Women in electronic/dance music

Dinky is such a happy hardcore name.

Haha Magda is probably the only producer on this thread to have had a range of merchandise produced instructing her to (albeit not in as many words) get back in the kitchen.

haha magda recently remixed depeche mode's "wrong". it's very bounce-n-squelch dark minimal, as might be expected.

Mary Anne Hobbes and Annie Nightingale are very high profile DJs (in the UK at least) while not particularly falling into any of the parameters mentioned above (attractive, youthful, entrepreneurial etc).

cos they made it through radio probably?

i don't even know where this discussion is going now!

you had to be good looking to be a Radio 1 presenter this decade

and aw shit, i think she replaced gahan's vocals with alison moyet's!! (xp, this is re the magda depeche remix)

Lex I do really like Cooly G, just like I really like Cassy. It's just that I find all the stuff i read about her (not including your stuff) massively off-putting. Very much beaming Frankenstein holding a flower.

Also to some extent when artists like these get mad props it's inevitably framed against a dismissal of the masses. I read quite a few "I'm bored with minimal... except for Cassy!" rants a few years back, and likewise a lot of the discussion of Cooly G is along the lines of "oh she's so much more interesting than boring/conservative/childish UK funky." Really not the artists' fault at all but I have to remind myself of that to prevent it from turning me against them.

With Cooly G this is as much the "Hyperdub effect" as it is anything else, though I think the "enigmatic female producer" proto-hype started before Hyperdub signed her.

"it's interesting that pretty much all of the techno women we've been talking about also (co-)run their own labels and other projects - maybe to gain recognition even within a female-friendly scene like techno, you have to be the sort of focused and driven woman who will also take on the business side of stuff?"

Possibly also linked with ensuring your creative independence to some extent, creating a space in which you can do what you want to do.

i read a ton of stuff about cooly g and cassy which doesn't do that! though i have seen it and yeah it's offputting. i find 90% of music writing offputting though, and you def get equally facile statements made about their male counterparts too. i mean how many badly-written purple-prose villalobos rhapsodies have you seen over the years...

I actually like Cooly G's Fact mix less than virtually every other funky mix I have heard.

...right down to the whole "oh he's such a unique auteur" thing.

xp

to me it seems that the "starting a label" thing seems to be an electronic dance music phenomenon as opposed to a gender phenomenon.

i think it helps if you think of cooly g as deep house and dub rather than funky - if you compare it to the rambunctious party-starting funky/dancehall mixes which have been cropping up, of course it comes off as less fun, but think of her as someone who can drop everyone from âme to fuzzy logik to dennis ferrer to perempay to hard house banton in the same set and make it cohere.

x-post oh totally, it's harshed my buzz w/r/t Villalobos for years. In fact the people who go overboard with Cassy and Cooly G are mostly the same people who go overboard with Villalobos (and also Ben Klock etc. being the stern muscular male counterparts to the women's pregnant femininity).

I don't think I've ever read anything good about Cassy.

Let's just all agree that all music writing ever is awful.

i only realised this year with his (great) new album that ben klock is REALLY HOTT. oh am i doing exactly what you're describing, haha! srsly though those cheekbones and that jawline.

never got villalobos tbqf

I didn't listen to Villalobos for about 2 years due to reading so much stuff that made him sound crap

i think sometimes music fans regard musicians in the way that creepy folks regard the objects of their desire in their real lives, and the idealized notion of who they ought to be can result in further enamoring or a whiplash sense of betrayal and subsequent hatred or condescending disappointment. maybe it's more pronounced w/dudes and how they regard female musicians.

just rambling here

the field get this too, except he is actually crap as well as being made to sound crap

Ha ha Klock actually looks exactly like someone I've slept with. (I don't think it was him though)

But the writing I'm talking about mostly scrupulously avoids discussions of appearance.

yeah it's weird, it's more like the frankenstein flower pic in the sense that it's like "she is speaking to me with her mind...groooan, it is pretty"

OTM!

He/She lashes my mind and body with beats that seem to invade my very sense of personal identity. I float on a wave of unknowing.

speaking of Mary Anne Hobbs, I heard an older show by her where she big ups a female dubstep producer named Subeena and goes on a little rant about how wrong people are for saying there aren't any female dubstep producers... well anyway, the song was great. don't know the name of it and it doesn't seem to be on her myspace, but i'll definitely be keeping an ear out for her stuff.

i actually only date female dubstep producers

asian ones

There's Vaccine, who's been on Mary Anne Hobbes' show.

thread needs more youtubes imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig3l42p7SNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZDaf2_wTuk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qsUWui6bJY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvpgiiotL0U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlcLiQ09b4A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ64DgfE6dU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34dAPDM2W3E

Some things I just want to highlight...

i think sometimes music fans regard musicians in the way that creepy folks regard the objects of their desire in their real lives, and the idealized notion of who they ought to be can result in further enamoring or a whiplash sense of betrayal and subsequent hatred or condescending disappointment. maybe it's more pronounced w/dudes and how they regard female musicians.

A thousand times yes. Though music fans do this with artists they admire of both genders, most men are so homophobic as to utterly repress or deny the "creepy" aspect of their obsession with male musicians, in a way that they feel totally justified in doing to females. (I fully cop to being guilty of this phenomenon myself, with the genders reversed - but it's amazing how much more flack I get for that aspect of my fandom.)

it's interesting that pretty much all of the techno women we've been talking about also (co-)run their own labels and other projects - maybe to gain recognition even within a female-friendly scene like techno, you have to be the sort of focused and driven woman who will also take on the business side of stuff?

This is something that Frances used to say a lot, before she basically friend-dumped me.

Maybe it's that you have to be the slightly insane and driven enough to survive in an all male environment without being run off. (How I often feel in threads like this.) Maybe it's because traditional labels (mainly the majors, but the indies are just as bad) where they say, in all seriousness, things like "we'd sign you but we've already got a female artist." If you want to do things on your own terms, in your own way, without being squished into someone else's box, you have to create your space. Especially if you have to be an independent minded person in the first place to even *survive* doing this stuff.

Anyway, I'm gonna try to stop carping and check out some of these artists.

I suppose it's very different for the other people on this thread, because it is all just THEORY for them. Whereas this is the kind of shit that actually affects me every day of my creative life.

A thousand times yes. Though music fans do this with artists they admire of both genders, most men are so homophobic as to utterly repress or deny the "creepy" aspect of their obsession with male musicians, in a way that they feel totally justified in doing to females.

This is totally true, and I think it's more obvious and emphasized in largely male-dominated genres like electronic music, where there's not too many women to obsess with.

You'd be one of the non-homophobic non-repressed ones tho I take it Tuomas?

Yeah, but I don't generally obsess over musicians, male or female. Except maybe Marc Almond and Grace Jones.

Maybe ILX can arrange a meet'n'greet

So far, I've liked Ada and... erm, didn't catch the name of the artist with the light fixture the best. But that could be down to genre familiarity more than anything else.

I always get caught out by the trainspottery hair-dividing nature of the genre categories. I know one has to have labels with which to assign one piece of music's relationship to another, but I'm just not familiar enough with the terminology of electronica to have any meaningful discussion.

Oh, the artist with the light fixture just got really, really good. I like the use of the stereo field and the kind of slippery noises that ricochet about. What genre is this, oh hair-splitters of ILX? ;-)

Add Estroe to the list of producers I had no idea were actually female. I'm not sure what you'd call her really, just straight house music really.

i would like to see more (any?) f/f and m/f duos.

I don't think I even understand what "house" music is any more. It meant something completely different in the late 80s/early 90s, didn't it? There's not one single "OOM-tish" in that entire track. It's much more organic and textural.

kate, that's estroe. i'd just call her techno i guess. she fit into minimal when that was released, i guess, but hardly rigidly so.

xps

xxp there really was no-one who gave a shit about that last Miss Kittin & The Hacker album was there (me included)?

it was rubbish, but the miss kittin solo one last year was surprisingly great!

I'm listening to more Estroe stuff on YouTube, yes I like this. A lot.

"Not everyone understands house music. It's a spiritual thing. A body thing. A soul thing"

(^_^)