Women in electronic/dance music

Im glad ellen allien, barbara morgernstern were mentioned (add masha qrella to the list for the germans)
also tsuyuko aki & (my personal favorite) tujiko noriko.

it seems overall that specifically japan & germany (who seem to share many other unrelated similarities) embrace the idea of women in electronic music. I remember reading ellen allien dismissing the issue when questioned about it because for her it was a non-issue.

I dont know why things seem to be different in the states. I wish it were not the case. still I would rather see a few excellent female artists than a ton of really crappy-mediocre ones.
but maybe part of the reason this happens is because women have to work so much harder to make a name for themselves? this is the case in every male-dominated field, not just music.
I dont know.

x-post - actually most of my female electronic musician friends have said that their gender's been an advantage to them, it gives critics something to write about. unfortunately they often write silly, annoying things, and Momus' post outlines some of the dangers of a women-only thread like this but... at least people are starting to find out that this music does exist and that a lot of it is fantastic.

the first major compilation of female electronic composers was originally released under the title New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media in 1977, not a mention of gender anywhere in the packaging, I bought it in 1985 while randomly shopping, took it home, listened to it four times & read through the liner notes twice before it dawned on me that there was a point being made... or was there? Every track on that album is interesting, great music.

Recently more of the very early electronic music has been finding its way into circulation. And I'm definitely noticing: from the beginning, far more of a female presence in electronic music than there ever was in orchestral / classical music. In a way it makes sense: Anna's comment upthread about the 'lonely and anti-social process' notwithstanding, electronic music studios also offered women solitude, control & authority over their materials to an unprecedented extent. It shouldn't be surprising so many women made a run for the studio, where they could finally compose music and hear the finished results themselves (though this was the appeal for most electronic composers, the odds against a women getting her piece programmed, rehearsed and performed were always higher).

there's one more thing that I notice when the female pioneers of electronic music all appear side by side: there's a lot of proto-ambient / drone / freeform dream music of extended duration here: Oliveros, Radigue, Spiegel, Carlos' Sonic Seasonings, LaBarbara, Lockwood's World Rhythms, Maggi Payne's Crystal, and on the brutal, scorching side, Maryanne Amacher's Living Sound Patent Pending -- this music went fearlessly deeper into pure ecstatic drone sooner than the busily twitching beeping leaping pointilist approach favored by most of the composers who were getting noticed at the time. But there's a lot more music today that sounds structurally like these works than sounds like, oh I dunno, Kontakte... they saw something coming.

Pauline Oliveros
maryanne amacher
Walter Carlos 'Sonic Seasonings' - Classic or Dud?
Eliane Radigue

Shimura Curves in London and Liverpool (Do not read if you hate ILX supergroups)

electronic music studios also offered women solitude, control & authority over their materials to an unprecedented extent.

This is actually quite true. Rather than having your aethstic dream subject to the whims of annoying (often male) session players, producers, engineers, etc. all with their specific idea about womens' role withing the creative process (shut up, look good, just sing and pose pretty, let the boys do the fun stuff and don't have any real input) - you can sack the lot and do it yourself with a shiny silver box. But I'm just feeling particularly misanthropic today.

(Granted, each a gal + guy couple, but women are present nonetheless)

anyone turning against the idea of this?

synth pop is not electronic music.

/challops

that's old hat. We're now all about the backlash against martian astronomy pop

Wanna Be Starting Something

so that kevin blechdom album

I was trying to research this last year for an article, and hit some very blank walls. There's iosolated chicks, but not many. Erm... oh, what was that girl I saw recently at the Arts Cafe? Printed Circuit? She's the only one that really springs to mind.

Here's an odd reason that will probably be shouted down (by myself) due to sexism. The very nature of dance music/electronics is the idea of one geek, alone in the bedroom twiddling knobs. (or up in a DJ booth twiddling knobs.) Geeks - women in the minority. Knobs - OK, I've just been looking at Barely Legal Teen Boys so I'm gonna steer clear of that one. But the way that women approach music is a communal thing, women often prefer to write in partnership, so the solo bedroom twiddling thing is not the preferred option. I'm too full of sugar to hone this into a fully formed opinion right now, but does anyone else know what I'm getting at?

It's just the way that I've seen women work when they create music, from having worked with so many of them...

― kate, Friday, 22 November 2002 17:50 (6 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^is ILM feeling this seven years later y/n

If you're gonna go all stalkeresque on me, and bring up stuff I wrote seven years ago, you could try reviving the posts I made since then, because I could do with some free hype kthxbye.

"stalkeresque"

stalkeresque to quote in this thread something you wrote in this thread, this thread which you linked to in another thread?

Also it was a genuine question borne of genuine intersest

interest, too

http://www.tv-intros.com/s/silk%20stalkings.jpg

Ayo, a link for a new Dinky EP in my inbox right now! Isn't that nice

Apart from the fkn promo voiceovers I'm enjoying this too - weird, aquatic trippy house tackle - not listened to any of her productions before I don't think

I took me ages to realize K. Hand is a woman, probably because she doesn't use an obviously female artist name like Miss Djax or Sister Bliss. Ditto for Neotropic.

Coincidentally or not, K. Hand and Neotropic are two of my favourite female electronic music producers. I kinda admire Miss Djax for doing all that harsh and uncompromising stuff that has little to do with stereotypical femininity, but often her tunes are just impossible to listen.

People Like Us, Blevin Blectum, Kevin Blechdom, Ikue Mori, Beast Master, Ami Dang, Ayako, IUD . . .

On that other demented thread of hate I wanted to post that there are actually a lot more women in electronic/dance music post-minimal, many of whom are just as respected as the men. Of course there's still the tendency for people to say "oh and she's great looking too" or whatever but house/techno in the underground respected fields have quite a lot of high profile female artists right now, women can be that ultra respected DJ which maybe wasn't always the case, eg Steffi, Cassy etc.

Mind you you do get sort of weird positive discriminatory remarks eg you'll read about Cassy, "everything she does is beautiful" or something and you know you'd never read that about a male DJ.

BTW let me just say I think it is 100 per cent utter bullshit that the other thread was locked and whichever mod did so should be ashamed of themselves.

The Doubtful Guest album is something else. Like being locked inside a horrible rave in an abandoned factory on a really bad drug trip that never ends. It's only an occasional listen but I reckon it's one of the best things Planet Mu has released lately.

I took a look at the other thread... The title was kinda bad, but I do agree that the recent trend in the music biz to promote young and pretty women doing synth pop/electronic music just because because they're young and pretty, and because women in electronic music have been historically quite rare, is a dodgy practice. Seems like (big surprise!) the main selling point for these acts is the gender, not the quality of the music. For example, there's this new Finnish synth pop trio consisting of three girls barely in their twenties, and they've been written in every local music and trend mag, even though they've only released one single and a couple other tunes in Myspace. I can't imagine the same happening if they were boys or unattractive older women. I think these sort of trends are undermining the work of female producers like K. Hand, who've never made their gender or prettiness a selling point.

"and they've been written about in every local music and trend mag"

I guess my personal taste also has something to do with it, because I think 95% of this new "indie electro" stuff is carbage, regardless of if it's made by boys or girls.

The music biz promotes young and pretty men doing whatever the latest thing is too. How this undermines whoever the credible artists are supposed to be is beyond me.

neotropical, how do you know Ami Dang? i used to be in a group with her during our college years called HANDSIGNALS. her shit is awesome.

guys, remember that KLYMAXX are still kicking it hard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Avtq1FRwI10

i'm going to see them in september in LA. very excited.

Yeah, but the pretty boys aren't given a special treatment because of their gender, whereas this is often done with girls working in a male-dominated genre. This enhances the impression that girls in electronic music are given props only because they're girls and not because of their skills, which is kinda shitty for female producers who've spent years honing their skill without putting any special emphasis on their gender.

(xx-post)

Woke up to find the other thread locked. I'm kinda surprised that a thread in which as far as I could tell every single contributor was wanting to talk about the unjustness of women being expected to conform to a certain type of image of a female performer has been locked for purported sexism.

it had a 'scary' name?

really seems like people just couldn't get beyond that, regardless of everything that was said in the thread itself

I think you're right psychgawsple.

Also, Tuomas is correct above. Gender can be an issue for male artists (and sometimes it becomes one contrary to their intentions) and male artists can find that their looks or visual appeal crowd out all other discussions of them, but this isn't compulsory in the way that it is for female artists. I think only female artists who are basically "faceless" (for which you have to have a pretty low profile) are spared.

One of the more pernicious aspects of this w/r/t "proper" dance music is the way in which gender-coded language creeps into discussion of the music even when people are scrupulously avoiding doing so with respect to the artist herself.

Ronan is spot-on with his reference to Cassy and the seemingly gender-coded descriptions of her music. This happens with Cooly G as well, and the critical reception of Cooly G reminds me intensely of the critical reception of Cassy (also their respective styles share some similarities).

Just as interestingly, certain female artists making comparable music don't receive that treatment to the same extent. e.g. with Dinky you see it a little bit but never to the same extent as Cassy. I'm not sure whether it's because Cassy occasionally uses vocals, or because she put herself on the cover of her mix-cd, or because she has a more conventionally feminine appearance, or because there's something in the music that encourages people to reach for gender-coded language.

well, there were a few on that thread who seemed to just want to bait kate

xps

Possibly with Cassy and Cooly G it's a case of gender times race.

hmm idk

http://www.electronicmusic.pl/upload/669754379.jpg

<3 dinky - dj mencap you should check out this album, esp 'burdelia', and her get lost mix - but cassy's more high profile and more distinctive. people don't talk about dinky's gender as much b/c they don't talk about dinky as much.

and dinky also uses vocals occasionally - 'acid in my fridge', 'fademein'...

Is anyone repping for Chloe on this thread? If so, I will. Both her album and her RA mix got very heavy rotation round my house.

chloé is AMAZING, that album!!!!

always felt a bit queasy when people wrote about cassy's "pregnant" vocals

everyone around here loved that gudrun gut record from a year (or two?) ago, i should play that again.

multiple xpost - Yeah but that album cover was relatively recent (in my head at least - I've disengaged from post-minimal in the last 12 months).

I think at the point when my Dinky obsession was at its highest (circa the Tapping EP) she had a higher profile than Cassy, though Cassy has surpassed her now - arguably partly because of the discourse which makes her seem like a liminal "individual" type whereas Dinky is treated more like one of the Cadenza/Vakant/etc. gang. (i'd say the two producers are about as distinct/individual as one another).

It's not like Dinky's music is less "feminine" (lesser amount of female vocals aside) - if someone wanted to go there it'd be easy to write a (insert whatever the opposite of "phallic" is again in here, i've forgotten) manifesto about "Horizontal".

what about (the other) MIA?

I meant to say on the other thread too that the idea male artists aren't dismissed for representing some sort of plastic prefab of their gender is ludicrous. I mean Oasis or someone to name just one?

The diff is that female artists seem more the victim of this process than the instigator, usually. EG Oasis are prob delighted and in fact revel in the "real blokes music" tag.

For better or worse, music is just a tiny part of a larger world and I think it's much more common to see a female artist's gender itself used as a unique selling point. It's obviously deeper than that and as with any successful artist, there are a number of themes at work in the way they're sold/told to us by record companies/the press, but there's something v formulaic about the branding of Little Boots etc...

I mean, I've lost count of the amount of times I've read about acts like her in the Guardian, it's incessant. And the tone always feels the same.

Criticising this stuff prob has v little to do with the artists themselves or their personalities/intentions, but even still I think it's okay and probably quite normal for people to be turned off by music that comes as a very well wrapped product.

x-post lol@ "pregnant vocals." isn't half the problem the fact that most techno writers are single dudes used to ranting about how militant and dark whatever music is and then they're all "oh cassy ur musics are so beautiful i luv u"

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_D2T_lLyEIQg/RgrSxEf0ktI/AAAAAAAAACc/8C9d0D4Sxpw/s320/MIA+COVER.jpg

^^also a great album - don't know what she's done recently. plus her sweet november ep from years and years ago was really great.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cMdbfkl3Rz4/SYfLPSim7HI/AAAAAAAAEeQ/BSezRj8kyog/s800/flower.jpg

But yeah, as far as I'm aware there is none of that gender-coded language in the discourse around, say, Anja Schneider. By which I mean a sort of mild condescension even when the praise is sincere. I'm not even sure there is around, say, Karin Dreijer Andersson, who admittedly is something of a special case.