The studio session, titled rehearsal letter, reinterprets pages from Carlos’ original scores for »Timesteps« and »Theme from A Clockwork Orange (Beethovania)« (1971) using the Mini Oramics machine that Tom Richards built in 2016. Mini Oramics is based on an unrealised 1976 design by British composer and inventor Daphne Oram. It is a musical interface which allows the composer to draw graphic scores on clear film rolls, which are then read directly by the machine, creating »drawn sound synthesis.«

In rehearsal letter, these translated excerpts combine with original music composed for Scott’s forthcoming film, which is anticipated to screen as part of transmediale x CTM 2022. The origins of the project are discussed below.

transmediale: In this studio recording you bring together fragments from a number of compositions. Part of the score you’re collaborating on for the forthcoming film, Wendy, is combined with elements from Wendy Carlos’ 13.48s opus »Timesteps«– a score you’re currently remediating to play on the Mini Oramics. Can you talk about your collaboration and the relationship between this recording and the eventual film?

Frances Scott: Tom’s own work and his careful recreation of this incredible instrument designed by Oram really interested me. I see something in the way he works – compositing different material and approaches – that I can identify with. Tom also works quite differently, and that’s always exciting when someone pushes you further in a collaboration. The interpretation of pages from Wendy Carlos’ scores happened intuitively, though. I liked the idea of a material conversation, and we were finding ways to translate or filter these materials – in Tom’s case, literally drawing out the score in visual terms. We didn’t know where this would go, but it was a way to begin. I was also intrigued to find out that Wendy Carlos originally started her »Timesteps« composition in response to the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), that predated Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation by almost a decade. There was something about her responding to another form of written »script,« before she worked on the film, that fed my imagination.

The performance presented here was originally meant to be live, but with the current situation, this necessarily became a remote presentation. In hindsight, it probably helped us take ideas further than a one-off event, because there was time to go back and forth, to let some elements grow, or be discarded. In this way, the process of making the recorded session became another kind of re-creation. We also worked with artist and filmmaker Phil Coy, and filmed each section of both translated scores and Tom’s own compositions, using a fixed go-pro on the Mini Oramics as a reference point if we needed it when cutting the other footage. In the end, it was much more abstract than that, some points coincide and some don’t. The title for the session alludes to that spirit, a »rehearsal letter« as a place where the conductor directs an orchestra to a point in the score that isn’t the start, but more a structural point in the piece, a cut-up of sorts.

The final film, Wendy, will collage together a number of scenes, hopefully including something from the annular solar eclipse in June, which will be visible from areas in Northern Canada and Greenland, as there’s definitely something in Tom’s interpretations on the Mini Oramics that conjures a celestial event. I’m developing a loose script now, and we’ll use this to work out what to take forward.

Tom Richards: Frances is also working with sound designer Chu-Li Shewring, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with the audio stems we’ve recorded so far. We will also be recording more music and sound toward Wendy. In the performance you see here, we bring together the Mini Oramics with hand-made modular synths, modified turntables with custom dub-plates, another sequencer, and an analogue vocoder.

»Timesteps« is a really challenging piece, and I’m looking forward to trying to respond to more of its sonic elements. I’m not really trying to make a faithful copy. I am attempting to make something new from the process of trying to understand and digest Carlos’ music – keeping it quite open. As a relatively untrained, self-taught musician, this is a real learning curve! The other piece of music, Beethovania, is a more faithful rendition, and we’ve used this to top and tail the session with the »Timesteps« inspired pieces forming three movements in the middle.

CTM: Daphne Oram and Wendy Carlos are both pioneers of electronic music, whose work exerts a long lasting and transformative influence on electronic music. Apart from this legacy, where do you see a connection between the two? What motivated you to link them in your sound and film work?

TR: I think Carlos and Oram both had a vision for electronic music in their early careers which didn’t fit with the academic trends of the 1960s. They both saw the potential for electronic sounds to be expressive and humanistic, which went against the grain of the fashionable and highly academic, mathematical approaches of the serialist and aleatoric schools, both of which are closely related to early experiments in computer music. Oram called these approaches »music by slide rule« and went on to create her highly expressive »drawn sound« synthesiser, Oramics. Carlos made Switched-On Bach, which greatly popularised electronic music and was a pivotal step in expanding its realms beyond academia. That said I don’t think our collaboration and the subsequent linking of our research was prescribed or particularly deliberate in terms of the Carlos/Oram link. Frances and I were introduced by mutual friend and curator Mat Jenner who thought we had similar interests, and the collaboration was quite organic. In this context we are two artists experimenting and trying things out; it’s more about capturing an essence or finding a non-verbal way to describe these subjects. Carlos and Oram have both been subjected to a lot of hyperbole and pigeonholing in the media, when both are really complex, multi-faceted individuals. I think we are trying to explore their characters through their creative outputs, outside of any labels or preconceived notions.

FS: The connection really happened first in coming together through our individual research, rather than consciously bringing Daphne Oram and Wendy Carlos into a union. Certainly, their experimental approach to making music, but also developing the form, and the hardware – thinking about Oram’s instrument invention, and Carlos’ key role in progressing the Vocoder with Moog – is an interesting alignment. Tom mentioned going beyond a limited reception, and I think Carlos did this with Switched-On Bach, but she also introduced people to something much more expanded in terms of voice. She talks about this in Secrets of Synthesis (1987), using »Timesteps« as a way to warm-up to the more synthesised vocal sections in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I know less about Oram, but my understanding is that her work, both at the Radiophonic Workshop and independently, gave people access to these new sounds through the theme music and effects embedded within the shows they were watching or listening to everyday. I’d be interested to know if they might have been aware of each other though, as women working in the same expanded field. It makes me think about an interview with Suzanne Ciani I was reading recently in NME. She relates the experience of sharing a bill with the first ever performance of an unheard work by Oram. The BBC who were covering the event asked Ciani what she thought of Oram: »I had nothing to say! I didn’t know anything about her! They performed her piece, Still Point. It was a premiere of a piece she had written in 1949. I cried. I felt so cheated that I didn’t have these women in my personal history.« It feels like there’s overdue interest now in celebrating these women’s music, and their achievements in developing the form. Our collaboration is a small part of that homage.

TR: Yes, I don’t specifically remember anything about Carlos in the Oram archive, but I’m sure Oram knew of her – she kept up with everything in electronic music. Oram also pitched for Kubrick (for 2001) so they were almost certainly aware of each other.

tm: In Wendy, the physical film strip provides a material link between sound and image (synchronised strips of 35mm in the original Oramics synthesiser design, and 16mm in the camera). Can you talk about your process of making – in particular how thinking through and with the material of film has shaped the sound and image and the intersections between them? Put another way, how has the material of film exerted a force on your respective practice of making, and where are the overlaps or intersections? (Perhaps I’m imagining a kind of »call-and-response« between the material of film within image production and sound production – how do they pull and push one another in production, and then in the edit?)

FS: For this recording, we shot entirely digitally, but I did bring 16mm film footage into the edit. In 2019 we did a performance-event at London project space TACO!, who commissioned the initial research and forthcoming film. Tom began the interpretation of »Beethovania« and I filmed a couple of rolls of 16mm on a hand-wound Bolex. It was then hand-processed and telecined to work with it digitally. There’s a pulsing quality to the image and because of the way it’s processed, you get inconsistencies and occasional forms flashing in a frame, that seem to be synchronous with the drawn shapes on acetate moving across the light bed. I hadn’t initially imagined using the 16mm for this edit, but it felt like a good way to transition into other sections of Tom’s score. It’s also why we shot everything else as 4:3 and in black and white, so there’s an equivalence, also beginning and ending with the macro, which somehow gives the instrument a texture of its own. Working with analogue film can give you permission to work at a different pace, or at least to think differently and deliberately about how you capture images. This is partly because there’s a delay, not an immediate result, and the expense of shooting analogue film (and even the heaviness of the camera) means you don’t film everything. I like this time as a buffer, time to think! I somehow see this time being part of Tom’s process too, and there’s a similar component of not totally knowing what the outcome will be. There’s also a nice connection between the drawing on a film-like substrate – in the early case of Oram, actually on 35mm – and »camera-less« filmmaking, where images are generated by processes like painting onto or scratching into the emulsion, collage, or direct exposure of the photosensitive layer.

These are all approaches, as well as the hand-processing, that I’ve been thinking about in terms of how to abstract an eclipse, how to suggest a transition of celestial bodies without seeing it happen. In terms of the material between camera and instrument, I feel this most when the drawn score passes over the rollers, and there’s this accumulating mass of lines. You can see the layers of sound. In 2019, I made a film called PHX[X is for Xylonite] which looked to the history of early semi-synthetic plastics, which were also used as the substrate for film, beneath the gelatin layer. Plastic – film – is layered, the ultimate synthesis, and this is part of my thinking. At this point, we haven’t made the film, so it’s too early to say how this call and response between image and sound will work, but having these transcribed sound elements will definitely inform where we go from here.

TR: I’ve also worked with analogue film, both as an artist and as a technician and projectionist. I love the physicality of the medium, and it feels very natural to now be working with sound in a similar fashion with the Mini Oramics. To be drawing on film to score a film is a pretty unique experience these days.

tm: Carlos appears to have largely refused impositions into her personal privacy and the labour of self-promotion implicit within the digital. Her status as one of the most important living composers is not overtly evident across major music streaming services, for example. But this disengagement from the dominant digital / cultural script can also be understood as a demonstration of agency. It’s certainly not a case of inaction as we’ve seen Carlos actively prevent others from placing her music in these spheres.

These micro-gestures of resistance reveal how people »not performing« or not acting in certain ways can perhaps create new spaces. It’s within these spaces and territories that I imagine the film to speculate. Perhaps this ties into ways I’ve heard you talk about Wendy as a film about absence. Could you speak to this?

I’m also thinking back to our first conversation and the discussion we had around Carlos’ 1979 interview in Playboy and the feelings of betrayal she is said to have felt due to the focus it placed on her gender transition. As I understand it, one aspect of the film you’re making is to bring to the surface some of the themes Carlos expressed within that Playboy article that were never published. Her interest in solar eclipses, in cartography, and astrology. These creative interests and processes that were key to her practice, but pushed to the margins in favour of a story that instead focused almost entirely on her gender transition.

FS: Yes, I think there are several things bound up with this. I imagine she was understandably disappointed with the focus that came through in the Playboy article. It’s possible that Arthur Bell edited with this slant, thinking about the magazine’s readership, even though the publication was probably much more radical then than it is now. It’s also possible that the magazine itself placed the emphasis on her gender transition, rather than taking a more holistic approach, or being faithful to the content of recorded conversations between Bell and Carlos. Either way, the one tape I was able to listen to in the Rodgers & Hammerstein audio holdings at the New York Public Library contains some wonderful insights into the other areas to her practice, somehow lost in the article. This passage was transcribed, and fragments were lip-synced to the silent 16mm in Valentina. In this, she talks about her interests and proficiency in photography, darkroom work, computers – programming and hardware – mapping, geography, transformations and mathematics, physics, acoustics, astronomy. But her solar eclipse »chasing« was something that particularly stuck with me. There’s a section dedicated to total eclipses on her website. She calls herself a »Coronaphile« (a »corona« is an aura of plasma that surrounds the sun and other stars and is most easily seen during a solar eclipse). She saw and captured every total solar eclipse between 1972 - 1985. Incredibly, she developed photographic processes to composite images to create a better exposure of an eclipse, which have been published, and I think NASA employed this technique out of her experimental processes. This analogue, pre-digital technique speaks to me around ideas of material layering and synthesis, creating or recreating an experience that attempts to exceed the limitations of the body.

Carlos did post something on her website last summer, as she was not happy with a recently published biography, but she has also engaged with other writers and researchers over the years, for example with Dave Tompkins as part of the research for his brilliant book on the vocoder, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: the Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop (2010). I see this distinction as not wanting her personal life to be made public, resisting a »biographical« take, so that her work should be the focus. I think her withdrawal or resistance to a certain mode of coverage, or publicity, is perhaps a way of her regaining some control over her music distribution, but also her image, particularly in a digital time where this is both possible and sometimes seemingly impossible. Her website, however, is a really amazing resource, and she is very generous in making material available there – a public space that is also her archive. It’s also part-blog, and I think her personality comes through. The writing is very witty, and she is often candid for someone who might also be seen to be quite private. Her description of herself here as »The Original Synth« plays on synthesis as a productive, generative process, and maybe also takes some pleasure in confusing and complicating boundaries and readings. She has also positively reclaimed her work through releasing the music that was missing from final productions of A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, for example. In the latter, Kubrick used much more of the click-track. Rediscovering Lost Scores is another form of her agency, making visible or audible that which had been missed out.

My »fan-letter« is really a way of thinking through this, and other histories or narratives, that are absented. It’s a correspondence, and a personal response piece. I think a lot about Wendy Carlos talking about synthesising qualities of the human voice, and how this is much more difficult to imitate than the equivalent version of an orchestral instrument. In Secrets of Synthesis (1987) she says that vocoders end up being more useful when doing things that are »not particularly vocal,« and perhaps it’s this abstraction, and distance, that will help to make the work too. There’s a nice quote from writer Chris Kraus on the dust jacket of a recent book, Fandom as Methodology (Catherine Grant and Kate Random-Love, eds., Goldsmiths Press, 2019): »…the reflex distance and skepticism of traditional criticism are merely a choice that may be abandoned at any time; it is equally possible for an actor or an artwork or musician to be understood in every dimension through the filters of empathy, enthusiasm and love.« I think Carlos has also been empathetic, and playful, in her relationship to other composers and their works, if you consider her translating Bach or Beethoven, for example, somehow working with them in absentia. In the liner notes to her album, DIGITAL MOONSCAPES (1984), she talks about one of the pieces, »MOONSCAPES,« being made in the spirit of Holst’s The Planets (1918). I am trying to find a language that does not attempt to represent her or her work, but to personally speak to some of her ideas, and to take these somewhere else.

tm: Your collaboration together crosses (at least) between moving image, performance, composition, and written research. It feels like there are many ways the work can both be presented but also continue to evolve beyond the fixed parameters of a film, which perhaps exerts certain limitations temporally and spatially. Can you talk to these varied practices you engage with within the project, their intersections and various outputs?

FS: I often work collaboratively with other practitioners, and these exchanges allow the work to spill over into sometimes unexpected forms. This project is an unfolding work, where each iteration brings about the next. This is partly practical, because of funding or support coming through in stages, but it has been particularly so over the last year because of restrictions, which we’ve tried to go with as best we can. In the spring of last year, I recorded elements of the soundtrack for Valentina on a video call with performer Valentina Formenti, which Chu-Li Shewring, the sound designer, then fed into a vocoder. It was all done remotely, re-enacting the words, looking back at this silent film on our separate screens. I’ve worked closely with Chu over the years, and one of the first elements was a 100 minute radio session produced in collaboration with her. Incantation, Wendy was made for RTM.FM, which was a project named after Thamesmead’s original community station. RTM was launched in 1978, and they broadcast from a localised cable radio system, out of a cupboard in a local church!

Like many artists, I end up gathering and responding to material as I come across things, and I’m not too fixed in the moment of research – which then bleeds into production – about how this will manifest. I want to find the right form for the ideas. This often ends up in moving image, but might be orbited by other materials. The next part will be a book published with An Endless Supply and TACO!, with contributions from Dave Tompkins, Stine Hebert, and Beth Bramich. The book precedes the film, and I suppose in the way I had been drawn to Wendy Carlos’ initial process with »Timesteps,« and her relationship to the novel first. It becomes a node in a line of thinking. In this project, the radio work, screenings of other films, the event with Tom, recording of the score, the book, all sit together, but they are independent too. They speak to each other, and maybe reveal each other. With Tom, I think we share some of these interests, where physically making something feeds into and comes out of periods of research in archives, conversations with other researchers, trying things out and returning to source material to see if these converse.

CTM: The process of »drawn sound synthesis« suggests a degree of painstaking physicality in the performance. But also of a physical intimacy and reliance on human gesture and interaction. Could you describe your experience of performing with the Mini Oramics, particularly in relation to the restriction or freedoms of your physical gestures?

TR: The thing about Mini Oramics is the »performance« in the drawing, which you generally do in advance of playback and recording. This process can be painstaking, and sometimes hit and miss. Imagine trying to draw the correct vibrato graph or the volume envelope of a single note – these are things which are normally looked after by the instrument you are playing, or by intuition and improvisation in real time. Mini Oramics is not like that; you have to conceive every parameter of every note as a drawing or graph and get them all to work together in time. On the other hand, each and every note can have a very precise timbral and dynamic character if you want it to. This is exactly what Oram wanted for her interface, to be able to compose this level of nuance without the interpretation of a performer. In terms of restrictions and freedoms of gestures, you can’t really draw something »wrong« on the Mini Oramics. Any drawing will make a sound, but it does have its own syntax and graphic code. You need to understand a bit about how it works to be able to predict the outcome of any given gesture, and more loosely keeping each gesture within its given parameter channel will help contain the chaos.

FS: Tom’s drawing happened before we made the recording, but we did try to show some of this in the film documentation, and the earlier 16mm film was shot as he was actually scoring the work, so there’s some truth in this sequence at least! I especially like the process of his enacting and then re-enacting, drawing, and erasing. Looking through the lens, you’re also very aware of Tom teasing the score through, rewinding, and slowing down, in the moments where he plays the instrument by hand, rather than it being automated. You can hear this hand-wound section in the »warm up« to »Beethovania,« towards the end of rehearsal letter. We tried to capture this, his touch, but also we talked about Tom appearing and disappearing, a partly-seen figure, where the Mini Oramics seems to have a life of its own.