Most official musician websites eventually become storefronts wearing an artist’s name. Wendy Carlos’ site feels like somebody actually lives there.
Visit Wendy Carlos’ official website
Carlos is inseparable from the history of electronic music: Switched-On Bach, synthesizer performance, alternate tunings, and film work including A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and TRON. Her website does more than list those credits.
The discography pages contain long notes about remastering, master tapes, unreleased recordings, album variants, synthesis, sound quality, distribution problems, and the strange afterlife of recordings that move in and out of print.
One of the best examples is the story of the TRON master tapes. Carlos describes old tape binder absorbing moisture until the reels became difficult or impossible to play. The solution involved carefully dehydrating the tapes long enough to transfer them. That is music history crossing directly into media preservation.
A “Living Page” from another web
The site calls itself the “Living Page.” Its design is dense with custom leaf icons, color-coded sections, long explanatory pages, personal opinions, warnings about unauthorized releases, technical notes, and occasional irritation with the music business.
There is even a MetaPage describing the site’s own design and the Macintosh computers used to maintain it.
That makes the site historically interesting beyond Carlos’ music. It represents an era when an official artist website could be idiosyncratic, hand-shaped, argumentative, and full of information that would now be flattened into social posts or marketing copy.
For researchers, the first-party commentary is the prize. Carlos explains her own recordings, equipment, restoration decisions, and unfinished or unavailable work without forcing the material through a biography written by somebody else.
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The web is full of pages about Wendy Carlos. Her own site is better because it preserves the part only she could write.