Notes
"So my droogs, if you're feeling oddy knocky or gloopy or chocked with chepooka, you are invited to sloosh the music of Clockwork and feel horror-show once more. It is all, to quote Alex, "Bliss, bliss and heaven.... Hear all proper. Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones. You are all invited."
This fab CD is a reissue (remastered and with bonus tracks) of the original 1972 Clockwork Orange LP that Wendy Carlos & Rachel Elkind (Carlos' producer) released shortly after the official soundtrack was released by Warner Brothers.
It contains the full length versions of some tracks that were only hinted at on the official soundtrack LP along with music that was composed and performed at the time (1971) but was never used in Kubrick's final cut of the movie (for reasons that are explained in the accompanying booklet).
Walter Carlos (now called Wendy Carlos after undergoing a sex change operation in 1962) studied music and physics and worked in New York as a recording engineer. She worked with Robert Moog, using one of his first keyboard synthesizers in the early 1960s.
Carlos' first album, Switched-On Bach (1968) was an LP of electronic interpretations of Bach's classical music. It was a huge success, winning three Grammy awards and staying on the classical music charts for more than 300 weeks.
After the success of her Switched-On Bach album, Wendy Carlos and her long-time producer Rachel Elkind began working with a spectrum follower - a device that converts sounds, such as speech, into electronic signals that mirror the overtones and rhythms of the original. The idea: To create the first electronic "vocal" piece. The piece selected for translation: the Choral Movement from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Whilst working on an introduction to this peice (called Timesteps), a friend gave her a paperback copy of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Carlos fell under the spell of Burgess' vision of a slightly futuristic world filled with ultra-violence. She also noticed that her Timesteps peice seemed to capture the feeling of the opening scenes of Burgess' book. Timesteps eventually evolved into a sort of musical poem based on Clockwork Orange - a peice that, as Carlos says, was an "autonomous composition with an uncanny affinity for Clockwork."
After hearing that Stanley Kubrick had just begun production of Clockwork, Carlos Wendy and Elkind began to share the same day-dream...
Once production on the movie had finished Carlos airmailed the tapes of Timesteps and Beethoven's Choral Movement to Kubrick who requested that they both they come to London and discuss the use of Wendy's music in the film.
Packaging & Liner Notes
Standard jewel case with a 16-page booklet containing detailed background notes from Wendy Carlos.