QUEERTRONICA
7pm -12am
A night dedicated to Wendy Carlos and the pioneers of electronica
Screening of Wendy (2023) by Frances Scott and Chu-Li Shewring
Live music from Celyn of Gwent and Keziah
QUEERTRONICA
7pm – 12am
This event focuses on the work and legacy of Wendy Carlos, a foundational figure in electronic music whose innovations transformed how sound was composed, mediated, and heard. Carlos’s pioneering use of synthesisers reshaped popular and experimental music alike, challenging inherited ideas of musical authorship, instrumentation, and form. The evening approaches her work as part of a wider historical terrain in which electronic music has repeatedly emerged as a space for transformation, experimentation, and reconfiguration. Carlos’s practice demonstrates how new technologies can unsettle established musical norms and open unfamiliar cultural possibilities—an impact that continues to reverberate across generations of artists working with machines.
QUEERTRONICA situates Carlos within a wider counter-history of electronic music shaped by trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming artists. Rather than treating technology as neutral, the programme foregrounds electronic sound as a site of disruption—where machines have been used to unsettle norms, redistribute creative power, and imagine other ways of being.
The lineage traced through the night includes Daphne Oram’s rejection of institutional hierarchies, Laurie Anderson’s boundary-blurring multimedia practice, and SOPHIE’s radical, future-facing production language. Together, these practices reveal electronic music as a field shaped by experimentation, resistance, and ongoing struggle over who gets to shape culture.
The programme moves between past and present: a DJ set mapping trans and queer histories of electronic sound, a screening of Wendy (2023), and live performances from Celyn of Gwent and Keziah that activate these histories in the now—treating legacy as something living, contested, and unfinished.
‘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.