“Amanda Sewell successfully pulls together a balanced portrait that acknowledges Carlos’s unavoidable cultural status as both a pioneer of electronic music and its most famous transgender woman, while also affording due recognition to her sonic accomplishments”
In late 1977, Wendy Carlos and her friend and producer Rachel Elkind started looking for the right journalist to tell her story. During the nine years since the pair’s creation of the million-selling Moog-powered phenomenon Switched-On Bach, Carlos had retreated from public life, fearful that her contemporaneous gender transition would overshadow the achievements of the album and its successors. Feeling that the time was now right for disclosure, they made tentative contact with Arthur Bell, the New York gay rights activist whose journalistic debut had been an account of the Stonewall riots.
Although largely sympathetic and upbeat in tone, the resulting feature as it appeared in the May 1979 edition of Playboy magazine greatly dismayed Carlos.
Originally published by The Wire.