At Fort Triple Zed. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we broadcast. We pay our respects to the elders, past, present, and emerging of the turbo and jaguar people. We acknowledge that their sovereignty over this land was never ceded, and we stand.

In solidarity with them.

You're listening to transmission on four triple Z amplifying the trans and gender nonconforming voices of Brisbane and beyond.

Hello, hello. You're listening to transmission on for Triple Z. Gosh, it is an exciting day today because it's International Working Women's Day tomorrow. And in light of that sev, I should introduce myself. I'm doing everything wrong. My name is Ez. I use he him pronouns.

My name is Sev. I use he him and they them pronouns.

And you listen to transmission all about ever find the trans and gender nonconforming voices of Mienjin and beyond. And yeah, it's International Women's Day tomorrow from this recording, this live broadcast. And yeah, so we've got some special person we're talking about today.

I'm really excited. So I have prepared some lovely information for you all today. Please prepare to be the victims of my latest obsession and info dump. And also the fact that I haven't slept in literally days now. There's only a certain amount of oat milk ice lattes in the world. It can handle this level of insomnia. So I'm really excited to info dump at you and hopefully teach you some interesting things about an incredible woman who is an absolute pioneer and completely changed the face of the music industry. So today we are going to be celebrating the incredible life and works of Wendy Carlos.

Yay. Oh, my gosh, I love Wendy. And that synth, that moog. We'll get into it. We'll get right into it. But before we start talking about the wonderful Wendy Carlos, we are going to be covering off on some week in community events and news. Sam. What's on this Friday?

So coming up this Friday, March 10 from 07:00 p.m.. We have the Heel Fire Club presents super Mario Party. So this is for Mario Day, March 10. Mario we are going to be celebrating everything. Mario. So when your favorite characters from the Mushroom Kingdom get together for an all out celebration in honor of their favorite Italian plumber, this is the back Dock Arts. We are going to be featuring a collection of Mi and Jim's amazing bolesque and drag artists. This show I'm really excited about. The producers and the entire cast are trans, nonbinary and gender nonconforming. And each performer is going to be embodying a different character from the Mushroom Kingdom. And they're going to be some incredible shows and some familiar faces, including your very own Lord Severus. So please get along. On Friday, March 10, from 07:00 P.m., doors open at 07:00 P.m., 730 shows. It's an 18 plus event. Tickets, a $30 plus booking fee. There is prizes for best dressed. There are games. And if you jump onto facebook, you can find the event listing and those ticket links.

Yes. That also happens to be on the same night as another event, friday, March 10, from 07:00 p.m. At Woolongaba. Substation Narki Soul, a young transqueer band, who you may have heard on right Here, right now, is having their Valley Soul single launch, which apparently isn't coming out without a party. So come celebrate the release of their first single of the upcoming Niki Soul album, which will be coming out sometime later in April, I believe. So they shall be joined by Hanoi Traffic with their all scrams post hiatus lineup and Horror Arrows packing a riot girl punch in the teeth. This is an all ages event as well, and the set times are from so Horror Boroughs are on at eight, and then I think Hanoi Traffic at nine. Then the headliners, Nike Soul at 10:00 p.m.. So, yeah, that will also be up on the Transmission Facebook page at Trans Radio with a Zed. If you'd like to check out all those events we're talking about, we also.

Got sorry, just quickly, that's the first time I've read the band name, Horror Ross in Texas. And can I just congratulate them on having one of the greatest band names of all time?

Yeah, they get a lot of compliments on that. Yeah.

All right. Also coming up, this one's really important, you all sunday, March 12 at 11:00, a.m. Meeting in King George Square. We have a fight. The right protest. So we're protesting the speaking tour of right wing UK transphobe Kelly J. Keane, aka Posi Parker. You may have heard we had some choice things to say about this individual in a recent episode. So, yeah. Who is Kelly? Jane Keane. She's one of the most recognizable and active antitrans activists in the UK. She's recently announced a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand. Keane is on a mission to build links between the far right and antitrans feminist activists. The far right are using transphobia to build support, and activists like Keen aim to link up the far right with antitrans feminist groups. Keen is part of the Hands Across the Isle coalition, which aims to connect antitrans radical feminists with conservative Christian, anti LGBT groups, and is all round awful. We need to stand together to show that transphobia has no place here in Me and Jen here in Australia. And we want to protest Posey Parker's speaking tour. So, yeah, please join us. King George Square Sunday, March 12 from 11:00 a.m.. Be safe. Come with your community. Come with people. Bring water. Take care of yourself.

Yes, we're going out there to defend the rights of women, real women. Trans women, that is. Anyway, moving on, we also got coming up, which will be on March 17, Friday at 07:00 p.m. At Black Bear Lodge is let's Get Hitched single launch to celebrate the release of Mountain Adeers upcoming single, you and Me. They decided to get hitched at Black Bear Lodge with live music. The ceremony will be joined with Big Dinner and Doggod opening the night. Tickets are $10 online and 15 on the door. I have to say, so Mountaineer Deer actually reached out to Transmission and sent us some of their music. I'm absolutely in love with this band. I have yet to see I've yet to be so moved by a local band in a long time listening to some of this music. Seven. I were actually listening to some of their tracks.

As introduced me to their music recently and my goodness, I haven't literally jaw dropped like that in a while. I highly recommend getting along, having a listen, supporting this band.

Yeah, absolutely. Amplifying the voices of the trans and gender nonconforming community of Mienjin, Brisbane and beyond.

Transmission enforceable Z brings you the latest in trans community news, music and events.

Every Tuesday from 09:00 A.m. Till 10:00.

A.m., join our team of posts for an hour of celebrating the unique perspectives of the trans community.

Transmission. Tuesday mornings from 09:00 A.m till 10:00 A.m on four triple Z. My name is Ez. I use he him pronouns.

My name is Sev. I use he him and VA vem pronouns.

And you're also in A Transmission, which is all about amplifying the trans and gender nonconforming voices of Mianjin and beyond. And in light of International Working Women's Day, which is on the 8 March today on the 7 March, we will be doing well. Sev will be actually, I'm just here as but a button pusher today as Sev talks about the wonderful Wendy Carlos.

I'm so excited to talk all about her to you.

Okay, take away.

All right. So many people will be aware of the name Wendy Carlos. She is renowned and a legend. However, her great contribution to the music industry, both as a musician, a composer and as an assistant when it came to the development of musical instruments, a lot of her notoriety was unfortunately very dampened by the fact that she spent the majority of her career closeted as a trans woman. Not sure how she would be able to work in the industry that she was so vital to help create. And in reading about Wendy Carlos and learning about her life, one thing that really struck me is that so little of the material available about her is from a trans perspective or is even sensitive to the needs and experiences of trans people. So I'm going to talk a lot about her life and experiences today. I really want to focus in on the joy and brilliance of her contribution, but to do her justice and to talk about her life, her experience and the industry that she worked in, we're going to have to talk about some difficult things and I will preface anything too graphic with a content warning. But just letting you know, this is a big journey that we're going to go on. So for people who haven't heard of Wendy Carlos before, she is a legendary composer, musician and the synth queen pioneer. Her debut album in 1968 was called Switched On Back. It was a collection of Johann Sebastian Bach classical pieces arranged entirely on a Moog synthesizer, an instrument she was integral to helping design and introduced the world to the endless possibilities of synthesizers and electronic music. But her work is best known in the cultural zeitgeist for her iconic contributions to film scores, her unique gift for exploring electronic sound instantly recognizable in her soundtrack contributions. And even if you've never heard her name before, when I tell you the soundtracks that she was involved in, you will know her sound immediately. So Wendy Carlos wrote the film scores for A Clockwork Orange, the Shining and Tron. In a quote from The Guardian, they said Carlos is arguably the most important living figure in the history of electronic music and it's because of that I find it an absolute tragedy that more people don't know her story and her incredible work. So her 1968 album Switched On Back made the moog internationally famous. This is a synthesizer, not the first synthesizer, but a modular synthesizer that really set the precedent for what was possible in early electronic music. And we will get in a little bit to that. But if you really want to know what the Moog is about, how it worked and what Wendy Carlos contributed to its design, there are some incredible pieces of archive footage available on YouTube. If you go and have a look, just Wendy Carlos Moog synthesizer. You can hear her describe not only the instrument, but also the way that she uses it and her unique approach to the instrument and you can hear it in her own words. And I highly recommend you go and check that out. But this album, Switched On Back, it was originally commissioned by Columbia Records because they were doing a season called Back to Back. They really wanted to get new updated recordings of Sebastian Buck pieces. And so they put this call out, like if anybody has an orchestra or a recording they'd like to make. And Wendy Carlos and her producer thought, well, this is a really great way for us to show how the Moog really works and what we can do with it. And Wendy had always been very grounded in classical music and classical music trained. So they pitched a fully electronic Buck album and Columbia was like, okay, well, we'll give it a go. They gave it a small forward, financial forward and didn't really get their hopes up too much. However, Switched On Back reached number ten on the US Billboard 200 chart and topped the Billboard Classical Albums chart from 1969 to 1972. By June 1974, it had sold over 1 million copies and in 1986 it became the second classical album to ever be certified platinum. In 1970, it won Grammy Awards for the best classical album, best classical performance of an instrumental soloist or soloist and best engineered classical recording making Wendy Carlos the very first trans person to receive a Grammy Award.

Oh, my God.

Absolutely incredible. And I know that a lot of people would have been learning about Wendy Carlos for the first time in the last couple of months. I was really delighted to see how many people shared articles and stories about her in the light of the Kim Petras and Sam Smith Grammy win. Obviously incredible. But it was really heartening to see so many of our queer historians and like, actually, Wendy Carlos was an absolute pioneer and was not afforded the same amount of celebration to her achievements. So I think it's our job to give it to her. Now. I'm really excited to tell you more about Wendy Carlos's history, but I think we should jump right in and listen to one of her soundtrack offerings.

Yeah, this one here is the main theme from Clockwork Orange. My name is Ez. I use he him pronounce.

My name is Sev. I use he him and they them pronounce. Just listening to that track gives me absolute chills. I mean, not only is it gorgeous, so this soundtrack particularly holds a really special place in my heart as an awkward alternative. Super queer, very uncomfortable in myself at the time. Teenager actually doing high school here in Manjun quite a long time ago. I was an arty weird kid, right? And I think there's something very magical. Our exploration as individuals of music, the music that will come to learn to, like, love, make parts of our personality that's sort of happening at the same time as our exploration of, you know, at least for me, my sexual identity and my gender identity and, you know, just your sense of self, they're all really linked into each other. And as a weird artie kid, there were two things I knew that I loved music and that I wanted to make films. Like, that's what I thought I would do at 15 years old. And, you know, here I am signing up to school and knowing that I want to take drama and film and television and music and that those are the things I want to focus on. And at that age, I had decided I have broadened my spectrum since. But at the time, I had decided that the best music in the entire world was industrial and electronica and I was really into synth music. I was so was getting really into, you know, 80s goth and 90s alternative. I just I loved the synth leaning sounds and I really wanted to get into making films and I had these delusions of being the next great orte and the films that I loved and obsessed over and studied so that I could understand how to make beautiful collaboration between story and images and colors and sound. You know, it's a bit edge lord to say it, but I was a massive Kubrick stan. Like a massive kubrick stan. Obviously a lot about his, you know, work methods to, you know, be discussed at a later date. But right now, that sound, the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange with those visuals, with the challenging narrative, it did things to young Sev. And to hear that music again now with a much fuller context and an understanding and knowing a little bit about where Wendy was at in her life when she made it, that's really incredible. So we're going to get to that. I just want to quickly say she was clearly always destined for greatness, a bona fide genius.

Oh, evidently. Also, if anyone's listening on the podcast and you can't hear the music, that's because that's copyright and we can't do that, but you can listen to any of the songs that we're playing by Wendy Carlos YouTube there's on all the things. And that was Clockwork Orange. So, yeah, you can listen back to that one.

Please do. Check it out. So, some evidence of her destined genius. She wrote her first composition, a trio for clarinet, accordion and piano, aged ten.

Yeah.

Wow. This is the same time she started soaring wood and soldering wires to build a hi fi system for her parents from scratch. In 1953, when Wendy Carlos was 14 years old, she won a scholarship to build a computer. And she then ended up studying a dual degree in physics and music at Brown University before moving to New York City in 1962 to study music composition at Columbia University. And it was from here, working with various electronic musicians and technicians at the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center, that she met Robert Moog. And it was there that she helped in the development of the legendary Moog synthesizer. And I've got this beautiful quote from Mug on Wendy Carlos and he said, Carlos came up with the idea of adding filter banks, pitch adjustment, sliders and a pressure sensitive keyboard to the Moog. He says, in my entire lifetime, I'd only seen a few, very few people who took so naturally to an instrument as she did. To the synthesizer. Moog told People magazine it was just a God given gift. Now, he really believed that she understood his work and his creation in a way that nobody else was going to be able to. And in multiple interviews, he gave full credit to the success of the Moog synthesizer. To Wendy Carlos, not only did she know how to work it, how to speak to it, and what it needed to really come to its fullest, she was also the greatest user of it. And her music, her explorations with it, worked as the greatest advert for this since, which would then become highly sought after by the largest names in music at the time. So after she had been working with Mug, it was encouraged that she find a way to make some money out of her skills and abilities and she starts writing jingles and creating sound effects and doing Foley work. And we're succeeding here and there, making these little pieces that she could live off of. But it wasn't until Kubrick was looking for contributions for a soundtrack and said he wanted to explore classical, but science fiction was the brief and mug and Carlos and her engineer, maybe we should send them switched on buck and the whole shebang came about from there. And we know that in 1970 that she was working directly with Stanley Kubrick, who apparently was very intense and fussy about a lot of the music, which is no surprise, knowing what we know about him as a director. But we know now from hindsight that the music is absolutely integral to that film, absolutely iconic, and creates this wonderful juxtaposition between the pomposity and arrogance of the main character and this sort of unsettling, sterile feeling. It's absolutely magical. So on top of her movie soundtrack work, obviously Clockwork Orange like Bust opened those doors and a few years later, Kubrick reapproached Wendy Carlos to help with work on The Shining and adaptation of a Stephen King book. Again, another of my absolute favorite movies of all time. That perfect mesh of iconic, unsettling noise and those big sweeping visuals. Just absolutely stunning. But her discography goes so much further. Over the course of her career 13 studio albums, she explored classical ambient music. She was one of the very first creators of like, ambient New Age music, just the things she did in her downtime whatever last time, and Most Delightfully, and something I didn't know about until researching for this episode Most Delightfully. In 1988, she had a collaboration with Weird Al Yankovic. They collaborated on an album, Peter and the Wolf and the Carnival of Animals, and it was a comical adaptation of classical orchestral works. And that album was also nominated for a Grammy that was nominated for the Grammy Award for the Best Album for Children. And that brings me so much joy. She deserved the good time, I'm sure. Working with weird owl? Must be.

Yeah.

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You're listening to transmission on four Triple Z. My name is Ez. I use he him pronouns.

My name is Sev. I use he him and they them pronouns.

And we're having a bit of a chat with Sev about Wendy Carlos and highlighting some of her career as an exceptional woman in music and yeah so Sev, what else is there to know about Wendy Carlos?

So next I really want to talk about Wendy Carlos's experience of navigating the industry as a trans woman. So we are going to be talking about her story of coming out, the information that she imparted to people through the press on the occasion of her coming out and a little bit about how that then transpired. This will have a brief content warning for just discussions of mental health, a very brief mention of suicidal ideation with no details. So yeah, moving forward coming out in 1979 in a at the time trailblazing but now very difficult to read Playboy article wendy Carr Lost publicly came out to the world as a trans woman. She told the world that she'd been living as a woman since at least 1968 and that she'd undergone affirming surgeries in 1972, seven years before she publicly came out with the revelation of her gender. We also learned how much the pressure of having to live her life closeted had had such a deep impact on both her mental health and her musical career. In Wendy Carlos's own words she said that she got to a point where she had to write a list where she had decided that she couldn't survive as she was and that she needed to write a list. What things would I need to survive? And the very top of that list was to find a doctor who would listen to her and you know, this is in the late sixty s and the early seventy s and there were a lot of barriers in her way. And although she says that she had always known she had felt a woman from childhood, she'd always known that she had not even been aware of the existence of trans people, that she'd never met one or had any sort of support that would point her in the direction of the support that she needed. And it wasn't until reading a book available at the time that covered a lot of information about the infamous car lotter that she was able to piece some pieces together and eventually attended the same gender clinic that the author from the book was from. But she tells some incredibly tragic stories about what the toll of this journey had taken for her in 1979. In one of these interviews she tells a story from ten years before in 1969 and she was already living her life as a woman and on hormones and she was invited to perform her electronic bark pieces with the St. Louis Orchestra before a live audience. She got on the plane as a woman, she traveled to hotel as a woman and she hid herself in her hotel room and cried and knew that she couldn't go on stage as a woman because nobody knew she was still fielding calls for her dead name counterpart and pretending like she was his secretary on the phone. She didn't have any route to be open at that point and tells this tragic story about in her hotel room forcing herself to put on drag. She used to have to travel with fake sideburns and a makeup kit and makeshift bindings in order to present herself as a man for stage and TV appearances. Obviously this had a massive impact on her well being. She did not identify she does not identify as fluid. She did not have any desire to be that person and forcing herself to do it for public consumption clearly took a massive toll. After that performance, Wendy Carlos decided to never perform live again. It was clearly crushing and so severe that she developed a phobia of being seen in public. She became a recluse in her home studio and this is at the same time she was a multi Grammy award winning notorious and deeply desired by other people in the music industry to collaborate with musician. There are stories that famous musicians like Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, Keith Emerson all showed up to her house wanting to meet her, begging for audiences, but she couldn't see them. She was still not out. She didn't want to be seen in her home, out in trance and her visitors were told that Carlos was away. I would listen to them from upstairs, Carlos told People magazine. I accepted the sentence on my life. But it was bizarre to have life opening up on the one hand and to be locked away from it all on the other. After that, when forced to go out in public for television appearances and interviews she went again disguised as a man. She used her disguise to appear on the BBC and the Dick Cabot Show and even in meetings with Stanley Kubrick for planning out the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange. She dressed in men's clothing for their meetings. In a quote from Wendy Carlos, she says I could tell he felt something was strange, she says, but he didn't know what. The wildest thing that Wendy Carlos ended up realizing saying, and I understand that it must be incredibly complicated for her, but after all the fear and all of the barriers that were not safe for her to be out and enjoying the rewards of her success, she has this incredible quote, like the public, in fact, turned out to be amazingly tolerant. Or if you wish, at worst, indifferent. She believes there had never been any need for this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life and a monstrous waste of all of her potential. And it was not her decision to hide, it was the world's position forced upon her and she would go on to create lots more studio albums and is still now apparently shacked up in a beautiful large studio space constantly moving things for ideal sound.

She must be in her ninety s.

I believe she's 83 I believe she's 83. My goodness.

And she also left like such an incredible legacy of music as well.

An incredible legacy. Now, unfortunately, it's very hard to listen to Wendy Carlos's music and there's a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, she is incredibly protective of her own music and her own legacy. And I hear that she has often reworked and remastered her own works because the sound quality and sound fidelity is so important to her. And she's clearly such a perfectionist with getting her sound perfect that she has taken her own albums down and often replaced them, although a number of those have now gone out of print. And on further Reading, I find that she decided that she didn't really want to have anything to do with streaming platforms at all. So you will not be able to find much Wendy Carlos music on streaming services. The ones that you will be able to find are collaborations and soundtracks for movies where obviously she doesn't have the entirety of the right for distribution. However, if you want the greatest celebration of Wendy Carlos possible, I implore you, please go to her website. Not only is that the only place to really buy all of her music, read her words in her own voice, the website is www.wendycarlos.com. But also you'll see all the other incredible things she does. She's not just a musician, an engineer and pioneer, she's eclipsed photographer and adopted mother of many beautiful cats. She's a visual artist and a map maker and a designer. She absolutely fascinating. If you want some real joy, go and look at this 16 bit wonder that is Wendy Carlos's website and just dig through her incredible body of work.

I think you were talking about an artist as well who's been influenced by Wendy Carlos from that younger generation.

Absolutely. So when I was reading up about Wendy Carlos, what was incredible was every musician who's ever touched a keyboard or a synthesizer will cite Wendy Carlos as one of their major inspirations. But obviously for us, and for me, where I get really excited is where young trans artists and modern trans artists get to be pioneers themselves and continue the journey of electronic music, electro, pop. And I was really excited to find an interview with Sophie where she says that Wendy Carlos was a major inspiration to her. So to close out the episode, I thought it would be really lovely to celebrate how far we have come and how wonderful it is to be able to not only celebrate trans musicians out, open and proudly, but to be able to have a platform like Transmission where we can do this every week.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for Triple Zed, for allowing us this space and giving us free rein to talk about the incredible things, but also the incredible body works of Wendy Carlos. If you're tuning in, this is the end of Transmission, but you're welcome to listen back. On our four triple Z website, four triplezed.org Au. We've got our on demand for each episode and everything, so you can listen back if you're just tuning in. Thank you so much and we will see you next week.

See you next week. Thank you all.

Bye.

Thank you so much for listening to Transmission. See you next Tuesday. Nine to 10:00 a.m on Fortrible.