‘You will witness the day become near-night, like the deepest twilight. Sunset colors bathe the full horizon, while a gaping black hole gazes down at you from the inky sky, eye-like and surreal, surrounded by the solar corona, a halo of pearly ephemeral light of delicate beauty. Each time the corona looks quite different, and like an old friend’s face you’ll recognize each in photographs.’
Wendy Carlos (www.wendycarlos.com)
‘Wendy’ is a film response to the work of composer, electronic music innovator and polymath, Wendy Carlos. The work orbits a duet rehearsal for four hands on one piano. Together, Frances Scott and Chu-Li Shewring learn to play ‘Timesteps’, transcribed from the original score composed by Wendy Carlos, first imagined for Anthony Burgess’ book, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1962), and later realised for the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation.
In ‘Wendy’, the duet realisation of ‘Timesteps’ takes place in a wood-panelled space, amid dust drifts, bleached-out light and the suggestion of umbral shadow, at the dark centre of an eclipse. Frances and Chu-Li focus on reworking sections, translated for piano by composer and musician, Sasha Scott. The music gives way to a halting choreography of hands and voices, where shifting time signatures are complicated by the players’ repetitions and mistakes made in the process of learning. Hammers and strings, percussive feet and voices count each other in, measuring a slow, half-speed from the original duration of 13 minutes 50 seconds. ‘Timesteps’ was initially imagined for the synthesiser, and its capacity for programming shifting layers and textures of sound. There are several arhythmic and dissonant sequences, and rather than being a performative exercise, the duet becomes an intimate attempt to understand, and inhabit a complex piece of electronic music.
This iteration of the score is accompanied by alternate sequences on piano, vocoded bird song, improvised singing and readings with collaborators Michael Curran and Valentina Formenti, including excerpts from Annie Dillard’s essay ‘A Total Eclipse’ (1982). Footage of the duet is synthesised with images using nascent digital volumetric filmmaking technology—a three-dimensional modelling technique—and solarised, hand-processed 16mm film material of other rehearsals, of horses, moons, and a sun, eclipsing as it rises above the horizon.
Wendy Carlos describes herself as ‘The Original Synth’, and in this spirit, ‘Wendy’ channels the unbounded voice in composition and transition. ‘Wendy’ is a work of translation and homage, but also of collaboration, fandom and friendship, and of sonic synthesis as a form of being.
