My Husband's Stupid Record Collection: Wendy Carlos
Sarah O’Holla is a mild-mannered librarian who, for the past several months, has been listening to her husband’s 1,500 vinyl records — one at a time, in alphabetical order. She’s been writing about that experience on her blog, My Husband’s Stupid Record Collection. From time to time, Soundcheck checks in with Sarah and her husband, Alex Goldman, a producer at On the Media and co-host of the podcast, TLDR.
“We’re finally in the C's, and that means we’ve gone through a Wendy Carlos stretch,” O’Holla says in a conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer. “Because Alex is a pretty big fan of Wendy Carlos.”
Carlos, a composer and electronic musician whose prolific discography contains 14 albums spanning over three decades, might be best known for her film scores, including A Clockwork Orange and Tron. Those two soundtracks, which combine orchestral elements and synthesizers, are made up of exquisitely dark, oftentimes brooding original compositions, and, in the case of A Clockwork Orange, electronic re-workings of classical composers.
Goldman adored Carlos’s work as a child, which he discovered while playing the Tron arcade game. While O’Holla is a newer convert, she's become an enthusiastic fan, to the point of pouring over Carlos’s digital presence after hearing her music.
“I love Wendy Carlos’s website,” O’Holla says. “She writes about her experience right after 9/11, she writes about her cats a lot, and she posts different essays…. There are just so many pages on it. You could read it for days.”
Interview Highlights
Alex Goldman, on "Creation of Tron," from the Tron soundtrack:
Tron was one of the only Disney movies that I liked as a kid. I wasn’t a Mickey Mouse fan; I was a Bugs Bunny fan. But Tron was really cool-looking…. When I got old enough to start collecting records, I was on the hunt for the Tron soundtrack. It represented something really cool and otherworldly to me in my childhood.
Sara O'Holla, on "Creation of Tron":
I grew up with Disney pretty hardcore — I love Disney movies — and Tron is probably the only Disney movie that I’ve never even really heard of. [I] never saw it, I didn’t know anything about the video game. So it’s pretty typical in our relationship, that the one Disney movie I’ve never seen is the one Disney movie you’ve ever connected with…. I really love [“Creation of Tron”]. It builds in this beautiful way. It’s so angelic, so relaxing. It’s just beautiful.
Goldman, on "March from A Clockwork Orange," the title of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" on Carlos's A Clockwork Orange soundtrack:
To me, it sounds like a broken computer a little bit. Which is not to say that I don’t like it. A broken computer is the kind of thing that I would love to listen to.
O'Holla, on "March from A Clockwork Orange":
It sounds pleasant and futuristic, but at the same time, "Ode to Joy" is this song that we all know and is really old. But [Carlos's version] sounds really futuristic. And it’s just happy! I just feel like I could listen to it all the time.
