despite these superlatives, music journalists covering the hit record were primarily concerned with Carlos’s purported gender transition, a subject of much speculation and even obsession that Carlos famously avoided discussing, going so far as to deny any such transition ever took place.13 Wendy Carlos’s vehement protests against others’ claims about her gender reveal the experience of being outed by journalists and scholars who sought to “set the record straight.”14 I instead investigate what it has meant for the album, the artist, the genre, the instruments, and popular electronic music generally that Wendy Carlos is a synth; to think through the merging of the musician with her instrument as a utopian and futurist ideal, one that exceeds the limits of gender/genre. And let’s not forget the composer that inspired S-oB. Johann Sebastian Bach’s notorious obsessive attention to sonority, acoustics, and novel orchestration suggests he pushed the boundaries of genre too, intra-acting with his instruments, the cathedral spaces in which his compositions would be performed, and the performers of his liturgical pop. But whether or not we want to impose the identity of cybernetic organism, or simply cyborg, to either Bach or Carlos, we can nevertheless understand both musicians to be producing what Haraway has called “cyborg theory.”15 Both employed not just instruments but the medium of sound as a means of exceeding the limits of embodiment while nevertheless emphasizing the materiality of the body. As Tara Rodgers has aptly summarized it, “Synthesized sounds themselves are complex naturecultures—instances of the imploded and deeply interwoven categories of 21

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natural and cultural . . . where the fleshy body and the human histories are always and everywhere enmeshed in the tissue of interrelationship where all the relators aren’t human (Haraway and Goodeve 2000: 106).”16 The concept “natureculture” was coined by Haraway to illustrate how the cyborg was the result of both organic processes and technological design. Like Carlos’s experimentations with synthesized sound, or Bach’s meticulous and careful study of how different churches brought out unique sonorities from each of the instruments for which he composed, it challenges the rigid, classificatory distinctions made between the natural and built environments. Natureculture A mighty electrical storm rustles a tinsel tree. Swoooshhhhh . . . thunder and lightning merge into one sound and erupt from the left channel of the stereo spread. The clouds part and electronic birds begin shyly chirping from the far right channel. The pitter-patter of other mystical creatures crawling out from their dampened shelters can gradually be heard. A sonic sunburst illuminates a tin branch that falls like a helicopter seedpod. Upon touching down it triggers an oscillator geyser that sprays sound toward the heavens just as the clouds burst open, hailing golf balls of voltage in return. The oscillations of a disapproving god yammer something no one can quite understand. The inhabitants of the land run about frantically, for they know not what god is synthesizing.

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In the 1990s, amid my Brazilian music obsession, I fantasized about a form of time travel specifically designed for music fans seeking an authentic encounter with music in its original time and place of production and performance. If only I could be teleported into the audience at the 1967 Brazil Popular Music Festival to behold Caetano Veloso’s angelic voice or the angular tropicalia of Os Mutantes. Like the second Bach revival, to which S-oB is the best-known contribution, I sought a revival in the form of time travel not unlike the space-time travel that was a preoccupation for listeners in 1968. S-oB inspired a wilding of the listener’s aural imaginary then as now; it signals an elsewhere, another time that seems to beckon the listener into timbres and colors juxtaposed against Bach’s Baroque compositions, which result in a creative tension that resolves in kaleidoscopic color in the listener’s mind. Attempting to put into language the otherwise indescribable experience of listening to select tracks on SoB, an experience that is of course purely subjective and contained within the space/time of each listening event, seems exceptionally futile. But still, in my close listening to the “Brandenburg Concerto #3 in G Major (second movement)” above, I imagine sounds of nature filtered and electrified; I am transported to a magical world electrified and illuminated by shimmering quartz. In “Brandenburg,” Carlos takes us on a magic carpet ride from the wire and machinery of the studio to a strange new world where nature and culture merge into what Donna Haraway has termed “natureculture,” in synthesized, audible form.

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Naturalistic metaphors like these were commonplace in album reviews of S-oB prior to 1980 and in Carlos’s own descriptions of synthesis. Sarah Marie Schoonhoven notes an important difference between how Carlos and her critics interpreted the record’s novel sounds.17 “Carlos’s metaphoric categories seem to focus upon the physical and material qualities of her sounds, describing the timbres in relation to physical experiences humans have, within music and within life,” Schoonhoven notes. “Nature, motion, and appearance are material and tangible metaphors that relate Carlos’s musical timbres to the listeners’ experiences.”18 After 1980, however, critics’ reviews began to change in tenor and, according to Schoonhoven, became “focused on the oddities and paradoxes in Carlos’s work.”19 The reviews began employing metaphors that signified the odd, dystopian, or synthetic, and what had previously been the sound of fantasy and escape became something “other,” to be feared. The tonal shift in these reviews was likely a response to the Playboy magazine exposé about Carlos published in 1979. Journalist and gay liberation activist Arthur Bell edited 800 pages of interview transcriptions with Carlos down to a roughly 16-page spread that reduced what he described as her “cosmic ramblings” to a focus on her gender transition, which clearly inspired a phobic reaction in a majority of subsequent music reviews. But putting aside the obvious transphobia among music critics and reviewers, journalist Arthur Bell’s fixation on Carlos’s transition is worth contemplating. Bell’s role as a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and later the Gay Activist Alliance yields a few 24

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poignant moments, illustrating tensions and harmonies between a radical gay liberationist and an electronic music prodigy. As if foreshadowing a scene from a gender studies classroom in the twenty-first century, Carlos engages in a patient exchange in response to Bell’s uninformed questions (which were possibly feigned as a rhetorical strategy in anticipation of Playboy’s audience), about what is today referred to as “PGPs” (preferred gender pronouns) and the nuances of trans terminology, “Let’s start with a basic question: what is a transsexual,” asks Bell. Carlos replies with a burdened, pedagogical patience, concluding, “I wish the word transsexual hadn’t become current. Transgender is a better description, because sexuality per se is only one factor in the spectrum of feelings and needs that led me to this step.”20 Bell’s radical gay liberationist agenda, which centers a racially unmarked, cisgendered homosexuality as the primary distinction and mar of difference, is at odds with Carlos’s interests, what he calls her “cosmic ramblings.” This tension repeatedly arises; when Bell asks about Carlos’s earliest memories of dating and sexual desire, “I remember going out on a date with a girl. I was so jealous of her I was really beside myself.”21 Carlos answers in ways that seem perplexing to Bell, incomprehensible perhaps to someone who had devoted his life to gay liberation. Bell edits Carlos’s interview down to a tediously detailed telling of her experience with medicine, only briefly relenting to her constant return to the topic of music. He allows her to narrate how she went from “daily taking a razor to my wrists” at the beginning of her graduate career at Columbia University to using razors to splice magnetic tape under the 25

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tutelage of Vladimir Ussachevsky. Carlos also reveals that while she was drawn to classical music, she was enamored with the pop being released between 1965 and 1967, which inspired her to push beyond the limits of what she characterized as the esoteric noise of the electronic music genre preceding the release of S-oB. In the Q&A interview section of the article, all responses are credited to Carlos while Bell’s questions are credited to Playboy, revealing perhaps that Bell’s authority was usurped by Playboy magazine.22 Or maybe Playboy/Bell was projecting onto Carlos the false consciousness some gay liberationists attributed to trans people in the struggle, a trans-misogyny shrouded in the righteous insistence upon an imperative of gay liberation above and beyond the race and class politics so many trans figures in the Gay Liberation Front prioritized or maybe Bell was just mad at Carlos for fiddling with patch cables and sound color orchestration instead of fighting in the streets for gay and trans liberation; perhaps we’ll never know. Bell’s commitment to politics in the street, where civil rights movements have been waged, makes it impossible for him to recognize the through line in Carlos’s narrative: electronic pop music saved her life; that Carlos’s quest for liberation was not in the domain of civil rights but through the medium of sound.23 Subsequent to the Playboy interview, Carlos retreated into a guarded, private life and rejected the trans moniker while simultaneously self-publishing a veritable digital memoir in the form of her website. Maybe she did so in an effort to complicate the narrow-minded preoccupations with her sexuality exemplified (and influenced) by Bell’s 26

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exposé through the presentation of her myriad other talents and interests. Among Carlos’s many creative activities are numerous annotated, spoken word recordings in which she offers historical facts on the painstaking process she, Benjamin Folkman, and Rachel Elkind engaged in while assembling each sound and getting to know the quirks of her electronic instruments. She additionally published outtakes and early takes to draw attention to the contrasts between different generations of each recording as tracks evolved but, more importantly, to reveal her process. Revealing the “secrets of synthesis” (which is the title to one of her recordings) came to be just as important to Carlos as maintaining certain other secrets. Carlos took control of her own messaging and produced a complex, multimedia archive that complicates the way she was reduced in the popular media.24 Synthgender The author’s/artist’s/composer’s autograph or signature has been a subject of substantial reflection. Not only does the signature guarantee immortality (for the Father, according to Jacques Derrida, since it is his name that is signed) but in the culture industries of art, which promote the branding of the artist’s name, the signature is also a commodity that accumulates value. Toward the latter part of the 1970s, journalists began to fixate on the gender of Carlos’s name change. This was not only a result of the value that had accumulated to Carlos’s signature but the downgrade in social standing (from white man to white woman) Carlos 27

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elected. In an era that equated technology with masculinity, this was especially troubling for some commentators. In 1979, Journalist Karl Dallas referred to Carlos as a “human synthesizer,” intending this as an invective, playing on the modern association of synthesizer with synthetic, artificial, and fake.25 This was of course transphobic but also laced with a not-so-thinly veiled technophobia. The metonymic use of synthesizer as a stand-in for Carlos was intended to cut her and the technology she uses down to size. But is there a difference between Dallas’s slur “human synthesizer” and Carlos’s identity claim “Original Synth”? I would argue that there is. “Original Synth” claims a form of being synth or being that which makes anew. A reflection on the nature of being is what philosophers call ontology. If to synthesize is to make anew, then a synthesizer represents an ontology defined by the perpetual production of new combinations. Carlos’s “Original Synth” is life giving; Dallas’s “human synthesizer” is dead, lifeless, and what feminist linguist Mel Chen calls inanimate.26 One of the many anxieties associated with the popularization of the synthesizer and electronic music was the claim that it lacked “liveness.” Chen uses “animacy” to discuss this cultural preference for liveness, which reiterates the hierarchical superiority of the human animal who exerts power over what he perceives to be the inanimate world through his organization of the world with speech and language. Not unlike the other critically important “sound synthesizer”—the voice and mouth—which the human species has historically used to synthesize sound in the production of language and speech, the analog, electronic 28

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“sound synthesizer” was developed to produce sounds that signify like speech. Shortened to “synthesizer,” the historical moment that bore these technologies was hungry for the electronic synthesis of Baroque music. When we consider Carlos’s muse—Johann Sebastian Bach—we can see a similar effect at play: Bach merged with his instruments to surmount his loss of vision and cultivate a modality of synesthetic sense-perception known as “sound colors” which played with the affects of timbres and acoustics to effect and bring to life the sacrament in sound. In music, “liveness” marks the difference between realtime performance and recorded sound. “Liveness” suggests the danger and unpredictability of performance and the capacity for improvisation called for by this unpredictability. In the context of acoustics, a “live room” is extremely resonant and a “dead room” is not. As it relates to the difference between the synthesizer and acoustic instruments like the piano, however, liveness is a reference to the resonance of the materials that make up the instrument as well as the acoustics of the performance venue. In 1968 the Moog 900 synthesizer was compared to the acoustic piano and determined to lack its liveness. Yet, after the advent of digital synthesizers in the 1980s, the analog synthesizer was described as having a liveness that the digital synthesizer lacked. Over time, notions of sonic liveness have revealed themselves as relative and wishful, aiming always for an unachievable idealistic horizon; so-called “liveness” is thus the marker of discrepant evolutionary change and indicative of a nostalgia for what has passed. The evolving sense of liveness in sound reveals its fictiveness; it is the lamenting of a feeling of loss evident 29

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only in relation to that deemed less alive than its previous iteration, or even deemed dead, representing dystopian anxieties about a fast approaching future ruled by machines. Some music journalists interpreted liveness to be S-oB’s opposite; in album reviews “liveness” became euphemism for an authenticity the album was thought to lack, as in the following review by Leonard Feather: What remains problematical is the matter of how the telephone-switchboardish knobs and jacks of the Moog can be harnessed for non-novelty use. . . . The synthesizer in its generally available form has an inherent limitation: for all its boundless variety of tonal permutations, it can only produce one sound at a time. The musician who compensates artificially by overdubbing as many times as he wishes for a recording has to face the public live with only one pair of hands. . . . [Quoting Peter Nero] “I’m afraid we’re producing a generation of cripples. Arrangers in New York keep telling me that when it comes to real pianists for a record session, a good man nowadays is hard to find. Too many young musicians use electronics as a crutch. Instead of pianists we’re developing what they call ‘keyboard men.’”27 For Feather (and Nero), “liveness” is a manly endeavor and electronic musicians like Carlos, who produce through a process of overdubbing, cannot possibly perform live. By “perform” it is of course implied here that the synthesizer covers over the musician’s lack; it is the “cripple’s” prosthesis. For this reviewer, Carlos’s painstaking overdubbing pathetically approximates the virtuosity, vigor, and vitality performed by 30

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real men on real pianos. The synthesizer is the dildo to the “real man’s” piano/penis. Feather’s piece is exemplary of the tenor of articles that were beginning to be published at the first murmurs of Carlos’s name and hence gender change. This gender panic was projected onto the instrument, resulting in a panic about the synthesizer itself. The synthesizer became the substitutive stand-in for Carlos, something “artificial,” not “live,” embodying contradictions of gender/genre that many male reviewers feared and thus rejected. If Haraway’s cyborg allows her to imagine a world without gender and if the status of “Original Synth” is akin to the cyborg, then perhaps the logical conclusion to draw is that it is a status without gender. But unlike the cyborg, the declaration “Wendy Carlos is the Original Synth” lays claim to being both a Wendy and an original synth, an intersectional embodiment that represents a synthgender that is a natureculture. Synthgender draws our attention to the gender identity disorder inherent to electronic music. It chronicles the hostile takeover of the sonic realm by fascists and warmongers after capitalists had deliberately feminized sound in the late nineteenth century through the domestication of the piano (which became a tool for the performance of Victorian womanhood), the phonograph, and even audio recording. Leonard Feather’s review of S-oB takes this a step further by concluding that the synthesizer is emasculated due to Carlos’s inability to perform S-oB live. Haraway’s original provocation created space for an entity that collapsed the boundaries between nature, culture, and technology; rather than doing away with any 31

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of these categories, her cyborg synthesizes them. Similarly, synthgender is not just a futurist, utopian wish, it is a gender ontology that moves across time, form, and space through sound. Unlike cisgender, which often describes perceived gender conformity, synthgender merges sound and gender and refuses normative gender legibility. To be an “Original Synth” is to dispense with the binary gendering of electronic music over the course of its technological history. Synthgender employs gender noise to refute the listener’s wish for gender legibility. Synthgender also rejects any primacy given to originals; so-called originals and analogs are equals. Not only does synthgender reflect a musician who changes as a result of becoming entangled with the synthesizer but it changes the instrument, which becomes tainted or elevated by the musician. These entities become mutually constituted as a synthgendered agency. They become synthesized.

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2 Switching-on

To switch-on is to electrify. So much of music has been transformed by this twentieth-century technological ubiquity. Switching on is a fundamentally modern kinesthetic act that automates a function—like labor—resulting in more time exertion elsewhere, that is, in states of leisure, rest, consumption, play, or more labor. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx predicted not only that automation could harm the worker if capitalist interests maximize production through automation at the expense of human interests but also that it could ultimately result in the obsolescence of the human.1 This same sense of anxiety around automation became attached to the synthesizer in the mid-twentieth century. The kinesthetic act of music making—the strike of a hammer against a string, the strum, the anthropomorphized heartbeat of a drum—seemed to be at risk of being replaced by electricity, the very literalization of abstract power. Electrical voltage as a source for music? The very stuff of science fiction. The twilight zone of a postnuclear world seemed to be descending in the form of the synthesizer, an electrical instrument with the power to shift shape.

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Switching on musical instruments (as opposed to large assembly line machinery) distinguished a generation of youth from their parents, a distinction further indexed by dress, music, dance forms, and cinema. By 1968 when Columbia Records released an album called Switched-on Bach—consisting of twelve pieces by the eighteenth-century classical composer Johann Sebastian Bach performed on a Moog synthesizer—the switched-on generation embraced it as a kind of soundtrack to their lives. Accumulating Grammy awards and dominating the pop music charts for years to come, S-oB exceeded all expectations and spawned a new subgenre of Moog-centric interpretations of any and all forms of popular music. What more can be said about an album that has been written about and obsessed over by cultists for the last fifty years? For starters, it is an album constantly being rediscovered almost yearly by new generations of listeners since its release. Such was the case for me in 1995. Prior to 1995, like anyone else I had been drawn to electroacoustic or electrified instruments like the electric guitar or the electric piano. But upon my first encounter with analog synthesizers I recognized the novelty and distinction of their sound production technology. Whereas electroacoustic instruments employ pickups to convert the vibration of strings into electrical signals, which can then be manipulated in infinite ways (through “effects units” that distort, reverberate, or echo sound, for instance), the analog synthesizer generates its own tones, which can then also be manipulated in infinite ways. In simpler terms, electrified instruments create and capture resonance (sound as an interaction with its environment, that is, strings vibrating 34

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within the hollow of a guitar) whereas the synthesizer creates sound from electricity. The sound of electricity is synthesized through the manipulation of various qualities like envelope, frequency, waveform, pitch, etc. What the synthesizer enables the musician to do is play within these shifts. It is a machine that satisfies a will to shift shape. On (modular/phase/pitch/paradigm shifting and) the will to shift shape Shape-shifting is a timeless and universal wish. Traceable across cultures, religions, and time periods, it represents a desire for a transcendence of the body, time, and space— the wish for metamorphosis. From Greek mythology to Marvel comics, shape-shifting has allured Homo sapiens sapiens as long as the archaeological record extends. The preChristian and early modern icons of shape-shifting (sorcery, alchemy, chimeras, magic, spirits, voodoo, hoodoo, ghosts, etc.) became pivotal to the paradigm shift to the Christian and colonial eras. Jesus’s resurrection comes to figure as exceptional and hence definitive of his divine power and an end is declared to the more commonplace, everyday forms of shape-shifting claimed by commoners. The mythos of resurrection elevated the birth and resurrection of Christ to the preeminent form of shape-shifting, rendering sorcery and magic as base and inauthentic. Nevertheless, shape-shifting has remained central to lore, superstition, and a variety of genres of storytelling; it is the means by which the unknown and otherworldly is imagined, engaged, and embodied. 35

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Its ubiquity across cultures and time periods suggests it is one of the driving forces of modern human beings, akin to what Nietzsche identified as the “will to power”, what Freud described through the pleasure principal as the “will to pleasure” and what Foucault’s emphasis on discourse interpreted as modern government’s “will to knowledge”; it organized the world into hierarchies. A “will to shift shape” represents the human wish to alter existence either physically or temporally. The Moog synthesizer is one answer to this timeless will. On the one hand, all music is shape-shifting. Timbre, color, scale, rhythm, and the body’s response to these forces—these are performative, shape-shifting energies. But in the analog synthesizer’s electronic medium, saw tooth, sine, and square waveforms can literally be changed by the musician through voltage variation translating as different rhythmic pulses of energy in sound, a literal shifting of wave shape. In Wendy Carlos’s hands, shape-shifting on the Moog resulted in what she calls “orchestration,” or the painstaking work of synthesizing sounds that are analogs of acoustic ones, transforming a simple square wave into color and sonic timbre through the introduction of variables like changes in the envelope (e.g., the signal’s attack and decay), voltagecontrolled oscillators, or pitch. Electronic orchestration could easily be (and often is) interpreted as an artificial mimicry of acoustic sound, but this misinterpretation is akin to the designation of photography and painting as simply miming rather than creating new representations of the world. As engineer and producer Rachel Elkind put it, “We were after a vocabulary 36

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of synthesizer sounds that might be analogous to the sounds that have become part of the standard orchestral language— but on the synthesizer’s own terms.”2 Continuing, “Of course, there’s musicianship involved too. It’s not as contrived as it seems when you envision each performance as beginning with a click track. But we work until it sounds loose and spontaneous. That’s the trick, the magic of synthesizer/tape performance.”3 Carlos’s orchestration of sounds for S-oB employs a realist sonic aesthetic to represent the instruments in Bach’s original compositions but does so in a manner that is productive rather than mimetic. The first track of S-oB, an interpretation of Bach’s “Sinfonia to Cantata No. 29” (originally composed for a pipe organ, which is typically found in a large, resonant cathedral), is very distinctly Moogy and clearly not meant to simply mimic the organ. It is paradigmatically contrapuntal, electronic Baroque. God the Christian father appears wearing Afrika Bambaataa’s shades, reciting the book of Genesis on the far left channel while the world erupts in hyper color fractals unfurling like a Prince guitar solo on the far right. The infamous low end of the Moog described as having the deepest, widest, most robust synthesized bass sounds—is a constant here, as is the brightness for which the instrument is known. Carlos and Elkind’s instrumental orchestrations are not reflections of the instruments for which Bach composed. Instead, Carlos’s orchestrations of symphonic sounds represent an “intra-action” between so many forces, including the collaboration, the period of Moog technology, and the recording technique.4 37

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“Intra-action” is potentially revolutionary when applied to sound waves, which are often understood as exclusively working through the process of reflection, distinct sound waves imagined as only capable of reflecting off of surfaces. But when we consider that electronic orchestration is produced through a synthesis of the original score, the wave shape, the aspects of color added through filters, and the multitrack layering of other sounds to create electronic synthesis, we can read Carlos’s careful manipulation of the synth—her synthesis of and the literal shape-shifting of the sound waves at her disposal—as sonic intra-action. Synthesis as sonic intra-action makes sound anew. Carlos and Elkind were after all the first to take some of those most basic waves (sine, saw, etc.) and create new sounds that resembled brass, strings, and voice—but with a difference. By inaugurating the field of electronic orchestration, the origins of which she traces to Ravel, Stravinsky, and Bartok, Wendy Carlos not only became an ambassador of sonic shape-shifting but also shamanically interpreted that spirit realm for Bob Moog and others through such orchestration. She was an interpreter of synthesizer sounds for mass consumption, stating, “Things have moved on a lot in the 30+ years since such folly greeted us. The technology also moved on, and the special modules and devices we had to custom build to allow our synth to be an expressive, flexible instrument, are assumed as the norm: everyone has them.”5 Through electronic orchestration Carlos translated synthesis into a sonic vocabulary that was familiar to the masses. Invited to review synthesizers for the 1974 issue 38

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of the Bohemian Whole Earth Catalog, Carlos incisively responds instead to accusations that she merely imitated real sounds, writing, The point is, the very word “Synthesizer” (which is otherwise full of unfortunate connotations) suggests a fertile investigation of the whole world of sound—like: why does a trumpet sound like a trumpet and not a clarinet or a violin, etc. All I can tell you is this kind of knowledge, more than any particular hardware, is what enables me to obtain the sounds that I do. . . . Many people suggest to me that I constantly “limit myself to imitating real instruments.” Bull shit. The easiest to obtain sounds (3 or 4 patch chords on the Moog, for ex.) are all those dreary “new” sounds. I’ve rarely tried to actually “imitate” traditional musical instruments—I’ve always used them as a point of departure and then veered off into subtly [sic] different areas. It’s almost more fun to invent a new woodwind sound; one which is, say, as flexible and musical as an oboe, but better, at least in context, for what you are doing at that moment. And these, be they obtained on Moog, Tonus, or whatever, are the very tedious timeconsuming many interconnection-types of sounds that lead to my own bag (although to the average ear, they may be reinterpreted as “sounding like” . . . a jet plane? a trombone? an electric motor?) “Gee, that Picasso paints weird “flowers,” don’t he?!”6 Carlos sets the record straight and re-presents the problem of synthesis as one of creative expression, not mimicry. Whether Baroque, Cubist, or Surrealist, Carlos understands 39

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her work to be, like that of Picasso and Bach, fundamentally aesthetic and creative rather than mimetic and realistic. Bach’s original compositions were also preoccupied with musical shape-shifting. Bach’s compositions were a mechanism for worship, transforming music into a socialmoral force. Sonically interpreting the Passion, both in choral works and even beyond through an aestheticization of the Passion in counterpoint, Bach devised a method for what Charles Hirschkind has elsewhere termed “ethical listening.”7 Hirschkind coins this term to refer to audiocassette sermons played by late twentieth-century Muslim taxi drivers in Egypt as an example of a kind of piety on the move. Like the mobile hardware of the twentieth century (wax cylinder, acetate disc, long-playing record, cassette tape, compact disc, cars, etc.) Bach’s liturgical pop music was partly fueled by the rapid transformations taking place in Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As European empires began expanding and colonizing not only surrounding territories but also those overseas, Bach’s liturgical pop music, its performance and the audiences it created, enabled an “ethical listening” practice that traveled beyond the cathedral and into the colonies. The piano was after all invented during Bach’s lifetime. As Jane Campion’s The Piano cinematically dramatizes, the piano was also an instrument of colonialism, allowing liturgical music to be performed beyond the church’s massive pipe organ. A harp placed on its side, encased in a portable wooden box, and outfitted with hammers that strike (rather than pluck) each string, the piano was the musical technology that signified a new automation of musical instrumentation in the early 40

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modern period, a definitive distinction from the antiquated harp and the harpsichord. As Europe expanded, the piano and its liturgy became one tool among many in the “civilizing mission” of colonialism. From the piano to the synthesizer Barring the fact that all musical instrument design has employed the most advanced technological innovations specific to the time to address local cultural needs with the raw materials available, something interesting began to take place in global musical technoscience around the midnineteenth century stretching to the mid-twentieth. Within this roughly one hundred year span, rapid industrialization, the growth of cities, and the mass movement of people around the world (as a result of colonialism, slavery, political, and religious upheaval and the lure of land settlement in the so-called “new world”), cultural traditions began to influence one another resulting in the appropriation of others’ cultural practices. Thus began the hybridization of everything, otherwise known as “the modern” period. Modernity quickened the pace of travel and the circulation of information, expanding ideas about what was possible and who was entitled entre into the bourgeoisie. The European bourgeoisie was represented as a leisurely, land-owning class through the opulent aesthetics of the Baroque period (roughly spanning 1600–1750), which included extravagant architecture (e.g., Catholic cathedrals and basilicas erected throughout Europe and the colonial world), décor, painting, 41

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opera, and the invention of tonality. But by the late nineteenth century almost anyone could aspire to be middle class, and the media industries quickly exploited these growing aspirations by marketing representations of the “good life” and the leisure class as achievable by all. The nineteenth-century rise of the aspirational class (i.e., the petite bourgeoisie) brought a Baroque revival and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, a doyen of Baroque music (who had been dead for almost 150 years), was chosen as the soundtrack to the lives of a rising consumer class who performed their upward mobility by playing his music on upright pianos marketed specifically to them. The piano revival of the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century represented the confluence of mechanical innovation and upper class aspirations of conspicuous consumption. Given its ubiquity, the piano became the focus of further technological development through automation and so the player piano was born. By this point, the domesticated piano and the amateur pianist signified Victorian womanhood; what came next was a technological sleight-of-hand in which the instrument, its handler, and the innovations it indexed became the domain of masculinity. As Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner has described it, this historical cover-up happened on many fronts, including the publication of George Upton’s 1880 Women in Music, “the first of many articles and reviews by prominent male critics which sought to trivialize and undermine the achievements of what was considered an alarming number of new women composers in the realm of ‘serious’ classical music.”8 Amid this masculinist takeover, inventors sought total automation of music and so began the quest for electronic music. 42

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The computational turn that began in the mid-nineteenth century represented a butching up of technological innovation. As musicologist Judith Peraino has put it, “Technology and machines align most frequently with masculinity, with male-dominated disciplines of math and engineering, and with economic advantages—in sum, with patriarchal power and control. This is especially true in popular music, where historically women have been ghettoized as singers rather than electric guitar players.”9 Electronic music is—like every technology-related field— male dominated. The proverbial chicken-or-egg question leaves an uncertainty regarding whether women and girls are merely uninterested in or discouraged from engaging in the tinkering necessary for success in such fields. In Pink Noises Tara Rodgers interviews a number of female electronic musicians and producers who refute the idea that women are not tinkerers, suggesting instead that their involvement is hidden, covered over, disappeared.10 This disappearing act recurs because of the repetitive and reiterative gendering of technology as masculine. Carlos references this misogyny as the inspiration behind her nom de plum “Walter,” under which she published some of her earliest recordings. Carlos often laments the music industry’s misogyny, which she claims forced her to initially publish under this alias. I take Carlos’s claims to heart as a fellow Moogstress who attempted to make a career in music (albeit at an entirely different historical moment and scale); going in drag as Walter Carlos to her one and only live performance in Saint Louis allowed her to traverse these barriers. Her origin story emphasizes the paternalism of 43

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journalists and academics who have insisted upon a story in which the master of the Moog synthesizer must have begun as a “he”; how else could Carlos’s prodigious talent and virtuosity be explained? Comments made by other female electronic musicians who attest to a “world of electronic music . . . [as] . . . a planet where something had happened to make all the women disappear” reiterates this.11 Contrary to the deliberate masculinization of technology, electronics, and computing over the course of the twentieth century, Wendy Carlos subtly points out the feminine origins of computer technology in her discussion of the commonly held “misunderstanding” that the Moog was a computer. She writes, Originally even the word “syn-the-si-zer” caused people a lot of trouble to pronounce, never mind understand. Even harder to grasp now is a misunderstanding that reared its head over and over: the Moog Synthesizer (and other brands) was some kind of computer. . . . Perhaps the maze of patch cords needed to interconnect all the modules had something to do with it. Analog computers used a lot of patch cords, too (as did the phone company’s operator consoles).12 This subtle, parenthetical aside on phone operators reiterates points made more forcefully in recent films and publications on the central role played by women in the history of technology and computing, including the Hollywood film Hidden Figures.13 So despite the historically central role of women in computation and telephony, all things technological became gendered masculine. 44

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This is due in no small part to the cooptation of technological research and design by what Dwight D. Eisenhower coined the “military industrial complex.”14 As a five-star general during the Second World War, Eisenhower cautioned against what he observed to be a dangerous alliance among the war economies that grew in response to the Second World War (such as weapons manufacturing, scientific experiments in the service of the world wars, and secondary industries developed to serve the military). What Eisenhower observed (which had previously been noted by German Jewish exiled scholar Franz Leopold Neumann) was that fascist governments like Nazi Germany refocused all technological development on national security; other nations would of course soon follow suit. From spy technology to synthesizer A focus on technological development and national security began in earnest in Russia when Lev Termen (a.k.a. Leon Theremin) was recruited to work at the Red Army Military Radiotechnical Lab to develop radio technology under Lenin’s command.15 As Termen biographer Albert Glinksy has described it, “The military demands of World War I intervened [in the nascent field of radio technology], and audion tube manufacturing soared to fill the needs of the U.S. Navy, as well as the waves of orders pouring in from foreign countries, including Russia.”16 But Termen became preoccupied with a discovery he made about the body and electricity while performing research. Whereas scientists 45

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around the world tinkering with radio transmission used physical materials like crystals and metal, Lev Termen experimented with the human body as conductor. Glinsky writes, Lev’s first project for [Russian physicist Abram] Ioffe used the human body as an electrical conductor—its ability to store up charges, or the property known as “capacitance.” In an electrical circuit, the capacitance was regulated by a “capacitor”—known at that time as a “condenser”—made up of two conducting plates, separated by a nonconductor (a dielectric), which functioned to accumulate an electrical charge. Lev was intrigued by the notion that a person’s natural body capacitance, when standing near an electrical circuit, could interfere with the capacity of the circuit, causing a change in its parameters, and set off a signaling device—a simple, invisible burglar alarm.17 Despite being tasked with developing technology in support of the Red Army, Lev Termen was sidetracked by the human body’s interactions with electricity, leading him to the discovery of the varying tones that he could produce as a result of the proximity of his hands to circuitry and antennae. Glinsky continues, As his hand moved closer to the capacitor, the whistle tone became higher; withdrawing the hand lowered the pitch. Shaking the hand in a gentle, tremulous motion created a subtle vibrato. The dormant cellist was roused. There was some sort of music in this capacitometer, a new way of producing tones—maybe even an instrument.

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He summoned Ioffe and handed over the earphones. “That’s an electronic Orpheus’ lament!” Ioffe marveled. Lev’s imagination was seduced. This was electricity singing to him, pure and simple. No friction of physical soundmakers rubbing against each other. No mechanical energy. Just the few voices of electrons.18 Termen had a rare opportunity to demonstrate his new “etherphone” to none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, which led the Bolshevik leader to declare, “Socialism equals Soviet Power plus Electrification!”19 According to Glinksy, this inspired Lenin to tout the “etherphone” and electrification in general as the epitome of Russian ingenuity, stating “we must advertise the invention in every possible way.”20 Lenin insisted that Termen “embark on an agitprop tour . . . Lenin did not mean to promote electronic music per se, but to flaunt one achievement of ‘Soviet Power’—to captivate the masses and galvanize popular sentiment for bending backs a little harder, in the name of modernization—in the name of a fortified Communist empire.”21 This pivotal moment married electronic music with statecraft, the theremin or “etherphone” with Soviet vitality and bore a space race in sound.22 Electronic music is the poetic and unexpected outcome of paranoid Cold War research. The appropriation and adaptation of one affect—paranoia—in the development of musical instruments with an electromagnetic capacity to inspire infinite other affects, especially queer and countercultural affects, is where this story gets very, very interesting. It was through messing around with theremins that the young Bob Moog developed his circuit design

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chops, not only demonstrating the one he built from his own design during his senior year of high school but even creating a line of Moog Theremins available through mail order. Described by Bob Moog as a “space control electronic musical instrument,” the theremin represented a symbol of the space age and the space race at once. As the theremin’s progeny, Moog synthesizer design was preoccupied with proximity and touch, which continuously emerged as a theme in Bob Moog’s musings on the connection that Moog players had with their instruments. “I can feel what’s going on inside a piece of electronic equipment,” testifies Bob Moog in the documentary about his life.23 This echoes the answer he gave to my question posed during a Q&A about the difference between analog and digital sound: “All I know is, you can feel the difference,” he replied. Clapping his hands then rubbing them together while feasting his eyes upon his newest creation, Bob Moog admiringly gazes at a Minimoog Voyager fresh off the assembly line at his Asheville, North Carolina, factory. “This is an analog instrument so we have electronic components actually making the electrical vibrations,”24 Moog explains. “In the sound path of this there are no numbers; there are electrical vibrations, which are the analog of things like strings and wood and brass.”25 In his characteristically charismatic description of the analog synthesizer, Bob Moog speaks to the vitality of this technology and how its circuitry distinguishes its processing and sounding. When I think of this circuit, I have a feeling for what’s happening with the electricity as it goes through these

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paths. . . . What it has to do with all these little traces on the board here that connect it together and cause the current to change as it goes from one part to another. . . . I have a feeling, which is very similar to how I imagine a violin maker feels when he’s just getting the right amount of wood in one surface of the violin. There are a lot of people who begin to feel what the circuits do in a way that’s similar to how I feel them . . . and I know for a fact that musicians make contact with this board inside this instrument here [bangs knuckles against circuit board]. Uh, not physical contact—it’s not like they have it under their armpits—but [circles finger around his head and body] there’s something going on here that connects what’s going here [taps circuit board] with what’s going on inside here [points to head]. It’s not spiritual in the sense that it’s religious but spiritual in the sense that it uses some way of connecting the things that are in the universe by ways other than we can see with our senses.26 Moog could easily rattle off technical jargon but eschews this, testifying instead to the affective circuitry connecting his eponymous synthesizer with its players in an extrasensory, quasi-spiritual manner. Moog attempts to decode the mythical qualities so many aficionados ascribe to his instruments and the feeling of playing the analog synthesizer more generally, describing a feedback loop formed between the player and the instrument. Moog situated himself in a long history of instrumentmakers, a breed of tech gurus who worked in novel ways with the materials at hand—be that wood, bone, ivory,

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catgut, skin, metal, magnets, or, in his case, voltage control. As Moog imagines it, this is a special calling, one where the instrument designer who “has always been at the fringe of technology, far from mainstream practices that stress ease of manufacture, predictability, and economy” perseveres along with the musicians for whom they design, despite the highly niche use-value for their products.27 A sonic soothsayer, Moog repeatedly expressed a metaphysical ethos about his calling as a musical instrument designer and his aim to serve the musicians who called upon him to apply his skills for their creative expression. The feeling of sound was something I was deeply preoccupied with as Moogstress and as a budding sound studies scholar.28 The sine, saw tooth and square waves, the voltage-controlled filters, the modulation of wave forms— these were mere metrics that could not describe what actually happened to me when I played the Moog. Inside Bob Moog’s circumspect description (“you can feel the difference”) was the answer I had been searching for—I could feel sound waves—both literally as vibrations moving against and through my body and as a transmission of electronic affect. As Moogstress, analog sound was my affect. Sure, musicians have testified to a oneness with their instruments for centuries; what’s different about the analog synthesizer you may ask? “It wasn’t natural and therefore it wasn’t right; it wasn’t the way things should be,”29 recalled Bob Moog of the typical response he received to his new “contraption” when he debuted it at trade shows in the late 1960s. This was also what I heard as a teenager growing up in the Bible Belt in the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the midst of contemplating 50

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my budding queerness. Was I hearing the Moog as a queer feeling when I first encountered it only a few years later? Phenomenology of Moog perception In Bob Moog’s waxing upon the encounter between the player and the circuit board is implied a form of contact not unlike the capacitance envisioned by his hero Termen. Moog suggests that the electromagnetic fields produced by players (like Carlos, his principal informant, and muse), whose brain waves and heart beats create electrical pulses, and those produced by synths actually alter one another in a form of synthesis. This claim is echoed in recent research using EEG to evaluate the effectiveness of music in music therapy settings.30 As I discussed in the Prologue and Chapter 1, synthesis is a sonic form of intra-action— synthesized sounds alter the humans making them just as the humans alter the synthesized sound. Through Termen’s experiments with capacitance (which designated the human body as conductor for electrical currents) as well as through properties of electromagnetic radiation, we can explain Moog’s and my own feeling. But feeling can of course also be an affect. The late scholar Teresa Brennan’s incredibly rich concept—“the transmission of affect”—seems apropos to what is happening here. As Brennan describes it, The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger, is social or psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsible for bodily changes; some

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are brief changes, as in a whiff of the room’s atmosphere, some longer lasting. In other words, the transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The “atmosphere” or the environment literally gets into the individual.31 Brennan’s notion pushes us to think beyond the skin as a membrane that neatly contains an individual and her sensual experiences of the world. In my retooling of Brennan’s pithy concept—as the transmission of electronic affect—electricity effectively alters the player and the player alters electricity. This altered state is what so many players testify to. Bob Moog suggests that players go in search of that contact. S-oB was a deliberate performance of affect and an intentional vehicle of feeling. As Carlos describes, Our motive for the first album of Bach’s had been personal and simple. It was designed to demonstrate to the world that electronic music did not equate with a stereotypically weird and unapproachable collection of disjunct beeps and boops lacking anything one might call musical expression and performance values. . . . As we set out to produce S-oB, Rachel and I were intent on proving that most electronic music was merely a victim of this same posture. It [was] arbitrarily confined [to] most classical music being written in the ’50s and ’60s, but need not be so. Here was an example of music that was honestly electronic in origin, but still musical in other ways that were currently out of style. We were trying to counter the “musical nihilism,” devoid of melody, harmony, meter, rhythm, and human expression.32 52

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What we learn about synthesis through Carlos is that it represents a continuation of a will to shift shape but in a postwar, modern era. Shape-shifting is in part a response to the social, environmental, and political climate, a realization that the human body, as well as the category of the human, is a limiting and exclusive container. Shape-shifting through sound imagines other futures than the bleak possibilities available in the here and now, as she describes in the following: I used to hate being a composer in the late twentieth century. With so few possibilities considered acceptable by much of the music world, it felt like we were all trapped in a little cul de sac. But now I barely sleep nights with all the excitement of possibilities becoming real with at least a few computer synthesizers. You no longer have to give up the richness of the acoustic realm or resort to the music concrete style limits of sampling equipment to be involved with electronic music. After all, we can build new orchestras of bowed timpani, percussive French horns, woodwind glockenspiels, metal marimbas and all the unnamed timbres imaginable that grow naturally out of instrumental power like this [plays such sounds]. What a great time to be a composer.33

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3 Switched-on Studio

The histories of electrical engineering and electronic musical instrument design are dominated by father figures whose names make up the canon: Newton, Fourier, Ohm, Kelvin, Helmholtz, Termen, Faraday, Deutch, Buchla, and of course Moog.1 Similarly, the history of audio engineering and record production includes names that signify an acoustic signature, much like the auteurs of cinema signify a visual one: George Martin, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Quincy Jones, and Sam Philips, just to name a few.2 But in the case of S-oB, we have an anomalous venture bringing together a female composer, audio engineer, and electronic music innovator with a female producer. It is a creative relationship between two women—Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind—whose collaboration produced one of the highest-selling classical albums of all time (it went Gold in 1969 and Platinum in 1986). The two worked within the limits of multitrack studio recording technology and the Moog synthesizer at its earliest developmental stage (900 series). Audio engineer, tape

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music composer, and pianist Wendy Carlos certainly had the credentials to usher in the odd new musical instrument with her BA in both music and physics and an MA in music composition, but none of these qualifications trained her in the skill that seems to be the most critical to her role as the interpreter of voltage-controlled sound for the masses. Analog synthesizers are shape-shifters notoriously difficult to tame. Whereas some synthesizers include preprogrammed settings and sounds accessible with the touch of a button, the Moog 900’s patch bays, switches, knobs, and dials allow for infinite sonic possibilities that are very difficult to replicate with any exactitude. Carlos’s ability to socialize the Moog is what has enshrined her as the mother of synthesis, or as she seems to prefer it—“Original Synth.” Much like mother’s role in the traditional nuclear family—as the nurturing translator of father’s rules—Carlos had a unique ability to translate the arcane and technical mechanics of the Moog 900 to sound colors that were legible to audiences. The violin, the trumpet, the human voice—it wasn’t just that Carlos’s perfectly tuned ear could mimic acoustic sounds, but that she understood the social order of things and “what is audibly important,” as she put it.3 It’s possible that the technological limitations of the mid1960s presented the necessary challenges to force Carlos and Elkind to innovate, but even beyond this, the perfectionism required of two women collaborators working in audio engineering was a response to the ambient misogyny surrounding them in the late 1960s and early 1970s both professionally and generally. Their painstaking attention

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to detail is audible and perhaps even inaudible, as Elkind described it: Everything has to be carefully plotted out for the final mix. EQ settings, echo and reverb effects, panning, and anything else you care to think of is carefully choreographed. If our music sounds alive it’s because there are live people making decisions and moving things around. When we’re mixing, I try to stretch out infinity as much as I can. That’s the only way to explain it. I like to try to give the ear a little more than it can fully hear.4 Elkind describes the role she played in developing the rich timbres on S-oB, which is in many ways not unlike some of the basic theories established by Hermann von Helmholtz in some of the earliest theorizing on synthesis, published in 1885. As Tara Rodgers has historicized it, “Helmholtz built on Ohm’s theories to argue that the quality of a tone depends on the number and relative strength of its constituent partial tones.”5 Contributing to what Carlos refers to as a “twohundred-year-old art of orchestration,” she and Elkind incorporated the studio and magnetic tape in combination with analog synthesizers in their composition of tones and timbres.6 In addition to this, Carlos has been a pioneer in multidirectional audio experimentation and is credited with making recommendations important to streamlining the bulky and costly modular system into an integrated unit, contributing to the commercial success of the Minimoog in the early to mid-1970s. Additionally, Carlos contributed to the creation of touch sensitivity to the instrument—now

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standard on all synthesizers—through refinements she recommended to Moog over a period of several years. Before we released S-oB, we realized the standard synthesizer was missing something very important: touch sensitivity. We thought soon all synthesizer keyboards would have this important characteristic but that didn’t happen for over 10 years. To get the first one though, I worked rather closely with Bob Moog starting in mid1967. The final version was rather mechanical and clunky by modern electronic keyboard standards but it did work and it still does. It had both depth and velocity sensing and these could be used to control the volume and timbre naturally and expressively as one performed. What’s more important is that it opened the door to doing Bach.7 Bringing the nuance of “human touch” to performance is key to Carlos’s synthgender (discussed in Chapter 1). By bringing a feminized human touch, what we can imagine as synthetic care work (or pink collar work), Carlos transforms the cold, calculated, and disembodied sounds of mid-century electronic music into an instrument of self-fashioning. Rodgers similarly concludes that touch sensitivity was a means of bringing the performer’s body and expressivity to an instrument that represented the post-human to many at the time, writing, “Many inventors of electronic musical instruments have devised and revised touch-sensitive interfaces in efforts to humanize expressive possibilities of otherwise unwavering electronic tones.”8 Based on Carlos’s suggestions, Moog introduced touch sensitivity to control brightness and volume, which “opened 58

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the door to doing Bach” in 1967 and with that the possibility for expressivity. Expressivity in turn enabled the innovation “electronic voice synthesis” which came out of Carlos’s request for a vocoder from Moog.9 This synthesis allowed her to sonically model the instruments of an orchestra; by layering different waveforms on multiple tracks and playing with envelope, Carlos developed sounds that resemble strings, brass, and percussion. In her 1987 spokencommentary album Secrets of Synthesis, Wendy Carlos discusses the development of synthesizer voices for S-oB, uttering in an altered voice, “I am a 10-band vocoder. I was designed by Trans-Electronic Music and built by R. A. Moog in the summer of 1970. If the synthesizer output is fed into my voicing circuit I can even sing solo and chorus parts as follows.”10 Employing electronic music as a medium of selffashioning, she personifies the synth as a way of translating the technology to a general audience. On the following track she reveals how her preconceived expectations regarding the expendability of the performer and the autonomy of electronic instruments were dashed by merely listening and comparing a “perfect electronically played electronic rhythm track” with an “imperfect human performed one.” As she reflects, Coming as I did from an academic background, I used to share the then-common notion that the performer was some kind of a barrier between the composer and the audience. I thought I was going to remove this sacred alliance by getting rid of the performer via electronic music. What’s ironic is that I’d soon found that I had

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become a performer myself and now I expect performance value in all music.11 Whereas the electronically played track perfectly interpreted the score, it was precisely the nuance, the inflection, body, and history brought by the human performer interfacing with the electronic instrument that Carlos came to prefer. Carlos was of a moment in which the studio performer could be distinguished from the live performer. The studio made it possible for a performance practice restrained neither by the stage nor an audience who shares a time-space with the musician. The surprising popularity of S-oB brought with it a dispersed audience eager for a rapport with Carlos, resulting in a cottage industry of journalism focused on Carlos, SoB, and Moog synthesizers enshrining her as the original synthesist. Her identity as synthesist melds the performing subject with the machine so that she is an agent through her machine in the production of sound. She primed listeners for electronic voice synthesis, which was initially rejected in 1969 then reintroduced again in 1970 after Moog developed the vocoder (initially called a “spectrum encoder decoder”) Carlos requested. Through careful sequencing, she and Elkind introduced “timid listeners to the concept of vocoding, gradually introducing more and more until by the end Beethoven would not sound so intimidating.”12 Carlos narrates how she came to a realization that, just like in the discoveries she made about electronic synthesis of orchestral sounds, one should not be “too vulgar” sounding when composing electronic simulations of the human

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voice.13 Thus the origin of the now iconic track “TimeSteps” was “largely pragmatic rather than artistic.”14 Not unlike the gradual introduction of broccoli or the birds and the bees to children by mothers, the sonic maternalist pragmatism practiced by Carlos and Elkind “paid off ” according to Carlos (especially so when Stanley Kubrik supported the use of their vocoder recordings on the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack). Birth of the home studio The evolution of the synthesizer coincided with the evolution of the recording studio. Like the Columbia-Princeton labs where Wendy Carlos initially cut her teeth (and tape) as a composer and sound engineer, the studiocraft she carefully and meticulously designed helped usher in a new era for the recording studio and the necessity for a synthesizer within it. The studio Moog, which came in the form of the early 900 series, simultaneously intimidated and beckoned even novice players with its quirky knobs and patch bays. The instrument was designed to be played and required playfulness in the pursuit of completely novel, otherworldly sounds. The sensual, experiential, and affective claim to liveness and “a sense of presence”15 analog synthesizer purists assert in order to differentiate the instruments from digital ones belies the fact that for many early Moog synthesizer players, and most certainly for Wendy Carlos, the instrument was not conducive to live performance. It was notoriously difficult to play live, especially when attempting the polyphonic sounds that were possible initially only through multitrack 61

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studio recording. (The early instruments were monophonic; only one note could be played at a time.) This inspired the designing of a studio around her synthesizers and the various other instruments that Carlos was to help bring into the mainstream of popular music and film score composition. A highly controlled environment, Carlos’s studio-cumlaboratory is arguably her most important instrument. Encased in a Faraday cage, which makes it completely impervious to “signal contaminants” (Wi-Fi, cellular, or radio signals as well as the din of circuitry), the studio is designed to record sound with absolutely no interference or sound pollution.16 By establishing it at home, Carlos and Elkind modeled a music production practice that was indistinguishable from everyday life. Foreshadowing the ubiquity of the home studio that would emerge decades later in the new millennium, their domestication of sound recording represents another instance of what I have referred to elsewhere as the “feminization of listening” prominent in the modern history of recording, going as far back as the late nineteenth century.17 Some of the earliest audio recordings ever made, for instance, were by women who translated what were often heard as the “noises” made by Native and African Americans for academic and then popular audiences. Following a long legacy of women sonic translators (i.e., from telephone switchboard operators to early twentieth century female comparative musicologists), Carlos and Elkind create a world of sounds that are analogs to acoustic sounds producing what comes to be known popularly as analog synthesizer music. Using electronic synthesis and magnetic tape as their media (as opposed to telephony or 62

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wax cylinders), they create by analogy, re-presenting the material and acoustic world in a fashion that causes the listener to rethink the original (and the very distinction between originals and copies) such that, subsequent to S-oB, the so-called analog sound has become a reified and fetishized object. As philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed, this slippage between what he calls “simulation” and “the real,” a.k.a. postmodernism, is what characterizes contemporary media. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say, of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes.18 Analog synthesizer music epitomizes the analogical condition of postmodernity, where the copy exceeds the socalled real in both symbolic and material value. But it also begs a larger question: Is every recording an analog of a realtime sonic event? Is every piece of writing an analogy? Studiolab A recording studio, especially of the variety erected by Carlos in the late 1960s, consists of countless moving parts patched together to form a unique circuitry. No two recording studios are alike. The actual space is understood 63

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by many to be a key quality of this distinction: the variations in acoustics across studios can bring unique qualities out of the instruments or voices being recorded, what Susan Schmidt Horning calls the studio’s “acoustical signature.”19 This widely held understanding of studio acoustics attributes the built environment with all of the agency, and the audio engineer’s ingenuity is the key that can more or less successfully unlock that nuanced resonant capacity, making it audible on record through careful engineering. In the post–Second World War era, the recording studio’s locale produced regional sounds: Sun Studios is associated with the Memphis sound; Motown’s Hitsville USA becomes associated with the Detroit sound; and so on. Thus the studio’s proximity to the sounds emerging within a local scene defines the sound of that studio.20 By the late 1950s, the combination of multitrack magnetic tape recording, the long-playing record, and recording in stereo turned the studio into a laboratory in which the engineer and producer could play with sound, space, and time like never before.21 The studio could be closed off from the world and turned into a temple of sonic experimentation, divorced from the original emphasis on acoustic resonance.22 Wave shape, envelope (controlled by a voltage-control filter), oscillators (for vibrato) and polyphony (through multitrack recording), choral tone, articulation, and phase— these were some of the qualities Elkind and Carlos tinkered with in the studio, even developing “electronic pointillism” to replicate the tape splicing Carlos performed at the ColumbiaPrinceton lab with its cofounder Vladimir Ussachevsky. As one journalist put it in 1979, “The barriers that had isolated 64

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electronic music were broken down as listeners became aware that there was something new, something musically enjoyable to be heard in Bob Moog’s instrument.”23 Similar to the way her muse J. S. Bach bore the acoustic properties of the room or chapel in mind as a resonant chamber for the particular tones and timbres of each instrument, Carlos worked within the acoustic properties of magnetic tape, multichannel recording, and the stereo spread to produce her analogic sounds. Unlike Bach, however, it was electronic properties like wave form, envelope, and filter that Carlos bore in mind in the creation of timbre or tone color. As she describes this approach, We call it pointillism or hocketing. It’s this distribution of many notes and many colors between many tracks that is one of the most distinctive qualities of our orchestration style. . . . We separate single notes and groups of notes and interlocking sequences of notes. This allows you to change timbre constantly.24 Carlos and Elkind conducted the studio as an orchestra. Carlos orchestrated sounds through attentiveness to the sound colors that constitute both acoustic and synthesized analogs; the studio became her means of synthesizing the Baroque embellishments that would otherwise require a symphony, even though Carlos admits that the color palette available to the synthesist in 1967 was limited when compared to a live orchestra. The synthesizer doesn’t have very many colors. You’ve got bright to dull, and if you want you can use effects, and

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hard to soft attacks. So there are maybe 20 basic colors. . . . The orchestra just has more colors. So to get around that problem, you have to change colors quickly. . . . I’ll never forget Bob Moog’s comment when he first heard the first movement of the third Brandenburg. . . . He said, “My God, where did you come up with so many colors?” And he was just as amazed as we were. Theoretically there aren’t that many colors there. It just sounds like it. It’s magic.25 Carlos and Elkind managed to surprise Bob Moog as a result of the magic they performed through the manipulation of waveforms and envelopes painstakingly layered to produce the tracks assembled in the mix. Their sonic shape-shifting mastery, more than any other aspect of the recording, is probably what resulted in S-oB being dubbed as “the most influential album ever released.”26 But why was the musical magic produced by Carlos and Elkind so highly desirable for listeners in 1968 and how was it achieved? Magic carpet ride: The “Persian Rug” at the center of Carlos’s studiocraft The opposite of a silent film, S-oB is a soundtrack with no moving picture, accompanied only by a still image. On its cover, beneath the 1960s Rococo revival gown-wearing winner of the J. S. Bach look-alike contest, beneath the muted, unpatched modular Moog synthesizer, just in front of the white Persian cat taxidermically curled upon a chair, lay a “Persian rug.” This “Persian rug” is the setting for the soundtrack with no film, yet the music aficionado 66

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handling the LP was never meant to consciously notice the presence of this setting. The same can be said of the listener to innumerable songs recorded in studios that feature a “Persian rug.” This is by design. The “Persian rug” in the recording studio is meant to appear in the recording’s unconscious, impacting the dream state, its fantasy of itself. Despite its ornamental and floral detail—its visual loudness, so to speak—the “Persian rug” in the recording studio is not meant to be heard, it is meant to be felt by the performers, audio engineers, and producers, a spirit brought in to anoint. This unconscious spiritual presence emerges as magic on record, or so recording studio lore portends. The so-called “Persian rug” is the centerpiece of any selfrespecting music studio. Period. Join a conversation online about how to establish your new recording studio—be it at home or not—and you will learn that in addition to the console, rack-mount effects, microphone collection, acoustics of the room(s), and eclectic and boutique instrument collection, no studio is complete without a “Persian rug.” The present absence of the rug on the cover of the S-oB LP, which epiphenomenally made its way onto the record, enshrined the “Persian rug” as the foundation of the recording studio, which was on the rise within a music industry reaching the summit of its arc in the 1970s. Subsequent to S-oB, Wendy Carlos would erect a legendary recording studio built around none other than an octagonal “Persian rug”; this rug became prominently featured (along with cats on her keys) in subsequent photos published of her in her studio. I come from an Iranian family with a long line of rug designers and dealers. As a child I spent innumerable hours 67

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inhaling the noxious licorice-tinged fumes of mothballs as I played in my great uncle’s “Persian rug” gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. Like the children snug as bugs in rugs in Henry Darger’s “They Attempted to Get Away by Rolling Themselves in Floor Rugs,” I grew up in a woolen playground where us kids would get lost in rooms filled with “Persian rugs” fantasizing about “getting away” from boredom, humidity, the South, the shackles of our youth, what have you. Mine was a tactile consciousness of these objects, a scratchy feeling of heavy wool on summerexposed shoulders and legs, a purely middle class, diasporic sensory perception alienated from the arduous labor and cultural skillset necessary to produce these artisanal, purely organic, unsigned works of art. Rugs were ubiquitous in my world: every room of every familial house I ever entered was decorated with rugs on the floor and sometimes on walls; tummy time was on a “Persian Rug”; graduation gifts were “Persian rugs.” This meant that rugs set the stage for my life; ne’er an event took place off of a rug, and yet I was oblivious to the rug’s foundational presence. So when I first noticed the octagonal rug in the center of Wendy Carlos’s famous studio, that most familiar object suddenly appearing in an unexpected place—its juxtaposition against the wires, speakers, keys, knobs, tape machines, and the like—suddenly made me aware of a binary code integral to all contemporary Western recording studio design, whether analog or digital: tradition/modern. Like an amulet, the rug is imagined to bring good juju into a space where almost anything can go wrong at any moment; it is magic. But how does the “Persian rug” alter the symbolic and imaginary 68

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acoustics of the recording studio, especially when the resonance of the room is irrelevant to the sound? Magic carpet ride Rug making has been practiced for centuries all over the world and cannot be credited to any particular culture. The more general term “Oriental rug” describes a utilitarian, woven floor covering made by peoples across North Africa, West, Central, and East Asia representing an area known by some as the “rug belt,” or “Quran belt.” For this reason, they are also known as “Islamic carpets.” When we consider the juxtaposition of the highly symbolic “Persian rug”—with its capacity to not only bring another world into the studio but also carry those inside the studio to an elsewhere—we understand it as a portal to a different time and place from the otherwise closed world of the recording studio. The European history of longing for escape—strangely coupled with a desire for conquest—has something to do with the rug’s symbolism. As Tara Rodgers contextualizes, “The sound wave has . . . become a ‘metaphor we live by’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) . . . wave metaphors and maritime themes are integral to audio-technical designs and materialized in music technologies.”27 Rodgers roots the term “synthesizer” to Lord Kelvin’s 1870s’ invention of a machine of that very name designed to predict tides. Continuing, Rodgers writes, A full century later, synthesizers introduced to a mass market in the 1970s were given names like Voyager and 69

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Odyssey (by the Moog and ARP companies, respectively). . . . Through themes of maritime voyage, the experiential navigation and technological control of sound waves were articulated to colonialist paradigms of racial exoticism and conquest. The imagined physical “space” of the sound wave became both a gendered and racialized space (Ahmed 2006, 111-112) that mirrored colonialist narratives: a particle/subject voyaged out, experienced affective encounters, and returned home to a state of rest.28 Rodgers convincingly argues for a direct connection between the analog voltage-controlled synthesizers of the 1970s and the fetishism of ocean waves as the means of odyssey, voyage, escape, colonization, and conquest. The peninsular, Mediterranean, and islanded geographies of the major European colonial powers make the sea one of the most ubiquitous motifs through which to imagine an elsewhere. What is less obvious is how a woolen, handwoven textile takes on the properties of water in the emergent fantasies of imperial expansion. Ever the stalwart Orientalist, Sir Richard Francis Burton titillated and scandalized a buttoned up Victorian England with his bestselling One Thousand and One Nights in which the magic of the flying carpet—which already existed within Abrahamic religious folklore—was seemingly made real.29 The “magic carpet” also appears to Europeans through the aesthetic conventions established in Orientalist painting and literature. Take the painting The Snake Charmer by Jean-Léon Gérôme, which adorns the cover of Edward Said’s book Orientalism: a snake charmer—a nude, juvenile,

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presumably male courtier—stands upon the stage set for him—a rug placed in the middle of a mosaic tiled floor in what is presumably a masjid or mosque—as a sizable python wraps itself around his nimble, erect body. Here the rug is a stage set for the presentation of a beautiful, erotic, nubile, and exotic danger. Consider as well Sigmund Freud’s famous analysts’ couch draped with numerous Persian rugs in a room adorned floor-to-ceiling with more rugs and various ritual objects and masks from West and central Africa. As Edward Said explains, the “Orient” is Europe’s opposite, its East, its other. Within the recording studio, the “Persian rug” is the Orient upon which a sound world is built, it orients the performance; it inspires fantasies about the painstaking labor that goes into the tedious and intricate designs, the collaboration between artisans who employ a centuries-old, perhaps even “timeless” skillset.30 A “Persian rug” placed ever so in a studio imagines maybe that same ethos will rub off on the musicians and the engineers. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson identified a category of metaphors in their classic text Metaphors We Live By. What they call “orientational metaphors” give a concept a “spatial orientation,” which varies by culture and period.31 This applies not only to the “Oriental rug,” which carries a timeless, backward-looking, and Eastward pointing weightiness to the studio (which is otherwise clinical and cold, in many cases) but also to the concept of the analog, which is an orientational metaphor that points either away from electroacoustics toward a future or away from digital toward a warm, fuzzy past. On the heels of the Holocaust, an impending nuclear winter, and mass casualties on the 71

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battlefield, postwar alienation made escapist fantasies ever the more necessary for the survival of Europeans and Europeanness. What better mode of escape was there in the second half of the twentieth century than a magic carpet in a space-age studio filled with modular Moog synthesizers?

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4 Switched-on World

On March 20, 1968, a cargo ship containing Moog and Korg synthesizers, Hammond organs, Fender Rhodes electric pianos, and Farfisa organs set sail from Baltimore, Maryland, destined for a display at the first World Exposition of Electronic Music (Exposição Mundial Do Son Eletrônico) in Rio de Jeneiro, Brazil.1 The ship never made it to Rio. Abandoned by its crew and lost at sea, it shipwrecked some months later on the Sau Nicalau island of Cabo Verde (Cape Verde), 350 miles off the coast of West Africa where an anti-Portuguese liberation movement was afoot. As a communalist and anti-colonial gesture, revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral is said to have distributed these instruments to various entities on the island, including schools and other public spaces equipped with the electrical utility required for their functioning. An entire generation of Cape Verdians was thus schooled on synthesizers, which formed the ambient soundtrack to the postcolonial coming-of-age of this new nation-state.2 Because the quasi-fascistic colonial government of the Portuguese Estatdo Novo regime censored nonreligious music, especially of the non-European, Cape

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Verdian, and African varieties, synthesis was embraced by Cape Verdeans as the modern sound for their liberation from the chains of colonial rule. The Italian Farfisa organ was not new to Africa, forming an important backbone to 1960s era highlife and the emergent Afrobeat sound overtaking the continent. The Farfisa can be heard throughout the continent in the various postindependence regional musical movements on the rise. The Farfisa’s dominance is due to Italy’s short-lived imperial clutches on parts of the continent, a reign that officially ended with the return of Somaliland in 1960. The distribution routes established through Italian colonialism continued apace, however, even after the overthrow of the Italian Empire. Such was the lot of all the postcolonial nation-states forming around the world right around 1968 after the overthrow of European colonial powers: colonial infrastructures like law, education, economics and currency, roads and commerce remained as they were, since the nascent postcolonial governments had no other option but to maintain them—lest they risk the collapse of their newly formed nations. Yet the case of the Farfisa represents how the formerly colonized resignified the colonial artifacts of a world left in ruins, enabling a sound like Afrobeat, which came to sonically represent the liberation of Africa. Popular articles chronicling a mysterious Cape Verdian synth booty or the vigor of the Afrobeat movement pivot on the unwritten plot point of Africa as anti-modern, relying on the false juxtaposition of a “wild” and “untamed” Africa and the proliferation of electronic music in the region as inherently ironic. Yet, the globalization of electronic music, 74

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which brought it to Africa, was afoot even prior to the 1968 release of S-oB. In fact, from a global perspective we could view S-oB as simply a provincial, American version of similar events, recordings, and musical paradigm shifts taking place all over the world. For starters, Wendy Carlos’s more advanced peers at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center were a motley crew of international composers who, like her, had come to train in electronic music (from Africa came Egyptian Halim El-Dabh in the late 1950s and Ghanaian Steven Agbenyega in the 1970s).3 The center was an incubator for electronic musicians whose compositions would usher their national musics into an emerging avantgarde, or so the government sponsors of these students had hoped. At the same time that arms races and space races were afoot, an electronic music race pit nations against one another in competition for ideological influence within an emergent global modernity. Music and nationalism were linked during Bach’s time as well; colonialism notoriously used not only religion and education but also music as a system of control (as discussed in Chapter 2).4 During the twentieth century the links between music and national culture took many forms, whether in the case of anti-colonial subversive movements like Afrobeat or proto-fascistic, ultra-nationalist movements like Italian Futurism. In both cases, however, electronic music was the chosen medium. As discussed earlier, listening had been feminized in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through associations with the emerging field of telephony and the female telephone operators who were thought best-suited for the caregiving work required for making 75

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telephonic connections between callers. Furthermore, early phonographic recordings were the domain of female comparative musicologists who were seen as closer in social standing to the Native and African Americans they were sent into the field to chronicle for the budding field of ethnomusicology and folklore. The growing phonograph industry marketed both the players and recordings to the woman of the house who was understood to be the decisionmaker on all domestic matters, because, after all, the record player was a piece of domestic furniture that made sound. These modern associations between sound and the feminine became aggressively resignified as a result of the military priorities of statecraft that defined the twentieth century. This was the case whether states were of the new postcolonial variety or were newly redefined, waning colonial powers. At this historical moment, sound became the object of a gender reassignment. Targeted sound research and design was initiated in earnest by competing world powers, and sound became reimagined as the ideal medium for covert surveillance and intelligencegathering endeavors between them. The unexpected result was electronic instrumentation. The genealogy Dave Tompkins charts for the vocoder is, for instance, eerily similar to Lev Termen’s invention of the theremin as accidental side project to spy technology development for the USSR. Thus the vocoder began as a technology designed to encrypt the voice in espionage. Tompkins writes, The vocoder [was] a massive walk-in closet of cryptology invented by Bell Labs in 1928. . . . During World War

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II, the vocoder reduced the voice to something cold and tactical, tinny and dry like soup cans in a sandbox, dehumanizing the larynx, so to speak, for some of man’s more dehumanizing moments: Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Soviet gulags, Vietnam.5 Although both the theremin and the vocoder started off as spyware, they were destined for different fates. The theremin became associated with female instrumentalists like Clara Rockmore; even the R. A. Moog Company Theremin was imagined as a feminine instrument, as the marketing materials and owner’s manual covers exclusively represented female players. The vocoder, on the other hand, had not been “feminized” and would not enter the mainstream until Carlos and Moog perfected a version of it for S-oB. This vacillation or, better yet, oscillation between masculine and feminine has been central to electronic music. As Carlos has described her own creative experiments with the vocoder, it was the human “performance value” that was brought to the Cold War technology that changed everything; it was the human body reintroduced into the dehumanizing vocoder that humanized it. Tompkins credits Wendy Carlos’s score for A Clockwork Orange with applying the war technology to popular music, writing, “In its big-screen debut, the vocoder sang Beethoven’s Ninth to Dresden firebombings while rehabilitating a murderer who wore eyeballs for cufflinks. It was quite an association. Soon the vocoder began showing up on records.”6 So just as Moog did for Termen’s spy technology, Carlos did for the vocoder, translating and applying the military technology for popular music.

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S-oB limns the tension between the avant-garde and mass culture inherent to electronic music production, which was present at its inception. The emergent musical avant-garde distinguished itself from the gentility of art music with the manipulation of sound as noise; through an alignment with noise, cities, and the sounds of death at the hands of powerful nations, the Italian Futurists objectified sound as a unique, masculine, urban, and patriotic means of expression, and this came to be heard through a division bifurcated along the lines of avant-garde and popular. Avant-gardism was not only European but also almost exclusively the domain of white, European men. It was rooted in the idea that the vanguard of aesthetic innovation would be, at least initially, intolerable to the general public of any society. As the twentieth century unfurled, electronic music became imagined by some as an ideal medium for this. In the larger strategic war for the hearts and minds of not only their own citizens but an increasingly global citizenry, all nations jockeyed for a seat at the musical avant-garde table. Challenging the racist hierarchy that placed Europe at the evolutionary top of the cultural heap was an important ambition for new nations who sent their brightest young composers to study at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. It was of course not only electronic music training that the postcolonial intelligentsia sought at elite universities in North America and Europe; the political movers and shakers of the world were also exclusively being trained at these same institutions. As Arvad von Lazar argued in a 1966 paper, 78

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Throughout the developing world, including the highly differentiated environments of Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, political and often socioeconomic leadership in society is in the hands of young and educated men in their late twenties or thirties. In the newly independent countries of Africa very often they are the actual yielders of political power as a direct result of their role and participation in the struggle for national independence.7 . . . Most of them were trained . . . in Western Europe.8 Von Lazar discusses the importance of science and technology—seen as the building blocks of modernization— to the education of these new postcolonial elites. International students were thus sent to Europe and North America to be trained in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields with the expectation that they would return and apply their modern skills to the development of their home countries. With the qualifier “electronic,” music became a STEM field available for instrumentalization into development and propaganda projects. Take, for example, the international cast of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center throughout its history.9 Founder Vladimir Ussachevsky (whose own biography as a Russian born in Mongolia is a sign of the postcolonial times) recruited students to the center while abroad on speaking engagements.10 As spokesperson for the center, Ussachevsky promoted the association between electronic music and modernity, attracting within the span of approximately thirty years students from around the world, including

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from Ghana, Turkey, Mexico, Uruguay, Iran, Argentina, Egypt, Korea, Peru, Venezuela, occupied Palestine, Brazil, and Japan.11 These individuals went on to initiate what some have referred to as postcolonial avant-garde movements in their home countries.12 The first international students who came in the 1950s included Michiko Toyama from Japan, Bulent Arel from Turkey, and Halim El-Dabh from Egypt. Although these artists were literally in the vanguard of electronic music production, their work was never considered avant-garde outside of their home countries. Michael Khoury discusses how Leopold Stowkowksi took the liberty of altering one of El-Dabh’s compositions during a 1958 performance of his work, an indication of the lack of seriousness with which he took El-Dabh as a composer.13 Similarly, the compositions of Toyama, the center’s very first international musician, are catalogued as traditional Japanese music by Folkways Records. These musicians were too marked by race and religion to qualify as avant-garde; with Toyama, a woman, and Arel and El-Dabh emasculated by their Muslimness, they were too effeminate to qualify as avant-garde anyway. As Edward Said discusses, the Oriental male has been represented as effeminate by virtue of his questionable sexuality and the Oriental female is seen as the epitome of subservience. The markings of race and gender disqualified these electronic music pioneers from having their music considered anything but music that represented their racial and cultural effeminacy. In contrast, the avantgardists were capable of transcending their biographies to make era-defining music. 80

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Carlos steered away from the musical avant-garde with SoB for reasons she has not publicly disclosed. But given its history, one can only surmise that it was partly due to the exclusionary and bigoted history on which it was built. As Douglas Kahn has explored it, the sound of the European avant-garde was noise made by the white nationalists of the Italian Futurist movement in celebration of militarism. Whether in the love-notes to war written by Italian Futurism’s father F. T. Marinetti, who Kahn claims “officially let loose the battle cry with his first manifesto in 1909: ‘We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.’”14 Or in the widely cited writings of Luigi Russolo, especially his Art of Noises manifesto, where Kahn claims “avant-garde noise” was born, writing, “Russolo devoted an entire chapter of his book The Art of Noises to “The Noises of War.” In it he implies that the battlefield serves as a model for modern listening and an art of noises since in combat the ear is much more privileged than it is in daily life; it can judge with “greater certainty than the eye!”15 Furthermore, the sound of the avant-garde was not only militarist, fascist, and misogynist but also, given its roots in modernity, primitivist and racist. Russolo’s Art of Noises inspired the Dadaists who performed at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, and Kahn describes the minstrelsy at the heart of a group that came to be known as the Bruitist performers there, “Like other aspects of the avant-garde and modernist arts, the Dadaists found a source for bruitism in primitivism. Prior to coming to Zurich, [Dadaist] Huelsenbech had 81

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recited some ‘Negro poems’ at an expressionist evening in Berlin” which he claimed to have composed himself.16 Here, the avant-gardism of bruitism hinges on minstrelsy and cultural appropriation. The sound of the avant-garde, which went on to inform all future avant-garde music (including musique concrete, John Cage and others), originated as a masculinist, white supremacist, war mongering one. This coincides with the rise of nation-states and their emphasis on militarism and sound surveillance technologies. As Carlos has commented, her popular acclaim was an accident. Consider the copy on the back of S-oB’s sequel The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, released in 1969, “Something went wrong. Switched-on Bach was meant to be an artistic experiment, a learning and testing vehicle, an example of a contemporary composer trying to find himself [sic]—not the marked commercial success it has so clearly become. . . . Something went wrong.”17 Producer Rachel Elkind similarly narrates how the intention was to make an experimental record but the popular appeal proved the album to be something else entirely. Record-label Columbia had very low expectations for its market potential among a niche music consumer, yet it was the masses that responded to Carlos’s music. The evolution of electronic music is propelled by this dialectic between avant-garde and popular, masculine and feminine, the militaristic and the domestic. Consider how disco and house responded with flamboyance and flourish to the camel-toed butchness of progressive rock’s synthesizer. Or take for example Stereolab’s gynecological interpretations of the disciplined and masculine metronomic groove of Kraut rock. These gender distinctions have nothing to do 82

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with the virtuosity of the performers or simple preferences in musical taste; these are distinctions that organize how much art is imagined to matter, for which audiences it was made and whether or not it is credited with shifting paradigms. Within the history of electronic music, the periods and artists who have most aligned with a masculinist swing of the pendulum were not—contrary to claims to any avantgarde status—on the vanguard at all, but merely applied the ideology of the moment to the electronic medium. Instead, the periods and artists and even cultural practices that feminized the medium were in fact challenging that ideology. But, how might we understand S-oB within this genealogy? The masculine/feminine dichotomy was made literal in the obsessive attention journalists paid to Carlos’s nom de plum “Walter.” In many articles written about her, she is referred to either as Wendy/Walter or as Wendy (nee Walter). Carlos has vehemently rejected this naming convention as well as the obsession over the circumstances behind her name change. Although I would argue S-oB would not have been a pop culture phenomenon were it not for the masculine-feminine dialectic in the history of electronic music, the album eschews these confines much like the generation of Cape Verdian students raised on synthesizers rejected the colonial confines of those instruments and instead used them to build liberation anthems.18 If what is meant by avant-garde is experimental, new and unusual, perhaps S-oB captures the spirit of true avant-gardism, stripped of its associations with militarism, masculinity, and fascism. Carlos and Elkind were pioneers in electronic instrumentation, yet unlike the exclusionary 83

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nature of the contemporary avant-garde, which suggested that what was avant-garde could never be mainstream and thus “low-brow,” S-oB captured the imagination of the masses to become a popular success. Carlos painstakingly worked toward a technique of electronic orchestration of Baroque music, not in an effort to mimic acoustic instruments, but in a postmodern assemblage of tones, waveforms, and pitch variations that completely transformed not only Bach but the Moog synthesizer as well. As Elkind continues to narrate on the back cover of The Well-Tempered Synthesizer LP, Something went wrong. Several critics and a lot of interested musicians and music lovers started to ask “How does the Moog do it all?”—implying that the machine was somehow responsible for the artistry and creativity to which our “Switched-On” audience had responded. . . . But at this point in time, the synthesizer is really nothing more than an embryo. And, just as the pioneers of electronic music established the groundwork with what they had available, Walter [sic] has carried on, within the limitations of the current device (and there are frustratingly many), the task of bringing the medium (electronic music) out of associations with but one style (contemporary, aleatoric, serial, etc.) into the music mainstream. . . . The polished performances here belie the tedium and time necessary for their realization. I spent many hours watching and assisting as, note-by-note, phrase by phrase, the familiar music was brought to life in a new and appropriate manner.19

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Elkind emphasizes Carlos’s artistry, labor, and commitment to aesthetically advancing the limits of electronic music. Similarly, Bob Moog notes on the back of the original S-oB LP, “Few musicians have taken the trouble to develop the combination of technical expertise, aesthetic discretion, and manual dexterity that is generally associated with a professional performance of traditional music. Walter [sic] Carlos’ realizations contained in this album are a dazzling display of virtuosity in the electronic medium.”20 Both Moog and Elkind are careful to emphasize and reiterate the skill that Carlos alone could bring to this task, going so far as to call it “virtuosity in the electronic medium.” The otherwise cold, impersonal, tense, and alienating sounds associated with electronic music were presented to audiences in a way that translated beyond the original esoteric domain and spoke to the masses.

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Epilogue: Cats on Keys and Total Eclipses

I held the solar eclipse glasses over my seven-year-old’s eyes and edged him out of the shade into the light to ensure he avoided looking directly at the sun during the solar eclipse of 2017. While doing so, I of course looked straight up at the sky and am now either hallucinating a visual impairment or experiencing one. Though I am certainly no charter member of the Eclipse Chasers Club (like Carlos), the truly fascinating and potentially dangerous experience made me appreciate the unlikely connections between eclipse chasing and the chasing of sound color. Sound and light are both carried by waves, after all. As an eclipse photographer, Carlos plays light filters; as Moogstress, she plays voltage-control filters. Like the tape splicing at the Columbia-Princeton labs that organically grew into the multichannel magnetic tape recordings she made at her home studio, Carlos developed a method for printing her eclipse photographs as composites of numerous frames assembled in the darkroom.1 Her photographs are analog compositions that preceded Photoshop just as her audio engineering signature employed a pre-digital sound

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assemblage technique that is ubiquitous today, omnisciently anticipating the digital horizon. Subsequent to the success of S-oB, Wendy Carlos had an impressive career arc that included several more albums,2 critically acclaimed film scores for A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Tron (1982), innovations in the domains of alternate tuning, contributions to the field of surround sound, mapmaking, and award-winning solar eclipse photography. Polymath; Renaissance woman— these are apt descriptors for a figure who has led a truly extraordinary life. But it is also a life made possible by the historical and political circumstances that formed the backdrop to it. Even so, why haven’t we seen ever more Carlos’s? Why, exactly fifty years later, is it still unusual to find women in the fields that Carlos helped establish? The battle of the sexes that propelled the sonic evolution seems to have finally been lost to the omnivorous modern military industrial complex, which has in effect come to dominate everything. Cats on keyboards Returning to the cover of the S-oB LP, accompanying the Persian rug is a Persian cat. The cat on/in/at the piano is a trope in Western folklore that can be found in cartoon drawings, paintings, and all over Wendy Carlos’s website and albums. Persian cats and Persian rugs are no more Persian than is modern-day Iran. They are the stuff of domestication, breeding, franchise colonialism, and cottage industries of 88

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the nineteenth century developed to satisfy the growing European bourgeoisie’s demands for exotic luxury goods and accessories. Then as now, the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods like Persian rugs was fodder for the aspirational, or the petite bourgeoisie. Similarly, the Moog 900 series, a piece of equipment out of reach to all except university music departments and celebrity musicians, has been modified for those of us who aspired to be like Wendy Carlos. Perhaps Carlos’s featuring of images of cats on her instruments and on her website represents an alternative future for electronic music. In the imaginary musical instrument (of torture) the “katzenclavier,” cats are lined up in correspondence with the octave, each prompted to meow when their tales are pulled by a mechanism initiated by the strike of piano key. This enlightenment era trope continues today in the proliferation of cats on pianos that periodically circulate as viral videos, like those of Nora, the piano-playing cat, which receive millions of views. My own cats have been drawn to my synthesizers resulting in a private collection of photographs that include each of my now deceased cats “playing the Moog.” Besides bringing a little levity to a subject about which aficionados can get a bit too serious, the cat on the keys also represents the space we grant to a type of agency in music production that is not solely controlled under the narcissistic domain of the maestra. The willful, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and seductive force of a cat on the keys is a kind of life force that takes the responsibility for musical creativity out of the hands of the musician. Anyone who has spent any time in a studio trying to commit music to record knows that the pressure to produce 89

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often does the complete opposite, squelching creativity and producing automaticity. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s 1975 deck of cards Oblique Strategies was designed to jolt the studio musician out of any creative block by rerouting their approach to performance. Whether animal or vegetable, cat or deck of cards, in either case, the presence of these tools and the phenomena they catalyze demands a humble acknowledgment by a musician of the many forces at work in producing the assemblage known as a recording. Returning to the ideas of Karen Barad that I began with, the musician is one force intra-acting with other forces that are biological, machinic, environmental, climatic, and cosmic. What we learn from S-oB and Wendy Carlos’s incredible career is that energies and magnetisms are perpetually present and available to work in what scholar and poet Fred Moten has called “an ensemble” with us.3 What Wendy Carlos as “original synth” has exemplified is a life of capacitance, a life lived as a conductor for electromagnetic fields. I’ll end on the refrain that has been most resonant for me: “That’s the trick, the magic of synthesizer/tape performance.”4 This statement encapsulates what was always the most alluring thing about S-oB, the analog synthesizer, and shape-shifting. These are instruments of magic, which have subsequently been put to every imaginable (and unimaginable) use in every genre of music all over the world. It is the thrill of this magic that continuously brings die-hards and new audiences to Wendy Carlos.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ally-Jane Grossan for encouraging me to submit the proposal to 33 1/3, to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld for getting behind the project and to Michelle Chen for editorial diligence. Heartfelt thanks go to Kalindi Vora, who offered feedback on all things STS and to Amy Cimini who has been an invaluable resource on all things JSB as well as on the musicological significance of a figure like Carlos. Thanks to Michelle Habell-Pallán, Sonnet Retman, Jade PowerSotomayor, and Maureen Mahon for workshopping parts of the book with me. Thanks to Sara Mameni for substantive feedback and moral support on content and images, to Susan Stryker, Eric Stanley, and Christina Hanhardt for feedback on historical details around gay and trans politics in the era of S-oB, and to Sara Cassetti for supporting my Moog habit. Thanks also to Tom Erbe and the UC San Diego Music Department for access to their Moog 900.

Notes

Prologue 1. Glenn Gould, “More Notes by Glenn Gould and Wendy Carlos on the Well-Tempered Synthesizer” in “Book Two: Original Notes,” in Wendy Carlos, Switched-On Boxed Set, (Minneapolis: East Side Digital, 1993) pp. 19–20. 2. Susan Reed, “After a Sex Change and Several Eclipses, Wendy Carlos Treads a New Digital Moonscape,” People Magazine, July 1, 1985. http:​//peo​ple.c​om/ar​chive​/afte​r-a-s​ex-ch​ange-​ands​evera​l-ecl​ipses​-wend​y-car​los-t​reads​-a-ne​w-dig​ital-​ moons​cape-​vol-2​4-no-​1/ (accessed July 23, 2016). 3. For Barad, humans are neither the only agents acting upon the world nor the apex of agency. Building on the quantum physics theories of Niels Bohr, Barad argues for an entangled matrix of agencies acting on and changing one another at all times. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 33. 4. On the concept of the “aural imaginary,” see Roshanak Kheshti, “Touching Listening: The Aural Imaginary in the World Music Culture Industry,” American Quarterly 63 (2011): 711–31. I develop here on the idea that sounds are productive of not only the imagination but also additionally the imaginary.

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5. Wendy Carlos, Switched-On Boxed Set, Book One: New Notes (Minneapolis: East Side Digital, 1993), p. 3. 6. See Nina Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham: Duke University press, 2015) and Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration (New York: Continuum Press, 2012). 7. Moog: A Film by Hans Fjellstad (Brooklyn: Plexifilm, 2005). 8. Ibid.

Chapter 1 1. The same banner can be found on the CD artwork for the individual disks in the Switched-on Boxed Set. 2. https​://ww​w.ety​monli​ne.co​m/wor​d/syn​thesi​s#ety​monli​ne_ v_​22543​ 3. See http:​//ety​monli​ne.co​m/ind​ex.ph​p?ter​m=syn​thesi​s& all​owed_​in_fr​ame=0​ (accessed July 23, 2015). 4. Tara Rodgers, “Synthesis,” in Keywords in Sound, David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), p. 208. 5. Virginia Anderson, “Bebe Barron: Co-composer of the First Electronic Film Score, for ‘Forbidden Planet,’” The Independent UK, May 8, 2008. 6. Don Snowden, “Moog on the State of the Synthesizer,” Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1981. https​://ww​w.roc​ksbac​kpage​s.com​/ Libr​ary/A​rticl​e/moo​g-on-​the-s​tate-​of-th​e-syn​thesi​zer 7. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Socialist Review, no. 80 (1985), p. 66.

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8. Refusing to be dead-named, or referred to by a name that misgenders an individual, Carlos describes her nom de plum “Walter” as a response to the misogyny of the classical music world of the 1950s and 1960s. See http://www.wendycarlos. com/pruri.html. 9. Donna Haraway, 1985, p. 65. 10. Ibid., p. 66. 11. Ibid., p. 101. 12. Jasbir Puar, “‘I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess’: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory” philoSOPHIA, 2, no. 1 (2012): 63. 13. Carlos has chosen to publicly disidentify with the “trans” moniker. 14. Carlos has publicly identified those writers who have denied her self-identification as woman or “Original Synth” on her “Cruel List,” claiming, “They have tried to turn me into a cliché, to treat me as an object for potential scorn, ridicule, or even physical violence by bigots (no joke in these dangerous times of beatings and deaths at the hands of the intolerant). At best, they have arrogantly used me and abused me to grind their own prurient axes, to profit by and justify their own agendas.” http://www.wendycarlos.com/ouch.html. 15. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 181. 16. Rodgers, “Synthesis,” p. 214. 17. Sara Marie Schoonhoven, Gender, Timbre and Metaphor in the Music of Wendy Carlos (Austin: University of Texas, May 2017). 18. Ibid., p. 25. 19. Ibid., p. 20.

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20. Arthur Bell, “Playboy Interview: Wendy/Walter Carlos,” Playboy 26, no. 5 (1979): 82, Playboy Enterprises. 21. Ibid., p. 83. 22. Author and activist Reina Gossett has described Arthur Bell as “friends” of trans liberationists Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, leading me to speculate whether the reductive representation was less Bell’s and more Playboy’s doing. See http:​//the​spiri​twas.​tumbl​r.com​/post​/1798​46862​64/sy​lvia-​goes-​ to-co​llege​-star​-take​s-ove​r-nyu.​ 23. Like other civil rights movements, movements for gay and lesbian rights have been dominated by masculine-presenting men, while relying on women and gender nonconforming people to show up and work. It is beyond the scope of this book to elaborate upon whether or not transgender, women, and gender nonconforming activists had much to gain from the labor they exerted in the public sphere as critical members of the early LGBT rights movement, considering the subordinate role they could aspire to if and when their civil rights were acknowledged. 24. One of the more interesting points in Bell’s article includes Carlos’s discussion of the underground world she circulated within, which Carlos dismissed as ultimately “boring,” once she achieved the outcomes she and her doctors had hoped. Importantly, the popularity of S-oB and the ascendancy of her career coincide with highly visible and violent protests that erupted after the riots at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, often cited as the origins of the modern LGBT movement. Many of the most visible and central activists in this movement were trans women of color, notably Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Of particular concern to these women were the intersectional forms of violence trans people

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of color faced, a violence that merges racism, misogyny, classism, and transphobia. (An important archive of this history has been collected by Reina Gossett and can be found here: http://thespiritwas.tumblr.com/). Carlos reveals in this interview all the ways she was shielded from these forms of violence due to her race and class. Her ability to “pass” (as she puts it), which she claims was crucial for her career, depended on access to the best team of doctors available in the world in the 1960s. Similarly, the freedom she sought through the medium of electronic music was made possible by this same race and class mobility. Carlos made it abundantly clear to Playboy/Bell that she claimed neither sexuality nor trans identity as her political battles to wage; it was electronic music synthesis that Carlos would instead claim as her site of intervention. 25. Karl Dallas, “Human Synthesizer Changes Sex,” Melody Maker, June 16, 1979. 26. Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), p. 11. 27. Leonard Feather, “Electronics: The Crutch of Musicians,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1970.

Chapter 2 1. While Marx ultimately viewed automation as emancipatory, there is no doubt that it dramatically redefines the role of the human in labor and becomes “a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast

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merely as its conscious linkages.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin), p. 692. 2. Wendy Carlos, Switched-on Boxed Set, Book Two: Original Notes (Minneapolis: East Side Digital, 1999), p. 38. 3. Ibid., p. 43. 4. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 33. 5. Carlos, Switched on Boxed Set, p. 20. 6. Wendy Carlos, Whole Earth Catalogue: Access to Tools (San Francisco: Point, 1974). Emphasis in original. 7. Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 8. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers and Music Technology in the United States (Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2006), p. 1. 9. Judith Peraino, “Synthesizing Difference: the Queer Circuits of Early Synthpop,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 2015), p. 294. 10. Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 2. 11. Ibid. 12. Wendy Carlos, “Looking Back on Synthesized Bach,” in Switched-On Boxed Set, Book One: New Notes (Minneapolis: East Side Digital, 1993), p. 13. 13. Hidden Figures, directed by Theodor Melfi (Beverly Hills: 20th Century Fox, 2017). 14. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address,” January 17, 1961. https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/w​atch?​v=CWi​IYW_f​BfY.

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15. Albert Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage (UrbanaChampagne: The University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 16. 16. Ibid., p. 22. 17. Ibid., p. 23. 18. Ibid., p. 24. 19. Ibid., p. 30. 20. Ibid., p. 30. 21. Ibid., p. 32. 22. Soviet inventor Lev Termen based his instrument on Soviet experimentation into proximity sensors, which catalog presence through the emission of electromagnetic fields. Proximity sensor research forwarded the Soviet security agenda before transforming into electronic instrument design. See Glinsky, Theremin, p. ix. 23. Moog: A Film by Hans Fjellestad. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Bob Moog, “Foreward,” in Analog Days (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. v. 28. “To Moogstress from Bob Moog” is autographed on the inside pocket of my favorite denim jacket, that faded second skin that screams “memento-of-an-aging-rocker’s-glory days.” I spontaneously asked for Bob Moog’s autograph after his lecture at Robot Speak in San Francisco’s lower Haight district in 2004, where I was recording his lecture with the hopes of including some of it in my dissertation. When he obliged and awkwardly reached for something to sign, I offered him the only thing I had—my denim jacket (which remains unwashed). On a whim, feeling an immediate shortness 98

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of breath and a sense of great historical significance in my encounter with this humble old white man, I was compelled to ask and he obliged; on the fly when asked “to whom” I replied “Moogstress,” the nickname my girlfriend gave me after I began to amass a collection of his eponymous gadgets. 29. Ibid. 30. See Rafael Ramirez, Josef Planas, Nuria Escude, Jordi Mercade, and Cristina Farriols, “EEG-based Analysis of the Emotional Effects of Music Therapy on Palliative Care Cancer Patients,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 254. 31. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 1. 32. Carlos, Switched-On Boxed Set, Book One: New Notes, pp. 16–18. 33. Wendy Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis, “Hybrid Timbres.”

Chapter 3 1. For a mapping of this genealogy see Rodgers, “Synthesis.” 2. There are numerous contemporary female producers but the number of female audio engineers is still unbelievably low, under 5 percent in 2012. See http:​//www​.bbc.​com/n​ews/ e​ntert​ainme​nt-ar​ts-19​28405​8. 3. Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis, Track 2, “Examples of Analog Timbres.” 4. Carlos, Switched-On Boxed Set, Book One: New Notes, p. 131. 5. Rodgers, “Synthesis,” p. 209. 6. Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis, Track 1, “Introduction.” 7. Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis, Track 5, “Performance Values.” 99

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8. Rodgers, “Synthesis,” p. 214. 9. Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis, Track 4, “Vocal Synthesis.” 10. Ibid. 11. Wendy Carlos, Secrets of Synthesis: Behind the Scenes Look in Words and Music (New York: CBS Records, 1987), Track 5, “Performance Values.” 12. Ibid., Track 4, “Vocal Synthesis.” 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Matthew Engelke, Promise of Presence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 3. 16. The attempt to create a sonically sterile recording environment is a vestige of audio recording’s past: a commitment to fidelity between recorded sound and its source, which initially began with preservation in mind (i.e., the sonic salvage of “dying” languages, ecologies, or musical forms) but later came to be commercially exploited to create regional and generic sounds (nature recordings, regional folk music, etc.). This emphasis on fidelity begs the question of how to distinguish between original electronic sounds and electronic interference, a confusion contemporary electronic music producer’s exploit. 17. On the centrality of women to the history of recorded sound, see Roshanak Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (New York: New York University Press, 2015), pp. 15–38; Jonathan Sterne, Audible Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). These texts chronicle how the white woman has been called upon as cultural translator and civilizer of children (or

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those races understood through social Darwinism to be at less advanced stages of evolutionary development) or communicator of nonhuman species behavior to humans. See also Louise Michelle Newman, White Women’s Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 18. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 2. 19. Susan Schmidt Horning, Chasing Sound, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 78. 20. And as we moved through the century audio engineers at provincial studios created makeshift effects that appeared on recordings, resulting in even more distinct sonic signatures. See Horning, Chasing Sound, p. 96. 21. Ibid., p. 104. 22. Cogan and Clark, Temples of Sound (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003). 23. Dominic Milano and Dr. Robert Moog, Music from a Mountain of Moog in Keyboard Magazine, 1979 and 1982. Reprinted in 2011 (Milwaukee: Backbeat Books, 2011), p. 11. 24. Ibid., p. 13. 25. Ibid., p. 18. 26. Ibid., p. 11. 27. Tara Rodgers, “Toward a Feminist Epistemology of Sound: Refiguring Waves in Audio-technical Discourse,” in Engaging the World: Thinking after Irigaray, Mary C. Rawlinson ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), pp. 195–96. 28. Ibid., pp. 196–97. 29. French Persianist Antoine Galland published his translation almost a century prior, inaugurating by many accounts the Romanticist movement there. 101

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30. Edward Said argues that Orientalism contrasts the idea of a “timeless” Orient with a modern West always marching toward a future. The stereotype of timelessness not only denies the possibility of so-called Orientals as modern but also denies them a history by freezing “Orientals” perpetually in the past. 31. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 14.

Chapter 4 1. http:​//fla​vorwi​re.co​m/577​826/s​pace-​echo-​how-a​-ship​wreck​ -full​-of-s​ynthe​sizer​s-bir​thed-​a-cos​mic-s​ound-​in-19​70s-a​frica.​ 2. https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/mu​sic/2​016/m​ay/24​/spac​eech​o-mys​tery-​behin​d-cos​mic-s​ound-​cabo-​verde.​ 3. Robert Gluck, “The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers,” Computer Music Journal 31, no. 2 Creating Sonic Spaces (Summer 2007): 22. 4. Philip Bohlman, Focus: Music, Nationalism and the Making of the New Europe (New York: Routledge, 2011); Timothy Taylor, Beyond Exoticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 5. Dave Tompkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2010), p. 20. 6. Ibid. Tompkins notes the lack of awareness of the vocoder’s double-life, writing, “Of all the World War II cryptology experts I interviewed, none was aware of the vocoder’s activities in the clubs, rinks and parks of New York City. (‘It was just analyzing breakdowns of speech energy,’ said the

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Pentagon.) Of all the hip-hop civilians I interviewed, none was aware of the vocoder’s service in any war, nor were they surprised by it.” p. 23. 7. Arpad von Lazar, “The Role of Young Educated Elites in Political Development,” Il Politico 31, no. 1 (March 1966): 74. 8. Ibid., p. 84. 9. Gluck, “The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center: Educating International Composers,” p. 21. Robert Gluck counts at least thirty. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Michael Khoury, “Looking at Lightening: The Life and Compositions of Halim El-Dabh,” in The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics and Modernity, Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson, and Benjamin J. Harbert eds. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), p. 158. 13. Ibid. 14. F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” trans. R. W. Flint, in Futurist Manifesto, Umbro Apollonio ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 22 as quoted in Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat (Boston: MIT Press, 2001), p. 59. 15. Luigi Russolo, “Noises of War,” in The Art of Noises, p. 49 as cited in Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water Meat, p. 63. 16. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, p. 47. 17. Rachel Elkind, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (Columbia Masterworks, 1969).

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18. For a compilation of these artists, see Space Echo. https​:// an​aloga​frica​.band​camp.​com/a​lbum/​space​-echo​-the-​myste​rybe​hind-​the-c​osmic​-soun​d-of-​cabo-​verde​-fina​lly-r​eveal​ed. 19. Elkind, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer. 20. Walter Carlos, Switched-on Bach (Columbia Masterworks, 1968).

Epilogue 1. http://www.wendycarlos.com/eclipse.html. 2. The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969), Sonic Seasonings (1972), Switched-On Bach II (1973), By Request (1975), Swtiched-On Brandenburgs (1979), Digital Moonscapes (1984), Beauty in the Beast (1986), Secrets of Synthesis (1987), Peter & the Wolf with “Weird Al” Yankovic (1988), Switched-On Bach 2000 (1992), and Tales of Heaven and Hell (1998). 3. Fred Moten, In the Break (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 67. 4. Carlos, Switched-on Boxed Set, Book Two: Original Notes, p. 38.

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Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi

A lso available in the series

23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns

40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel

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55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois

71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

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87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

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119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin

129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry 136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson 137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans 138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin 139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn 140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland

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