A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score
One of the most satisfying soundtrack "companion" pieces ever released, this collaboration between synthesist Wendy Carlos and producer Rachel Elkind manages to both logically extend and credibly expand on director Stanley Kubrick's masterfully conceivedClockwork Orangemusical ethos. That shouldn't be surprising, as the pair was largely responsible for initiating those concepts with the music they'd begun as a follow-up to their successful, synthesizer-pioneeringSwitched on Bachcollection. "Timesteps," a rich, wildly evocative, 13+ minute electronic sound and music collage, was based on impressions gleaned from Anthony Burgess'soriginal novel(excerpts of it are liberally scattered throughout the film), while an abridged version of the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was an early experiment in vocal synthesis that ended up as one of the film's key motifs. Also featured here are synthesized versions of music Kubrick ultimately chose to use in orchestral form (Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie") as well as original Carlos/Elkind electronic compositions ("Orange Minuet," "Biblical Daydreams," and "Country Lane") that ended up on the cutting-room floor. Composed on primitive, monophonic analog instruments (which could play only one at a time!) long supplanted by generations of digital revolution, this work has a brooding otherworldly quality all its own. As our favorite Droog would say: "It was like a bird of rarest spun metal, or like silvery wine flowing in a space ship, gravity all nonsense now."--Jerry McCulley