My wife found me a nice bootleg of all the unused Shining music 15 years ago - its great. Sonic Seasonings is the only cd I have otherwise.
My wife found me a nice bootleg of all the unused Shining music 15 years ago - its great. Sonic Seasonings is the only cd I have otherwise.
Yeah, if one can find the LP editions of Sonic Seasonings or Walter Carlos' A Clockwork Orange (with that ridiculous "collage" album cover, which she says she never liked in the liner notes of the ESD CD, which is why she changed it for the reissue) in good condition and at a better price than the CD's, they're definitely worth having.
I agree.
Well, clearly Wendy wasn't happy with the original cover, which is why the "lame" parody cover was used on the reissue. I happen to prefer the reissue cover.
To me the original artwork would have been impressive if it had been done by a fifth grader or someone like that, but it wasn't. It was (theoretically, at least) designed by an adult, who was being paid good money by the art department of one of the biggest record companies in the world to design album cover artwork.
Re: A Clockwork Orange reissue
It was very easy to get when ESD first released it. How easy? I stumbled across it and Sonic Seasonings at Borders. I don't think I had known they were being reissued prior to that. That had to have been sometime around 98 or 99. I remember staying up til dawn, literally, one night, reading all the stuff on her website.
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As mentioned in my previous post on the topic, the soundtrack album to the movie A Clockwork Orange and the Wendy Carlos album are two almost completely different things. The soundtrack album only has a few of the pieces that she recorded for the film's score, and Timesteps appears in a severely truncated form. Also, I believe she mentioned somewhere that the sound quality on the soundtrack album was comprised due to the manner in which Warners derived the music (I've forgotten the details, but it had something to do with the music being derived from the film's optical print or something like that).
This is the album we were talking about:
http://www.amazon.com/Clockwork-Oran...ockwork+Orange
"Always ready with the ray of sunshine"
Yeah, that's the LP edition. Wendy said in the liner notes of the CD reissue she was never happy with the cover Columbia came up with, so when they did the reissue she had something different put together, which was used on the version in the Amazon link I posted.
Indeed, here are some recent confirmed sale prices on Discogs:
Order Date Condition Sleeve Condition Price in your currency Price
2014-08-19 Near Mint (NM or M-) Near Mint (NM or M-) CA$91.35 51.00 GBP
2014-04-08 Near Mint (NM or M-) Near Mint (NM or M-) CA$141.50 79.00 GBP
2014-01-07 Near Mint (NM or M-) Near Mint (NM or M-) CA$98.32 70.00 Euro
2014-01-05 Near Mint (NM or M-) Near Mint (NM or M-) CA$107.47 60.00 GBP
2013-11-25 Very Good (VG) Very Good (VG) CA$105.34 75.00 Euro
2013-08-22 Near Mint (NM or M-) Very Good Plus (VG+) CA$177.39 149.99 USD
2013-06-22 Near Mint (NM or M-) Very Good Plus (VG+) CA$118.24 99.98 USD
Two are currently for sale at asking prices of 200 Euros and 135 GBP.
That original "Walter Carlos' Clockwork Orange" album cover art was GREAT. I absolutely prefer it over the lame reissue cartoon. And it matched the claustrophobic feel of Kubrick's film much closer than Philip Castle's airbrushed cover/poster (same artist who did "Manzanera/801/Listen Now" cover art)
One could argue that Wendy isn't exactly the best judge of aesthetics...
No, it was nothing to do with that. She could simply have changed the name without changing the artwork, as in fact she did: the original cover still appears on the back of the CD booklet with the name revised to Wendy. Now the By Request album, on the other hand: there was no way she was going to keep that original cover, what with the caricature of her in her male persona, complete with the phony sideburns she used to wear in publicity pictures.
walter_carlos-by_requst.jpg
She never felt the need to distance herself from the Switched-On Bach cover that was originally released as Walter Carlos. One of the all-time great covers, that was. I personally like the original Clockwork Orange cover. The replacement was a terrible attempt to ape the look of the film's artwork.
I can't find the thread that had some more recent discussion of the Wendy Carlos albums on CD, so using this:
Renate, I sent you a Private Message about some Wendy Carlos CDs I might be able to help you out with - check your messages if interested.
I bought most of the ESD releases back in the late 90s? Or early 2000s?..and they were readily available then.
Overtime they become scarce and rare at high prices. The unavailability of her music on YouTube I find curious. For example..if you wanted to get a sample of a specific album and it's not there to be found.
I get the obvious impression that she is deeply disappointed by something. Whatever she disliked about the industry may have given her a reasoning to pull the plug, ( so to speak), and not all of those details on a existing confrontation between her and associates has surfaced through the publications industry. ...so it's a little baffling in some ways.
The fact is she is an innovator and a genius at composition to a lot of people in the world. She's also a very important person in the history of Electronic Music..so yeah..people will wonder.
One can only guess about her motives. The YouTube thing may have something to do with publishingrights. Her disappearance might have something to do with not wanting to be reminded on a part of her past, which always will be mentioned if is about her. I suppose one Playboy interview goes a long way.
Yeah it's not hard to guess. She's been screwed over by her labels and screwed over by the press and screwed over by an unauthorized biography and all of her stuff is out of print now so she gets no royalties anymore. The "new reality" of digital online distribution is not really to her liking and her lawyers spend a lot of time protecting her copyrights from infringers.
It's sad her music is so hard to find, and so expensive when found but that's where we are.
Alas it's a reality she has to deal with. I can't blame her that she doesn't want to. On the other hand she might serve as a kind of role model for people like her. But well things were hard in the 80s, so I'm sure they were even harder in the 70s, so I don't blame her she wants to leave that past behind and burried.
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