Women in electronic/dance music

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.

MIA - bittersüss

Haha, MIA was the other name I was reaching for in my last post.

That's cos nobody is talking about Anja Schneider of late, she's more a constant than an iconic sort of star.

As for Dreijer, I think her music prohibits that kind of language. Part of the problem with Cassy (or whoever else) is that people are bad at describing whatever skills DJs/producers have anyway. It's not easy.

And people do use the same old masculine clichés to describe men too.

every time i open this thread i think: grace jones

or, like, missy elliot

Re Anja Schneider - I have seen some people dismissing her work as the product of her various co-producers. Which is odd because her stuff rarely sounds anything like the work of her co-producers.

But yeah Schneider's a good example of how female artists can avoid the over-genderising fate by immersing themselves really heavily into a broader context. In her case, it's the "aesthetic" of Mobilee, which she runs. MIA did this as well with her label (at least up until that album cover! Lex is 100% right about Sweet November btw). Compare/contrast with Ada, who was never "just another Areal producer", for pretty obvious reasons I think.

BTW I'm glad you like the Royal P track Steve. More people should get on that.

Is Schneider no longer involved in running Mobilee these days? I think that's been the case for a while.

Oh okay. I think her profile's a bit lower now anyway now that Mobilee isn't the hot label. That's one downside of being too heavily associated with a particular label.

i'm on the royal p track! it's incredible. i still think you're overly suspicious of cooly g though tim. seriously, her set last week was one of the best i've ever heard, in any genre.

ellen allien got a lot of the "so her boyfriend produced it?" remarks earlier on in her career...

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?

is it a thing among the female DJ/producers that they want to be more visible/facey? they all seem to appear on their own album covers unlike Gui Boratto, The Field or whoever, as if this was part of a statement.

a few examples that maybe haven't been brought up:

Monika Kruse (high underrated producer and DJ)
Norma Jean Bell (definitely works with KDJ a lot, but has produced her own stuff forever, too)
Magda (who is a fucking great live DJ, whatever happened to her)
DJ Heather (whom I know absolutely nothing about, OM is mostly garbage imho)

also, i don't really think of Cassy's music as particularly feminine. i mean, if one strips the vocals out, most of her tracks are pretty unidentifiable in terms of gender... it is just that her voice is so sultry and great.

with Dreijer it was funny because on hearing the Fever Ray LP some people were like 'so what does Olof do then?'

yeah the royal p track is good

also on the UK side of things is mary anne hobbes

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.