ok do you see this Legendary Epic woman right here? this is wendy fucking carlos and i’m going to describe to you why wendy carlos is 30 thousand times better than you
- she is a 74 year old trans fucking woman. she remembers having dysphoria at age five and started hrt in 1968. you think transitioning is difficult now? try doing it in 1968. the thought scares the shit out of me.
- her first album, switched on bach, is a literal hour of her playing bach’s music on synthesizers. that’s classical edm. edm wouldn’t exist if she hadn’t brought synthesizers to prominence. the catch? synthesizers in 1968 were monophonic. that means you can only play one note at a time. wendy carlos sat there and played each instrument’s piece of bachs music at least 6 times per symphony, painstakingly overdubbing and rerecording each line, one at a time.
- oh yeah, switched on bach was the first classical album to sell more than 500k copies and she won 3 grammies and stayed on the billboard #1 pop charts for 17 weeks.
- you know tron? that really awesome movie whose sequel daft punk made the ost for? wendy is the original daft punk. tron’s soundtrack was all her; not only that, but so was a clockwork orange and the shining.
- in 1998 this piece of shit momus (aka nick currie on wired) made a song mocking wendy’s sexual orientation. $50k of currie’ money later, she forced him to remove that song from his entire collection, have the master destroyed, and his music career fucking died after that.
figured i’d post this since daft punk keep getting a lot of love. i love daft punk, but they owe their lives to this fucking badass.
HOLY. CRAP. I did not know this.
work work work work work!
Wendy Carlos also scored Kubrick’s ‘Clockwork Orange’ and ‘The Shining.’ She’s a big deal, people.
Holy shit.