June 8, 2015 • 44 mins
Whether playing the theremin or crafting soundscapes for your favorite TV shows, women have shaped the electronic music industry from the beginning. Cristen and Caroline examine the role of these synth pioneers and women's place in today's billion-dollar electronic scene.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you from houstu works
dot com. Hello, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristen, and today we're talking about women in
electronic music. And it was super difficult to clip these
notes together and sort of come up with talking points
(00:25):
because this is not exactly like a one and done topic.
Women have been involved in electronic music from the get go,
so way back in the nineteenth century, all the way
up through today as DJs, as composers, as people who
are building and constructing instruments and devices that make all
(00:45):
of those fabulous beeps and boops that you hear, and
electronic music to totally sound like a nube. Um. But yeah,
So this is Women in Music Week, and we're super
excited to get started talking about something that frankly, I
personally only didn't have a lot of familiarity with before
we started looking into it. I am much more of
like a an Otis reading channel on Spotify person than
(01:10):
an electronic music person, but more a luddite music fan.
Yeah yeah, but I mean even then, electronic music infiltrates
so many different types of music that it's hard to
pin it down as just one thing, and I want
to go ahead and offer our disclaimer to our listeners
that there's so much great information out there that we
couldn't hit at all. I mean, we're we're definitely trying
(01:32):
to focus on the pioneers women in electronic music who
were really blazing a trail in addition to some of
the gender issues that are being talked about today. And so,
without further ado, let's jump into what electronic music is
for people who are like, I'm not sure, well, that
is what it sounds like. It's music created with electronic equipment,
(01:52):
things like computeurs and synthesizers, right, And so you might
think and you might dismiss electronic music as being something
that's like, that's not real music. There's nothing to it.
You just hit some dials on a synthesizer. But that's
an attitude that Bork, who's a pretty mainstream electronic artist
at this point, took issue with back in in an interview.
(02:15):
She said, I find it so amazing when people tell
me that electronic music has not got soul and they
blame the computers. They get their finger and they point
at the computers like there's no soul here, and it's like,
you can't blame the computer. If there's not soul in
the music, it's because nobody put it there and it's
not the tools fault. And so it's interesting to see
how as electronic music has evolved from way back in
(02:38):
the nineteenth century to today, how people have tried to
sort of create music that is free of the traditional constraints,
whether of the instrumentation itself or just the way we
think about music in general. Well, speaking of constraints, though,
when we look at electronic music today and how it's critiqued, uh,
(02:59):
women are still a lot of times put in boxes,
Oh you're a female DJ, or you're a female electronic
music artist. And Molly Wells of Funerals takes issue with this,
saying woman is not a genre. Stop acting like we're
a passing fad. And I don't know if Molly Wells
would hear us talking about the history of women in
electronic music and say the same thing all over again.
(03:21):
But we are hopefully going to back up her statement
that hey, we're not some specialty act. We've been here
the whole time. So let's give you some quick origins
of electronic music and where it came from um. It
goes back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
You have some pretty smart folks, people like Herman von
Helmholtz and Ferruccio Bossoni, who start publishing books encouraging people
(03:45):
to explore the science of sound and the possibility of
creating new tones altogether. Others take this idea and a
passion for music and sound and start creating some pretty
crazy instruments. So in seven, for instance, you have Thaddius
Kate Hill who patents the tell Harmonium also known as
(04:05):
the Dynamo phone, which was the first significant electronic music instrument,
and he didn't complete it until nine seven. And this
scene was massive. It weighed two d tons, measured sixty
ft long, and it was a thirty six note per
octive keyboard and was a type of additive synthesizer, likely
(04:28):
a term coined by Kate Hill. So this guy was
pretty much a genius. And you could only hear it
though by sending the voltage output over the telephone network
to paying subscribers. And I mean when I say this
thing is massive, it was. It looked like one of
a huge organ on steroids, like a robot organ taking
over a room and for all of that size, Yeah,
(04:52):
it could make a little bit of music. But yeah,
you had to be one of the cool early adopter
insiders who knew when to pick up the phone. I
guess to listen to it, and then I mean, who
has the time? What are you doing when you're sitting
there listening to it, Like you've got to sit on
the phone. Well, it's well, I guess by this point,
what nineteen seven? What else are you gonna do? That? Right?
It's true. Well, in nineteen nineteen c I, a Nemesis
(05:15):
and Soviet spy Leon Thereman invents the harp the theremin,
which is basically a box with two antenna and you
wave your hands next to them to control pitch and volume,
and he ended up patenting it. In my first Thereman experience,
I saw somebody performing it and was like, what it's
it's black magic magic um. But also during this time
(05:41):
of development and experimentation in the nineteen twenties, you've got
your major who develops the sporophone, which could deliver microtonal
and quarter tone scales. Basically, he wanted to liberate music
from its fixed scale on the piano. And during this
time you know, a lot of people are responding to
cultural shifts. It's not surprising that when things happen in
(06:04):
society and in culture, people in the arts will respond
to it. And so if you look to Russia after
the Bolshevik Revolution, there were radical new types of music
and electronic instruments emerging as part of this utopian movement
inspired by futurism and anarchistic ideas. You've just basically got
a lot of people around this time being like done
(06:25):
with the charity of the piano and hooray for scientific culture.
But not everybody was on board with this newfangled electronic
music in the nineteen thirties. For instance, the Nazis were
initially like, yeah, thumbs up electronic music, but then they
labeled it experimental and thought electronic music was degenerate and
(06:48):
un German. And meanwhile, the Bolsheviks started killing the anarchists.
So I mean, actually, that kind of makes electronic music
a lot cooler if the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were
against it, if they were like totally for electronic music,
I might feel a little more conflicted about beets and boops, right,
(07:12):
all your beats and boops, well beyond just the political
speed bumps that electronic music hit. There was also sort
of the global shrug of people wanting instruments that could
simulate the sound of regular instruments. Yeah, that's a fun
of playing a keyboard today. Yeah, like I can't play
the bassoon. Oh wait, yes, I can, honk. I know,
(07:33):
Kristen's constantly walking around in here with her bassoon key tar,
just like hitting notes. It's getting really old. Um. But
if we jump forward to the nineteen sixties and seventies,
this is the Space Age. This is the Cold War,
serious interest starts redeveloping in electronic music. This is also
the era where we start getting a lot of electronic
(07:54):
music studios. I mean, how else, Kristen, are you going
to make all of the laser guns sounds that accompany
all of your Space Age movies? Well, a lot of
that technology, Caroline. The Space Age stuff is thanks to
links between electronic music equipment and equipment developed for military purposes,
(08:17):
and so you have things like broadcast radio amplification and
recording technology vocoders, which is a combo of voice encoding
and encryption technology that would end up in early hip hop.
So that's laying the groundwork for these kinds of instruments
being developed in the sixties and seventies, and also a
(08:38):
reason why women might not have been as visible or
participatory in building these earliest instruments. Yeah, that's one thing
that I found in all of this research was that
there's so many guys out there building and constructing and
inventing these electronic do deads, but not as many women.
They tended to be more performers. What if you look
(09:00):
at eighteen fifty two at eight A. Lovelace, she of
first computer programmer fame. She did note that Charles Babbage's
analytical engine might actually be able to compose some sort
of elaborate or scientific piece of music. So the idea
was there, she just wasn't the one implementing it. Yeah,
and she kicks off fantastic timeline of women in electronic
(09:24):
music over at the Vinyl Factory and is followed up
in seven by Dot Deal Corn, who was half of
Get This, a Victorian electro musical act, and was likely
the earliest professional female performer of an electrical musical instrument
in the UK. And she performed this song while in
(09:48):
tux in a top hat by the way, called Clickity Clack,
which featured electric castanets and clickity Clack is about as
musically complex as a song called clickity Clack. You know,
it sounds like so not exactly what we would consider
cutting edge and electronic music today, but back then, having
(10:10):
electrified castanettes playing along as you plunked on the on
the keys on your piano, it's pretty new wave. Yeah
so dot was super new wave, but not perhabs as
new wave as Thereman superstar Clara Rockmore, who came about
in the early nineteen thirties, and she was a classically
(10:32):
trained Lithuanian musician with perfect pitch and perhaps the world's
first electronic music star. Yeah so Rockmore picked up The
Thereman after a health condition made it hard for her
to continue playing the violin, and she even came up
with a specific finger technique to play the instrument more precisely.
(10:54):
And if you look at pictures of her, she looks
so sublime, just like like she's holding her arms up
like what am I going to make for dinner? To me,
she looks a little bit like more Tisha from the
Adams Family with an updoe playing the Thereman. She's very otherworldly. Yeah,
the thing is she's picking up this instrument not too
(11:16):
long after Leon Thereman himself patented it, and she kind
of became his muse during this time. She so impressed
him with her abilities and her technique that he ended
up giving her an r C a model Thereman as
a gift, and she even inspired him and turned to
improve the design. And you know, she's so talented and
(11:37):
so more tisha that he can't help himself but be spitten,
and so he does propose marriage, I believe more than once,
and she declined. She ended up marrying some other guy,
but they stayed super close for the rest of their lives,
even after you know, he got like taken out of
the country and then came back and taken out again.
But whatever, And it's great to get Rockmore's perspective on
(11:58):
the instrument and playing it. In a seven interview with
synthesizer pioneer Bob Mogue, she talks about electronic instruments and
she says that people think of them as something that
are new, eerie, strange, ugly, strident sounds. She says, now
that is completely the opposite of my approach. I am
a violinist and a musician. I wanted to see if
(12:20):
it were possible to use the theorem and to make
real music. Bach couldn't write for the theremin when he
was alive, but there's no reason why I can't play
back on the Theoremin today. And I think it's awesome
that she uses the example of Bach, because Bach will
resurface in our electronic music conversation a little bit later.
But the Theoremin actually sort of realizes those early scientific
(12:44):
men's desires to free themselves from the tyranny of the piano.
As rock Moore puts it, there is a certain terrific freedom.
You feel like a conductor in front of an orchestra.
There is no instrument between you and the music. Well,
and speaking of the music, moving on in our timeline,
in ninety eight, Joanna Buyer becomes the first woman to
(13:06):
compose a work scored for electronic instruments. Is called The
Music of the Spheres, and it's very avant garde. That's
the thing with a lot of this early electronic music.
Listening to it, it's either avant garde, as I just said,
or very sci fi sounding. Yeah, lots of like there
(13:29):
should be aliens. Yeah, speaking of which six yeah, BB Baron,
along with her husband Lewis, created the first electronic film score,
four Forbidden Planet, and this sort of starts. This Forbidden
Planets score kind of is one of the very first
dominoes to fall in the pre modern electronic music era,
(13:52):
because in we get electronic heavy hitter Daphne Orham, who
co founds the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, becoming the first woman
to direct an electronic music studio. She was also among
the first to experiment with musique concrete, or basically the
technique of recording raw sounds on the environment and using
that as material to then create electronic music with so
(14:16):
using a key at you know, scraping against metal as
sort of sound effect, and then weaving that into your composition.
And so a year later, in nine nine, or Hum
becomes the first woman to set up a personal studio,
the Aoramic Studio for electronic composition. There she creates basically
electronic background music for theater, radio, TV, short films, and
(14:40):
even exhibits things that we would call sonic environments. And
she eventually did compose electronic pieces for feature films, concerts
and even a ballet. And it's notable to see what
sparked her interests. When she was a kid, she played piano,
so there you have that. But her electrical engineer brother
also helped her to build radio transmitters and receivers, and
(15:02):
you put that together and you have her getting her
start as a BBC music balancer and studio engineer, a
job that only open to women when men left to
fight in World War Two. And when she gets there,
she starts experimenting with synthetic sound in after becoming interested
into cathode ray oceloscope, which was used to display the
(15:24):
characteristics of sound waves graphically. And genius that Daphne is,
she thinks, huh, I wonder if I can reverse this
process and she figures it out. In nineteen sixty two,
she becomes the first one to design and build an
electronic music instrument with help called the Aeramic System, And
(15:45):
essentially it's an early sequencer, so it was a machine
that interpreted the composers drawn musical instructions. So shape was
used to tell the machine how things like pitch, vibrato,
and volume come out. So she did it. She reversed
the oscilloscope. But this, of course was after when she
was younger, she had asked someone at the studio like, hey,
(16:07):
if I do this in reverse, will it read when
I what I'm doing? And I imagine she trailed off
as she got a blank stare from the man, who
then just said no, and the source that we're reading
was like, well yeah, or I'm just took that as
a challenge and was like, okay, fine, well I'm smarter
than you, so I'm gonna do this. Um. But in
nineteen sixty three, her contemporary composer and arrangement Delia Derbyshire,
(16:31):
who's basically like a cult star of early electronic music,
was also working in the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, creates the
theme for Dr Who, one of the first theme songs
to be produced totally electronically. And so she takes this
guy Rob Grayner's score that he had written to become
(16:51):
the theme song, and without the aid of synthesizers, just
using oscillators and other little bits and Bob's of what
eventually would be part an actual synthesizer, creates this incredible
almost sonic experience, and Grainer when he heard it was like,
did I did I write that? And She's like, well, no,
(17:13):
not really, I did half of it, and so you
owe me half of the royalties for this theme song,
which she was denied. Yeah, that was part of the
Radiophonic Workshops rules where really only the main composer got
any royalties to which hardcore Doctor Who fans today cry fowl,
Doctor Who fans love Delia Derbyshire. And she also, though
(17:36):
not surprisingly, had a background much like Daphne Orham in
music and math from college, and she went on to
have an incredibly full and creative career, even working with
Paul McCartney. And she was also in demand among bands
who were interested in synthesizers. And just quickly I wanted
to note that while she was working with BBC's Radiophonic Workshop,
(17:59):
there was this uh soundscape that she did for a
documentary that took place in the Sahara Desert, and she
used this green lamp shade that when she struck it
made a pure frequency. She used it and then broke
down the various sounds from it and then rebuilt them
(18:19):
to create the background for these camels running through the desert,
and that green lamp shade is now really an icon
in the history of electronic music, listed, for instance, in
the BBC's for sound effects that made TV history. Whenever
you read about Delia Derbyshire, you always read about that
(18:42):
green lamp shade. Yeah, and she also talks about how
she used her own voice, essentially breaking it down into
parts for the sound effect of the camels running their hooves.
And so I mean she that that documentary is totally
cited as a huge moment in electronic music. But a
game changer in all of this is Wendy Carlos. She's
(19:03):
a composer and instrument builder and a reluctant performer. She's
way more into the hole behind the scenes creation aspect,
and her Switched On Bach album, which was released in
nineteen is basically seen as the turning point where electronic
music becomes a thing and the mainstream takes notice. Yeah,
(19:24):
it went platinum and won three Grammys in nineteen seventy,
and so not only is electronic music getting this mainstream
recognition for the first time, it also encourages a lot
of other people to start creating music with synthesizers, and
Switched On Bach is essentially a reimagining of Bach using
(19:45):
a Moge synthesizer, because after all, she had helped Moge
develop it and was an early adopter. But when you
talked to Wendy Carlos about this, she's a little i
rolly about it. She says, quote listeners thought of a
synthesizer itself, the Moge synthesizer was a real musical instrument,
when all it really was was just a collection of
(20:07):
fairly limited sounds extrapolated from what had been available in
the fifties, put together in one extremely nice package with
a nice consistent interface and a keyboard that could supply
voltages and trigger so you could play notes. But you
still used it Wendy to create this hit record. Well,
I love that, she and she so she gives this
(20:28):
entire description that sounds like holy crap, that's a lot
of stuff. But she's like, and that was about it.
Because she goes on to say like she she hates
being almost pigeonholed as just the switched on Bach person,
like that's just the lady who did switched on box.
She's like, I don't ask you about things that you
did in the seventies, Like I've grown and changed since then.
You can't just put me into a box box. But
(20:51):
she basically was saying like, yes, I used it, and
I did something new with it and different with it
in terms of the moge synthesizer. But she's like, that's
just because that's what was there at the time. If
there had been something more advanced, I would have used that,
but I kind of used it was available to me.
And she should know. I mean, this woman has a
background in both physics and music, which is a theme
(21:12):
and just about everybody we've looked at so far. She
talks about how she actually did try to go into
physics first, but her grades kind of weren't up to snuff,
and she says, part of my whole personality is really
much more that of a person who would work in
the sciences. I don't find very much disparity between the
sciences and music. And so this, this whole field, this
(21:32):
career that she ended up with is just a continuation
of how when she was a kid she kind of
grew up tinkering with things and inventing things and putting
things together, and that grew into this amazing, like genius
career as an electronic composer and inventor that we see today.
And if you haven't heard Switched on Bach, maybe you've
(21:53):
seen Clockwork Orange the nineteen seventy one Kubrick film that
haunted my high school experience, and the soundtrack, which Carlos composed,
adds so much to that film, Like you take the
two apart, and it's not as eerie and as powerful
(22:13):
of a film as it is in The New York
Times at the time hailed it as a giant step
past the binalities of most contemporary film tracks. And then
in two she also did the score for Tron People.
I mean, she's like, she's got a lot of stuff
out there beyond just the switched on box stuff that
people really kind of culturally identify with. And another thing
(22:35):
that makes her such a fascinating character is that in
nine she came out as trans and she had been
living as a woman since ten years before that. Um,
but she gave this fascinating Playboy interview which is such
an interesting time capsule about how people used to think
and talk about trans people. But when Carlos, like, in
(22:58):
that interview, she says things that were so familiar with
nowadays in terms of I wish people would say trans
or transgender instead of transsexual. And then the whole idea
of listen, I've always known I was a girl that
I was a woman, and it just took other people
a minute to catch up. Yeah. At one point the
interviewer asks her about the operation. Yea. At one point
(23:19):
the interview asked her about whether she had any castration
fear going into her operation, and she was enraged by
the suggestion of that. She was like, no, this wasn't
a removal, this was a corrective surgery for me. Um.
But she was also though followed by other prominent women
(23:41):
in electronic music, like a Peacock who was big on
synthesized vocals, Ellion Radigue who used synthesizers to create meditative
sounds so nice, and then Susan Siani who supplied sound
effects for Star Wars. What. Yes, a lot of women,
uh are working in this whole film scoring industry. People
(24:03):
are creating lots of incredible sound effects and scores that
you're probably familiar with. Um. You also have people like
Laurie Spiegel, who created an algorithmic composition software from mac
Atari and Amiga, and Lori Anderson, who is a composer
and performer and who also built her own instruments. She
(24:23):
ended up having hits in the nineteen eighties, became lou
Reid's wife. Um, but it's it's incredible to realize that
we just haven't as people who are kind of outside
the electronic music realm, we just aren't exposed to these
incredible women in their contributions to music, to electronica, to soundtracks.
(24:45):
But there's so many names out there, and I just
wish that we had more time to talk about them. Well,
now that we have offered at least a brief history
of women in electronic music, let's fast forward and look
at women in electron music today, because the landscape has
definitely changed, but some things remain the same. Yeah, So
(25:07):
today's electronic music industry is huge. This is coming from
an April Billboard article that said that the electronic music
industry just in North America is worth about one point
nine billion dollars. Globally it's about six point two billion.
And they were talking about a report that analyzed revenue
from things like music sales and streaming from festivals and
(25:28):
clubs and things like that, and apparently dance track sales
hit and all time high. So where are the women
and all that? What's what's the equation? Well, when it
comes to live performances like if you go to, for instance,
Tomorrow World, you aren't going to see a ton of
women on stage. Female Pressure that we mentioned at the
(25:51):
top of the podcast, looked into women's representation and survey
twenty one music labels and forty three festivals, which admittedly
small sample size, but they found that women represented just
five and eight point four percent of artists, respectively. And
then even if you include though mixed male female groups,
(26:12):
the numbers don't change all that much. In fact, the
number of festival acts drops to seven point seven And
so when you look at sort of the role that
women playing electronic music today and and their visibility and
their participation um. The general theme that we found in
researching and reading blogs and and post like post talking
(26:35):
about this issue, the general themes tends to be that, yes,
we need more women participating, we need more visibility for women,
we want to hear more from women. Um. But also,
don't just focus on my gender, focus on the fact
that I'm an incredibly talented person who's been working hard
at this career for a long time. And we looked
(26:57):
at Pink Noises um Tera Rodgers, which is both a
book and a blog, and Rogers mentions the scholarship that's
been done around the topic of women in electronic music.
But she really takes issue with how so much of
it quote gives the impression that women are rarely present
in DJ, electronic music, and sound art cultures, that they
(27:18):
have not made significant contributions to these fields to the
extent that men have, or that gender categories ultimately pose
restrictions on professional survival. So basically, looking yes, looking deeper
into the gender issue of the music industry today, that's
a good thing, but just out of the gate, assuming
that women aren't present, that's not great. That that's sort
(27:39):
of an image that needs to be corrected. Well, it's
notable too that when it comes to seeking visibility, as
Melissa Fong wrote about over Ricochet, DJs are essentially gender neutral.
I mean you can have a gender neutral DJ name
you're using technology, So I mean we should have gender
neutral levels of accessibility as well. So she wonders why
(28:03):
more women aren't getting into particularly electronic music production. So
even as the question of is this the problem of
participation or visibility or are women avoiding it or simply
not seeking to be described as female? Because as well
talk about a little bit more in a minute. There
are some female DJs who intentionally go by gender neutral,
(28:26):
even masculine names, because they're like, I don't want to
be called a female DJ. Don't put me in your
lady's night lineup. Yeah, I mean, that's that's definitely part
of the issue. I mean, um, there are a lot
of women out there, but in terms of the people
who are working on their music in front of an audience,
(28:47):
perhaps some women are concealing their identities because they don't
want to be defined totally by their gender, or to
face exploitation, harassment, to be treated as different, to be asked, hey,
can you dj and address us and heels, or like
what's it like to be a woman? You know, things
like that. A lot of women right to the Huffington's post,
(29:07):
for instance, about the term female DJ, and one of
those women, Jack Novak, says, I don't want to be
singled out as a woman. I want to be rewarded
on my own merit. Yeah. Annie Max similarly wrote a
whole thing for Vice after being enraged at a series
of questions that a reporter was asking her, including things like,
(29:27):
was how were you able to DJ while pregnant? What's
it like being a female DJ, do you experience sexism
all the time, essentially making her gender the focus and
not her music, And she said she's sick of being
asked about all of these women things. And also when
the reporter finally asked her a relevant question, asked her
to recommend some other electronic musicians she's into, she recommended
(29:51):
female artists and the response was, oh, well, are you
just supporting women? It's like, no, no, can we just
please make this about the music? Although Christie Schaefer of
Hideous Men is a little bit conflicting on the whole thing, yeah,
because she says, on the one hand, women should get
recognition for overcoming gender based restrictions really in any profession,
(30:14):
but she says constantly pointing it out can be mothering. Plus,
she says, listen, we don't use our genitals to play
our synthesizers, but could you? That really made me think,
because you could, you could. But but I think maybe
Shaffer doesn't evolve sizer. Oh my god, I love them on.
I have some ideas about what that could be, but
(30:36):
it is. I mean, some do find it problematic though,
when you have the what would that be called kind
of the vanity plate dj like when Lindsay Lohan got
into djaying there for a minute that some think only
amplifies these stereotypes about women DJs being fake or they're
just up there to look hot, like they're just they're
(30:59):
just put she play on a playlist, they're not doing
the real work. Well, honestly, there are plenty of guy
DJs who are just pressing a button. But Caroline, they're
real d j's. Come on, They're not playing any vulva
sizers up there. I wish, um, But there are a
lot of complaints that people like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton,
(31:20):
for instance, who's like, I guess she's out of things
to do, so she's decided to pick up deejaying. But yeah,
but there are a lot of complaints, uh, from people
who are working hard at this every day as their
professional about people like Lindsay Lohan or people like Paris
Hilton who kind of do come in and just press
a button to get the publicity to maybe get money
out of making a club appearance. Um. And so that
(31:43):
one negative aspect ends up reflecting pretty poorly on women
who have been hard working in the industry all along,
and they end up getting belittled or mocked, especially when
it comes to appearance about you know, oh, well you're
wearing a dress, so you're just trying to be sexy
or you're not sexy enough. It's like, as we see
in so many different industries, the whole looks thing comes
into play all the time too. Well, And there was
(32:06):
that whole kerfuffle over DJ Nina Kravitz who had a
documentary film crew following her around on tour and at
one point she doesn't interview both in a bikini, and
then at one point she doesn't interview in a bubble bath,
and people were like, WHOA, stop being so sexy, we
don't like this. And then she said, hey, it's my body.
(32:27):
I can do what I want with it. Stopped being
so sexist, And honestly, it just made me want to
go to your Spotify, your otis otis writing Spotify playlist
and have a little leadite moment. Yeah, it is sort
of like, hey, can we come out of the weeds
for a minute. I mean I agreed to an extent
with some of these DJs who are saying, can we
(32:49):
just stop asking women about being women and then talking
about what's sexist? Or what's feminist and just focus on
the work, because on the one hand, like, yes, no,
I do want to ask you about being a woman,
because the average your average music consumer doesn't know that
much about electronic music or like what goes into it
(33:10):
or the history of it. I mean, so people it's
natural that they're curious about being a woman in especially
like in techno or in you know, fields of electronic
music that are so sort of overrun by that BROWI
sort of just like white guy image and so yes,
like I would be curious about it. But on the
(33:31):
other hand, you do kind of want to encourage people
to move past just focusing on gender and saying let's
let's talk about your music. Well, why don't we move
past gender to talk about the queering of music, because
this was an interesting theme to emerge in what we
were reading as well, where you do have some like
(33:52):
E d M artists and DJs who are intentionally confronting well,
gender identity, yes, and sexuality through music. Yeah, And I
mean it's hardly a stretch to view electronic tools and
instruments as a queering of music. This is all the
way back to the late nineteenth early twentieth centuries when
(34:13):
people are like, I am so sick of the piano.
I want to create spaces in between those notes and
tones where I can create something special. Um And so
along those lines, Electronic Beats Magazine in profiled three acts
in particular who they said, we're challenging traditional power structures
through this most unlikely of musical forms, and we're connecting
(34:37):
the more fability of sound synthesis with thoughts on the
fluidity of gender identity. And so one of the people
they talked to was Jam a k A. Janine Rostrun
a k A. Planning to Rock, who's a gender neutral
artist with tracks that include Patriarchy Over and Out, Misogyny,
Dropped Dead, and the queer disco track Let's Talk About
(35:01):
Gender Baby, which is now the official soundtrack of Sminty
I just decided. But Planning to Rock really plays with
their voice. They're not trying to sound like a man necessarily,
but instead using their voice as an instrument, just like
the rest of the sounds that come into play in
their music and their attitude and this interview is basically like,
(35:22):
this is a great time. This is a great time
to be a human, let alone an electronic musician playing
with gender because they said changes in the air. You've
got more female journalists who are finding their voice and planning.
Dra goes on to say that they're super excited about
issues of intersectionality and gender fluidity finding their way into
(35:42):
more mainstream media and taking it back a step from
today to the origins of where this intersection between gender
identity and electronic music was really coming from. Electronic Beats
also talked to Terry Fameless, a k a. D J Sprinkles,
who Fact Magazine described as a deep house idle, queer theorist,
(36:04):
media manipulator, and seasoned contrarian, which is a fantastic description.
Um and DJ Sprinkles came out as trans in the eighties,
which was a period quote when disco and dance music
were still explicitly hot wired to queer culture, and Sprinkles
feels that house music's queer roots have been cleansed with
(36:27):
its main streaming, so that helps you know, connect the
dots as to why there might be this renewed interest
today in reclaiming those kinds of roots and really playing
around with identity as it relates to music. And this
is something also echoed by The Knife, a k a
Swedish siblings Olof Drajer and Karen Drejer Anderson, who are
(36:49):
committed to challenging gender and power norms and applying feminist,
queer and academic theories to real life. Which who knew
that electronic music could be that loaded? But yes, indeed
it is. Yeah, And of course, you know, we we
haven't talked about. We mentioned very briefly how some of
(37:09):
the instrumentation that was developed as military uh technology which
was then used in early hip hop. We touched on that,
but we haven't even had the time to dig into
queer culture, nor have we really had the time to
dig into where the women and other people of color
are in this conversation. And that's something that Zell McCarthy
(37:31):
at Vice pointed out in an article in March of
and he really lamented one the lack of women in
the dance music industry and to the positioning of women
and color, women of color as objects to look at
rather than as DJs to listen to. And he cites
people like Diplo whose videos feature the rear ends of
(37:52):
many a woman, usually women of color, and so from
there he kind of branches off. McCarthy does into talking
about this issue that we see in a lot of
industries that whoever the gatekeeper is to sort of allowing
new people to surface, the people they let through a
lot of times tend to look like themselves. And so
(38:15):
when you have club owners, promoters, or even popular publications,
they might not be consciously sexist or racist, but if
they're promoting their friends or people that they're familiar with,
you sort of get that in group effect where everybody
ends up looking like those gatekeepers or those tastemakers. McCarthy
even cited a talent buyer who said that one club
(38:37):
wouldn't book an act because the women weren't hot enough,
And that can be a big deal obviously, because if
you're not getting booked, then you're not getting the money.
And there's so much money, particularly right now in E
d M. And so if those people who look or
sound different aren't getting past the gate, then there are
fewer opportunities open to them. And yeah, I mean a
(38:59):
lot of this does go back to the money. But
McCarthy kind of pulls us back and says, but wait,
we can't forget what he says the essence of what
dance music is and should be, because yeah, Okay, it's
all about the money, yes, yes, But remember dance music
as we know it was originated by black, Latino and
(39:20):
queer artists who wanted to create safe spaces for people
disenfranchised by mainstream society. So I mean, who not that
way anymore? It seems like in a lot of ways,
I mean McCarthy also praises the d M community, like
the people in the audience, for being very like open
(39:42):
and accepting and very fluid with gender and sexuality and
all these kinds of things. Um, But on the industry side,
it does seem like the more mainstream that you get,
the more that door starts to close. So, Kristen, we
have now gone from the nineteenth century through to the
(40:02):
raves to today people who are out there crafting incredible
music that serves as a commentary on gender identity. I mean,
that's way far removed from them from the dynamic phone
it was two hundred tons. But what's not different and
what I love and I hope I don't sound too
cheesy for saying this, is that the common thread of
(40:26):
wanting to use this electronic music and technology and sounds
to throw off sort of the tyranny of the traditional
way that society operates through, that music operates through, that
sound operates. That's the common thing is that whether you're
saying I want to challenge the patriarchy or gender norms,
(40:48):
or whether you're saying I want to challenge the way
that sounds are created, it's all coming from this beautiful,
like scientific uh, just desire to yate and create beautiful differences. Well,
I think it's time now to hear from listeners. Do
we have any electronic music fans in our audience? Are
(41:09):
there any theoreman players? I really was just I am
so so enthralled by the theorem and right now, um,
let us know all of your thoughts. Any DJs listening,
do you ever confront this kind of stuff? Because really
we touched on so many different things. So whatever sparked
your interest, let us know. Moms Stuff at house stuff
works dot Com is our email address. You can also
(41:30):
tweet us at mom stuff podcasts, or messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now. So I've got a Facebook message here
from David and I wanted to share this because sometimes
we hear from fellas who are like, hey, we never
hear from the fellas who right in. So David, you're
(41:54):
a fella and this is what you have to say,
David Rights. I'm currently listening to your social justice or
yours episode, and I thought i'd let you know that
I'm super glad I found your podcast recently. I'm a
Christian who is white, upper class, this gender, heterosexual, and mail.
I love how balanced and neutral you are in your discussions,
and I find it very helpful to think about how
(42:15):
things are for those who aren't given the same opportunities
as I've been. Well, I don't know if I'll ever
be able to remove all of my biases. Your podcast
definitely helps me remove some of them, So thanks, he says. Ps.
I've just graduated as a nurse and would love it
if you did an episode on the nursing profession as
a whole, or if you wanted to go a bit
(42:35):
more in depth. Males in Nursing would make for a
great episode, And I sent David a link to our
nursing podcast because friends, we have done it and you
can find it over at stuff Mom Never Told You
dot com. So thanks, David. Well, I have a Facebook
message here from Becca about our sci Fi episode. She says,
I got really excited this week on my drive to
(42:56):
work when I started listening to your science fiction podcast.
As I type, I'm sitting in my pajamas with a
cup of coffee, watching Battlestar Galactica, researching time travel and
making notes on the storytelling and characters from my own
sci fi novel. Well, I do want a very real
science background to what I'm writing. I hadn't even thought
about the social impact that a hopefully one day successful
(43:17):
sci fi novel could have. Then I remembered The Time
Machine by H. G. Wells that I have only recently
just read. A writer friend of mine and I were
discussing the fact that it seemed more like a social
commentary than science fiction. It reinforced everything you were saying.
The point I'm trying to make is that it has
influenced how I want to write and the ideas that
I want to get across to the reader. Even more
(43:40):
than that, I'm twenty six weeks pregnant with a little
girl whose name will be Aria after Arias Stark, a
strong female character, and I want to make my own
small change that will make a difference to the world.
She will grow up in I'm still working and developing
my story and plan to do a lot of writing
on maternity leave, but thanks to you, there will be
something more that wasn't there before. Again, thanks for all
(44:01):
your efforts, and if one day I'm lucky enough to
have this story published, I would love to point out
your influence well. Thank you, Becca, and thanks to everybody
who's written into us. Mom step at house Stepworks dot
Com is our email address and for links to all
of our social media as well as all of our blogs,
videos and podcasts, including this one. So you can read
up on the fascinating history of women in electronic music,
(44:25):
head on over to Stuff Mom Never Told You dot com.
Welcome to stuff Mom Never told you from houstu works
dot com. Hello, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristen, and today we're talking about women in
electronic music. And it was super difficult to clip these
notes together and sort of come up with talking points
(00:25):
because this is not exactly like a one and done topic.
Women have been involved in electronic music from the get go,
so way back in the nineteenth century, all the way
up through today as DJs, as composers, as people who
are building and constructing instruments and devices that make all
(00:45):
of those fabulous beeps and boops that you hear, and
electronic music to totally sound like a nube. Um. But yeah,
So this is Women in Music Week, and we're super
excited to get started talking about something that frankly, I
personally only didn't have a lot of familiarity with before
we started looking into it. I am much more of
like a an Otis reading channel on Spotify person than
(01:10):
an electronic music person, but more a luddite music fan.
Yeah yeah, but I mean even then, electronic music infiltrates
so many different types of music that it's hard to
pin it down as just one thing, and I want
to go ahead and offer our disclaimer to our listeners
that there's so much great information out there that we
couldn't hit at all. I mean, we're we're definitely trying
(01:32):
to focus on the pioneers women in electronic music who
were really blazing a trail in addition to some of
the gender issues that are being talked about today. And so,
without further ado, let's jump into what electronic music is
for people who are like, I'm not sure, well, that
is what it sounds like. It's music created with electronic equipment,
(01:52):
things like computeurs and synthesizers, right, And so you might
think and you might dismiss electronic music as being something
that's like, that's not real music. There's nothing to it.
You just hit some dials on a synthesizer. But that's
an attitude that Bork, who's a pretty mainstream electronic artist
at this point, took issue with back in in an interview.
(02:15):
She said, I find it so amazing when people tell
me that electronic music has not got soul and they
blame the computers. They get their finger and they point
at the computers like there's no soul here, and it's like,
you can't blame the computer. If there's not soul in
the music, it's because nobody put it there and it's
not the tools fault. And so it's interesting to see
how as electronic music has evolved from way back in
(02:38):
the nineteenth century to today, how people have tried to
sort of create music that is free of the traditional constraints,
whether of the instrumentation itself or just the way we
think about music in general. Well, speaking of constraints, though,
when we look at electronic music today and how it's critiqued, uh,
(02:59):
women are still a lot of times put in boxes,
Oh you're a female DJ, or you're a female electronic
music artist. And Molly Wells of Funerals takes issue with this,
saying woman is not a genre. Stop acting like we're
a passing fad. And I don't know if Molly Wells
would hear us talking about the history of women in
electronic music and say the same thing all over again.
(03:21):
But we are hopefully going to back up her statement
that hey, we're not some specialty act. We've been here
the whole time. So let's give you some quick origins
of electronic music and where it came from um. It
goes back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
You have some pretty smart folks, people like Herman von
Helmholtz and Ferruccio Bossoni, who start publishing books encouraging people
(03:45):
to explore the science of sound and the possibility of
creating new tones altogether. Others take this idea and a
passion for music and sound and start creating some pretty
crazy instruments. So in seven, for instance, you have Thaddius
Kate Hill who patents the tell Harmonium also known as
(04:05):
the Dynamo phone, which was the first significant electronic music instrument,
and he didn't complete it until nine seven. And this
scene was massive. It weighed two d tons, measured sixty
ft long, and it was a thirty six note per
octive keyboard and was a type of additive synthesizer, likely
(04:28):
a term coined by Kate Hill. So this guy was
pretty much a genius. And you could only hear it
though by sending the voltage output over the telephone network
to paying subscribers. And I mean when I say this
thing is massive, it was. It looked like one of
a huge organ on steroids, like a robot organ taking
over a room and for all of that size, Yeah,
(04:52):
it could make a little bit of music. But yeah,
you had to be one of the cool early adopter
insiders who knew when to pick up the phone. I
guess to listen to it, and then I mean, who
has the time? What are you doing when you're sitting
there listening to it, Like you've got to sit on
the phone. Well, it's well, I guess by this point,
what nineteen seven? What else are you gonna do? That? Right?
It's true. Well, in nineteen nineteen c I, a Nemesis
(05:15):
and Soviet spy Leon Thereman invents the harp the theremin,
which is basically a box with two antenna and you
wave your hands next to them to control pitch and volume,
and he ended up patenting it. In my first Thereman experience,
I saw somebody performing it and was like, what it's
it's black magic magic um. But also during this time
(05:41):
of development and experimentation in the nineteen twenties, you've got
your major who develops the sporophone, which could deliver microtonal
and quarter tone scales. Basically, he wanted to liberate music
from its fixed scale on the piano. And during this
time you know, a lot of people are responding to
cultural shifts. It's not surprising that when things happen in
(06:04):
society and in culture, people in the arts will respond
to it. And so if you look to Russia after
the Bolshevik Revolution, there were radical new types of music
and electronic instruments emerging as part of this utopian movement
inspired by futurism and anarchistic ideas. You've just basically got
a lot of people around this time being like done
(06:25):
with the charity of the piano and hooray for scientific culture.
But not everybody was on board with this newfangled electronic
music in the nineteen thirties. For instance, the Nazis were
initially like, yeah, thumbs up electronic music, but then they
labeled it experimental and thought electronic music was degenerate and
(06:48):
un German. And meanwhile, the Bolsheviks started killing the anarchists.
So I mean, actually, that kind of makes electronic music
a lot cooler if the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were
against it, if they were like totally for electronic music,
I might feel a little more conflicted about beets and boops, right,
(07:12):
all your beats and boops, well beyond just the political
speed bumps that electronic music hit. There was also sort
of the global shrug of people wanting instruments that could
simulate the sound of regular instruments. Yeah, that's a fun
of playing a keyboard today. Yeah, like I can't play
the bassoon. Oh wait, yes, I can, honk. I know,
(07:33):
Kristen's constantly walking around in here with her bassoon key tar,
just like hitting notes. It's getting really old. Um. But
if we jump forward to the nineteen sixties and seventies,
this is the Space Age. This is the Cold War,
serious interest starts redeveloping in electronic music. This is also
the era where we start getting a lot of electronic
(07:54):
music studios. I mean, how else, Kristen, are you going
to make all of the laser guns sounds that accompany
all of your Space Age movies? Well, a lot of
that technology, Caroline. The Space Age stuff is thanks to
links between electronic music equipment and equipment developed for military purposes,
(08:17):
and so you have things like broadcast radio amplification and
recording technology vocoders, which is a combo of voice encoding
and encryption technology that would end up in early hip hop.
So that's laying the groundwork for these kinds of instruments
being developed in the sixties and seventies, and also a
(08:38):
reason why women might not have been as visible or
participatory in building these earliest instruments. Yeah, that's one thing
that I found in all of this research was that
there's so many guys out there building and constructing and
inventing these electronic do deads, but not as many women.
They tended to be more performers. What if you look
(09:00):
at eighteen fifty two at eight A. Lovelace, she of
first computer programmer fame. She did note that Charles Babbage's
analytical engine might actually be able to compose some sort
of elaborate or scientific piece of music. So the idea
was there, she just wasn't the one implementing it. Yeah,
and she kicks off fantastic timeline of women in electronic
(09:24):
music over at the Vinyl Factory and is followed up
in seven by Dot Deal Corn, who was half of
Get This, a Victorian electro musical act, and was likely
the earliest professional female performer of an electrical musical instrument
in the UK. And she performed this song while in
(09:48):
tux in a top hat by the way, called Clickity Clack,
which featured electric castanets and clickity Clack is about as
musically complex as a song called clickity Clack. You know,
it sounds like so not exactly what we would consider
cutting edge and electronic music today, but back then, having
(10:10):
electrified castanettes playing along as you plunked on the on
the keys on your piano, it's pretty new wave. Yeah
so dot was super new wave, but not perhabs as
new wave as Thereman superstar Clara Rockmore, who came about
in the early nineteen thirties, and she was a classically
(10:32):
trained Lithuanian musician with perfect pitch and perhaps the world's
first electronic music star. Yeah so Rockmore picked up The
Thereman after a health condition made it hard for her
to continue playing the violin, and she even came up
with a specific finger technique to play the instrument more precisely.
(10:54):
And if you look at pictures of her, she looks
so sublime, just like like she's holding her arms up
like what am I going to make for dinner? To me,
she looks a little bit like more Tisha from the
Adams Family with an updoe playing the Thereman. She's very otherworldly. Yeah,
the thing is she's picking up this instrument not too
(11:16):
long after Leon Thereman himself patented it, and she kind
of became his muse during this time. She so impressed
him with her abilities and her technique that he ended
up giving her an r C a model Thereman as
a gift, and she even inspired him and turned to
improve the design. And you know, she's so talented and
(11:37):
so more tisha that he can't help himself but be spitten,
and so he does propose marriage, I believe more than once,
and she declined. She ended up marrying some other guy,
but they stayed super close for the rest of their lives,
even after you know, he got like taken out of
the country and then came back and taken out again.
But whatever, And it's great to get Rockmore's perspective on
(11:58):
the instrument and playing it. In a seven interview with
synthesizer pioneer Bob Mogue, she talks about electronic instruments and
she says that people think of them as something that
are new, eerie, strange, ugly, strident sounds. She says, now
that is completely the opposite of my approach. I am
a violinist and a musician. I wanted to see if
(12:20):
it were possible to use the theorem and to make
real music. Bach couldn't write for the theremin when he
was alive, but there's no reason why I can't play
back on the Theoremin today. And I think it's awesome
that she uses the example of Bach, because Bach will
resurface in our electronic music conversation a little bit later.
But the Theoremin actually sort of realizes those early scientific
(12:44):
men's desires to free themselves from the tyranny of the piano.
As rock Moore puts it, there is a certain terrific freedom.
You feel like a conductor in front of an orchestra.
There is no instrument between you and the music. Well,
and speaking of the music, moving on in our timeline,
in ninety eight, Joanna Buyer becomes the first woman to
(13:06):
compose a work scored for electronic instruments. Is called The
Music of the Spheres, and it's very avant garde. That's
the thing with a lot of this early electronic music.
Listening to it, it's either avant garde, as I just said,
or very sci fi sounding. Yeah, lots of like there
(13:29):
should be aliens. Yeah, speaking of which six yeah, BB Baron,
along with her husband Lewis, created the first electronic film score,
four Forbidden Planet, and this sort of starts. This Forbidden
Planets score kind of is one of the very first
dominoes to fall in the pre modern electronic music era,
(13:52):
because in we get electronic heavy hitter Daphne Orham, who
co founds the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, becoming the first woman
to direct an electronic music studio. She was also among
the first to experiment with musique concrete, or basically the
technique of recording raw sounds on the environment and using
that as material to then create electronic music with so
(14:16):
using a key at you know, scraping against metal as
sort of sound effect, and then weaving that into your composition.
And so a year later, in nine nine, or Hum
becomes the first woman to set up a personal studio,
the Aoramic Studio for electronic composition. There she creates basically
electronic background music for theater, radio, TV, short films, and
(14:40):
even exhibits things that we would call sonic environments. And
she eventually did compose electronic pieces for feature films, concerts
and even a ballet. And it's notable to see what
sparked her interests. When she was a kid, she played piano,
so there you have that. But her electrical engineer brother
also helped her to build radio transmitters and receivers, and
(15:02):
you put that together and you have her getting her
start as a BBC music balancer and studio engineer, a
job that only open to women when men left to
fight in World War Two. And when she gets there,
she starts experimenting with synthetic sound in after becoming interested
into cathode ray oceloscope, which was used to display the
(15:24):
characteristics of sound waves graphically. And genius that Daphne is,
she thinks, huh, I wonder if I can reverse this
process and she figures it out. In nineteen sixty two,
she becomes the first one to design and build an
electronic music instrument with help called the Aeramic System, And
(15:45):
essentially it's an early sequencer, so it was a machine
that interpreted the composers drawn musical instructions. So shape was
used to tell the machine how things like pitch, vibrato,
and volume come out. So she did it. She reversed
the oscilloscope. But this, of course was after when she
was younger, she had asked someone at the studio like, hey,
(16:07):
if I do this in reverse, will it read when
I what I'm doing? And I imagine she trailed off
as she got a blank stare from the man, who
then just said no, and the source that we're reading
was like, well yeah, or I'm just took that as
a challenge and was like, okay, fine, well I'm smarter
than you, so I'm gonna do this. Um. But in
nineteen sixty three, her contemporary composer and arrangement Delia Derbyshire,
(16:31):
who's basically like a cult star of early electronic music,
was also working in the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, creates the
theme for Dr Who, one of the first theme songs
to be produced totally electronically. And so she takes this
guy Rob Grayner's score that he had written to become
(16:51):
the theme song, and without the aid of synthesizers, just
using oscillators and other little bits and Bob's of what
eventually would be part an actual synthesizer, creates this incredible
almost sonic experience, and Grainer when he heard it was like,
did I did I write that? And She's like, well, no,
(17:13):
not really, I did half of it, and so you
owe me half of the royalties for this theme song,
which she was denied. Yeah, that was part of the
Radiophonic Workshops rules where really only the main composer got
any royalties to which hardcore Doctor Who fans today cry fowl,
Doctor Who fans love Delia Derbyshire. And she also, though
(17:36):
not surprisingly, had a background much like Daphne Orham in
music and math from college, and she went on to
have an incredibly full and creative career, even working with
Paul McCartney. And she was also in demand among bands
who were interested in synthesizers. And just quickly I wanted
to note that while she was working with BBC's Radiophonic Workshop,
(17:59):
there was this uh soundscape that she did for a
documentary that took place in the Sahara Desert, and she
used this green lamp shade that when she struck it
made a pure frequency. She used it and then broke
down the various sounds from it and then rebuilt them
(18:19):
to create the background for these camels running through the desert,
and that green lamp shade is now really an icon
in the history of electronic music, listed, for instance, in
the BBC's for sound effects that made TV history. Whenever
you read about Delia Derbyshire, you always read about that
(18:42):
green lamp shade. Yeah, and she also talks about how
she used her own voice, essentially breaking it down into
parts for the sound effect of the camels running their hooves.
And so I mean she that that documentary is totally
cited as a huge moment in electronic music. But a
game changer in all of this is Wendy Carlos. She's
(19:03):
a composer and instrument builder and a reluctant performer. She's
way more into the hole behind the scenes creation aspect,
and her Switched On Bach album, which was released in
nineteen is basically seen as the turning point where electronic
music becomes a thing and the mainstream takes notice. Yeah,
(19:24):
it went platinum and won three Grammys in nineteen seventy,
and so not only is electronic music getting this mainstream
recognition for the first time, it also encourages a lot
of other people to start creating music with synthesizers, and
Switched On Bach is essentially a reimagining of Bach using
(19:45):
a Moge synthesizer, because after all, she had helped Moge
develop it and was an early adopter. But when you
talked to Wendy Carlos about this, she's a little i
rolly about it. She says, quote listeners thought of a
synthesizer itself, the Moge synthesizer was a real musical instrument,
when all it really was was just a collection of
(20:07):
fairly limited sounds extrapolated from what had been available in
the fifties, put together in one extremely nice package with
a nice consistent interface and a keyboard that could supply
voltages and trigger so you could play notes. But you
still used it Wendy to create this hit record. Well,
I love that, she and she so she gives this
(20:28):
entire description that sounds like holy crap, that's a lot
of stuff. But she's like, and that was about it.
Because she goes on to say like she she hates
being almost pigeonholed as just the switched on Bach person,
like that's just the lady who did switched on box.
She's like, I don't ask you about things that you
did in the seventies, Like I've grown and changed since then.
You can't just put me into a box box. But
(20:51):
she basically was saying like, yes, I used it, and
I did something new with it and different with it
in terms of the moge synthesizer. But she's like, that's
just because that's what was there at the time. If
there had been something more advanced, I would have used that,
but I kind of used it was available to me.
And she should know. I mean, this woman has a
background in both physics and music, which is a theme
(21:12):
and just about everybody we've looked at so far. She
talks about how she actually did try to go into
physics first, but her grades kind of weren't up to snuff,
and she says, part of my whole personality is really
much more that of a person who would work in
the sciences. I don't find very much disparity between the
sciences and music. And so this, this whole field, this
(21:32):
career that she ended up with is just a continuation
of how when she was a kid she kind of
grew up tinkering with things and inventing things and putting
things together, and that grew into this amazing, like genius
career as an electronic composer and inventor that we see today.
And if you haven't heard Switched on Bach, maybe you've
(21:53):
seen Clockwork Orange the nineteen seventy one Kubrick film that
haunted my high school experience, and the soundtrack, which Carlos composed,
adds so much to that film, Like you take the
two apart, and it's not as eerie and as powerful
(22:13):
of a film as it is in The New York
Times at the time hailed it as a giant step
past the binalities of most contemporary film tracks. And then
in two she also did the score for Tron People.
I mean, she's like, she's got a lot of stuff
out there beyond just the switched on box stuff that
people really kind of culturally identify with. And another thing
(22:35):
that makes her such a fascinating character is that in
nine she came out as trans and she had been
living as a woman since ten years before that. Um,
but she gave this fascinating Playboy interview which is such
an interesting time capsule about how people used to think
and talk about trans people. But when Carlos, like, in
(22:58):
that interview, she says things that were so familiar with
nowadays in terms of I wish people would say trans
or transgender instead of transsexual. And then the whole idea
of listen, I've always known I was a girl that
I was a woman, and it just took other people
a minute to catch up. Yeah. At one point the
interviewer asks her about the operation. Yea. At one point
(23:19):
the interview asked her about whether she had any castration
fear going into her operation, and she was enraged by
the suggestion of that. She was like, no, this wasn't
a removal, this was a corrective surgery for me. Um.
But she was also though followed by other prominent women
(23:41):
in electronic music, like a Peacock who was big on
synthesized vocals, Ellion Radigue who used synthesizers to create meditative
sounds so nice, and then Susan Siani who supplied sound
effects for Star Wars. What. Yes, a lot of women,
uh are working in this whole film scoring industry. People
(24:03):
are creating lots of incredible sound effects and scores that
you're probably familiar with. Um. You also have people like
Laurie Spiegel, who created an algorithmic composition software from mac
Atari and Amiga, and Lori Anderson, who is a composer
and performer and who also built her own instruments. She
(24:23):
ended up having hits in the nineteen eighties, became lou
Reid's wife. Um, but it's it's incredible to realize that
we just haven't as people who are kind of outside
the electronic music realm, we just aren't exposed to these
incredible women in their contributions to music, to electronica, to soundtracks.
(24:45):
But there's so many names out there, and I just
wish that we had more time to talk about them. Well,
now that we have offered at least a brief history
of women in electronic music, let's fast forward and look
at women in electron music today, because the landscape has
definitely changed, but some things remain the same. Yeah, So
(25:07):
today's electronic music industry is huge. This is coming from
an April Billboard article that said that the electronic music
industry just in North America is worth about one point
nine billion dollars. Globally it's about six point two billion.
And they were talking about a report that analyzed revenue
from things like music sales and streaming from festivals and
(25:28):
clubs and things like that, and apparently dance track sales
hit and all time high. So where are the women
and all that? What's what's the equation? Well, when it
comes to live performances like if you go to, for instance,
Tomorrow World, you aren't going to see a ton of
women on stage. Female Pressure that we mentioned at the
(25:51):
top of the podcast, looked into women's representation and survey
twenty one music labels and forty three festivals, which admittedly
small sample size, but they found that women represented just
five and eight point four percent of artists, respectively. And
then even if you include though mixed male female groups,
(26:12):
the numbers don't change all that much. In fact, the
number of festival acts drops to seven point seven And
so when you look at sort of the role that
women playing electronic music today and and their visibility and
their participation um. The general theme that we found in
researching and reading blogs and and post like post talking
(26:35):
about this issue, the general themes tends to be that, yes,
we need more women participating, we need more visibility for women,
we want to hear more from women. Um. But also,
don't just focus on my gender, focus on the fact
that I'm an incredibly talented person who's been working hard
at this career for a long time. And we looked
(26:57):
at Pink Noises um Tera Rodgers, which is both a
book and a blog, and Rogers mentions the scholarship that's
been done around the topic of women in electronic music.
But she really takes issue with how so much of
it quote gives the impression that women are rarely present
in DJ, electronic music, and sound art cultures, that they
(27:18):
have not made significant contributions to these fields to the
extent that men have, or that gender categories ultimately pose
restrictions on professional survival. So basically, looking yes, looking deeper
into the gender issue of the music industry today, that's
a good thing, but just out of the gate, assuming
that women aren't present, that's not great. That that's sort
(27:39):
of an image that needs to be corrected. Well, it's
notable too that when it comes to seeking visibility, as
Melissa Fong wrote about over Ricochet, DJs are essentially gender neutral.
I mean you can have a gender neutral DJ name
you're using technology, So I mean we should have gender
neutral levels of accessibility as well. So she wonders why
(28:03):
more women aren't getting into particularly electronic music production. So
even as the question of is this the problem of
participation or visibility or are women avoiding it or simply
not seeking to be described as female? Because as well
talk about a little bit more in a minute. There
are some female DJs who intentionally go by gender neutral,
(28:26):
even masculine names, because they're like, I don't want to
be called a female DJ. Don't put me in your
lady's night lineup. Yeah, I mean, that's that's definitely part
of the issue. I mean, um, there are a lot
of women out there, but in terms of the people
who are working on their music in front of an audience,
(28:47):
perhaps some women are concealing their identities because they don't
want to be defined totally by their gender, or to
face exploitation, harassment, to be treated as different, to be asked, hey,
can you dj and address us and heels, or like
what's it like to be a woman? You know, things
like that. A lot of women right to the Huffington's post,
(29:07):
for instance, about the term female DJ, and one of
those women, Jack Novak, says, I don't want to be
singled out as a woman. I want to be rewarded
on my own merit. Yeah. Annie Max similarly wrote a
whole thing for Vice after being enraged at a series
of questions that a reporter was asking her, including things like,
(29:27):
was how were you able to DJ while pregnant? What's
it like being a female DJ, do you experience sexism
all the time, essentially making her gender the focus and
not her music, And she said she's sick of being
asked about all of these women things. And also when
the reporter finally asked her a relevant question, asked her
to recommend some other electronic musicians she's into, she recommended
(29:51):
female artists and the response was, oh, well, are you
just supporting women? It's like, no, no, can we just
please make this about the music? Although Christie Schaefer of
Hideous Men is a little bit conflicting on the whole thing, yeah,
because she says, on the one hand, women should get
recognition for overcoming gender based restrictions really in any profession,
(30:14):
but she says constantly pointing it out can be mothering. Plus,
she says, listen, we don't use our genitals to play
our synthesizers, but could you? That really made me think,
because you could, you could. But but I think maybe
Shaffer doesn't evolve sizer. Oh my god, I love them on.
I have some ideas about what that could be, but
(30:36):
it is. I mean, some do find it problematic though,
when you have the what would that be called kind
of the vanity plate dj like when Lindsay Lohan got
into djaying there for a minute that some think only
amplifies these stereotypes about women DJs being fake or they're
just up there to look hot, like they're just they're
(30:59):
just put she play on a playlist, they're not doing
the real work. Well, honestly, there are plenty of guy
DJs who are just pressing a button. But Caroline, they're
real d j's. Come on, They're not playing any vulva
sizers up there. I wish, um, But there are a
lot of complaints that people like Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton,
(31:20):
for instance, who's like, I guess she's out of things
to do, so she's decided to pick up deejaying. But yeah,
but there are a lot of complaints, uh, from people
who are working hard at this every day as their
professional about people like Lindsay Lohan or people like Paris
Hilton who kind of do come in and just press
a button to get the publicity to maybe get money
out of making a club appearance. Um. And so that
(31:43):
one negative aspect ends up reflecting pretty poorly on women
who have been hard working in the industry all along,
and they end up getting belittled or mocked, especially when
it comes to appearance about you know, oh, well you're
wearing a dress, so you're just trying to be sexy
or you're not sexy enough. It's like, as we see
in so many different industries, the whole looks thing comes
into play all the time too. Well, And there was
(32:06):
that whole kerfuffle over DJ Nina Kravitz who had a
documentary film crew following her around on tour and at
one point she doesn't interview both in a bikini, and
then at one point she doesn't interview in a bubble bath,
and people were like, WHOA, stop being so sexy, we
don't like this. And then she said, hey, it's my body.
(32:27):
I can do what I want with it. Stopped being
so sexist, And honestly, it just made me want to
go to your Spotify, your otis otis writing Spotify playlist
and have a little leadite moment. Yeah, it is sort
of like, hey, can we come out of the weeds
for a minute. I mean I agreed to an extent
with some of these DJs who are saying, can we
(32:49):
just stop asking women about being women and then talking
about what's sexist? Or what's feminist and just focus on
the work, because on the one hand, like, yes, no,
I do want to ask you about being a woman,
because the average your average music consumer doesn't know that
much about electronic music or like what goes into it
(33:10):
or the history of it. I mean, so people it's
natural that they're curious about being a woman in especially
like in techno or in you know, fields of electronic
music that are so sort of overrun by that BROWI
sort of just like white guy image and so yes,
like I would be curious about it. But on the
(33:31):
other hand, you do kind of want to encourage people
to move past just focusing on gender and saying let's
let's talk about your music. Well, why don't we move
past gender to talk about the queering of music, because
this was an interesting theme to emerge in what we
were reading as well, where you do have some like
(33:52):
E d M artists and DJs who are intentionally confronting well,
gender identity, yes, and sexuality through music. Yeah, And I
mean it's hardly a stretch to view electronic tools and
instruments as a queering of music. This is all the
way back to the late nineteenth early twentieth centuries when
(34:13):
people are like, I am so sick of the piano.
I want to create spaces in between those notes and
tones where I can create something special. Um And so
along those lines, Electronic Beats Magazine in profiled three acts
in particular who they said, we're challenging traditional power structures
through this most unlikely of musical forms, and we're connecting
(34:37):
the more fability of sound synthesis with thoughts on the
fluidity of gender identity. And so one of the people
they talked to was Jam a k A. Janine Rostrun
a k A. Planning to Rock, who's a gender neutral
artist with tracks that include Patriarchy Over and Out, Misogyny,
Dropped Dead, and the queer disco track Let's Talk About
(35:01):
Gender Baby, which is now the official soundtrack of Sminty
I just decided. But Planning to Rock really plays with
their voice. They're not trying to sound like a man necessarily,
but instead using their voice as an instrument, just like
the rest of the sounds that come into play in
their music and their attitude and this interview is basically like,
(35:22):
this is a great time. This is a great time
to be a human, let alone an electronic musician playing
with gender because they said changes in the air. You've
got more female journalists who are finding their voice and planning.
Dra goes on to say that they're super excited about
issues of intersectionality and gender fluidity finding their way into
(35:42):
more mainstream media and taking it back a step from
today to the origins of where this intersection between gender
identity and electronic music was really coming from. Electronic Beats
also talked to Terry Fameless, a k a. D J Sprinkles,
who Fact Magazine described as a deep house idle, queer theorist,
(36:04):
media manipulator, and seasoned contrarian, which is a fantastic description.
Um and DJ Sprinkles came out as trans in the eighties,
which was a period quote when disco and dance music
were still explicitly hot wired to queer culture, and Sprinkles
feels that house music's queer roots have been cleansed with
(36:27):
its main streaming, so that helps you know, connect the
dots as to why there might be this renewed interest
today in reclaiming those kinds of roots and really playing
around with identity as it relates to music. And this
is something also echoed by The Knife, a k a
Swedish siblings Olof Drajer and Karen Drejer Anderson, who are
(36:49):
committed to challenging gender and power norms and applying feminist,
queer and academic theories to real life. Which who knew
that electronic music could be that loaded? But yes, indeed
it is. Yeah, And of course, you know, we we
haven't talked about. We mentioned very briefly how some of
(37:09):
the instrumentation that was developed as military uh technology which
was then used in early hip hop. We touched on that,
but we haven't even had the time to dig into
queer culture, nor have we really had the time to
dig into where the women and other people of color
are in this conversation. And that's something that Zell McCarthy
(37:31):
at Vice pointed out in an article in March of
and he really lamented one the lack of women in
the dance music industry and to the positioning of women
and color, women of color as objects to look at
rather than as DJs to listen to. And he cites
people like Diplo whose videos feature the rear ends of
(37:52):
many a woman, usually women of color, and so from
there he kind of branches off. McCarthy does into talking
about this issue that we see in a lot of
industries that whoever the gatekeeper is to sort of allowing
new people to surface, the people they let through a
lot of times tend to look like themselves. And so
(38:15):
when you have club owners, promoters, or even popular publications,
they might not be consciously sexist or racist, but if
they're promoting their friends or people that they're familiar with,
you sort of get that in group effect where everybody
ends up looking like those gatekeepers or those tastemakers. McCarthy
even cited a talent buyer who said that one club
(38:37):
wouldn't book an act because the women weren't hot enough,
And that can be a big deal obviously, because if
you're not getting booked, then you're not getting the money.
And there's so much money, particularly right now in E
d M. And so if those people who look or
sound different aren't getting past the gate, then there are
fewer opportunities open to them. And yeah, I mean a
(38:59):
lot of this does go back to the money. But
McCarthy kind of pulls us back and says, but wait,
we can't forget what he says the essence of what
dance music is and should be, because yeah, Okay, it's
all about the money, yes, yes, But remember dance music
as we know it was originated by black, Latino and
(39:20):
queer artists who wanted to create safe spaces for people
disenfranchised by mainstream society. So I mean, who not that
way anymore? It seems like in a lot of ways,
I mean McCarthy also praises the d M community, like
the people in the audience, for being very like open
(39:42):
and accepting and very fluid with gender and sexuality and
all these kinds of things. Um, But on the industry side,
it does seem like the more mainstream that you get,
the more that door starts to close. So, Kristen, we
have now gone from the nineteenth century through to the
(40:02):
raves to today people who are out there crafting incredible
music that serves as a commentary on gender identity. I mean,
that's way far removed from them from the dynamic phone
it was two hundred tons. But what's not different and
what I love and I hope I don't sound too
cheesy for saying this, is that the common thread of
(40:26):
wanting to use this electronic music and technology and sounds
to throw off sort of the tyranny of the traditional
way that society operates through, that music operates through, that
sound operates. That's the common thing is that whether you're
saying I want to challenge the patriarchy or gender norms,
(40:48):
or whether you're saying I want to challenge the way
that sounds are created, it's all coming from this beautiful,
like scientific uh, just desire to yate and create beautiful differences. Well,
I think it's time now to hear from listeners. Do
we have any electronic music fans in our audience? Are
(41:09):
there any theoreman players? I really was just I am
so so enthralled by the theorem and right now, um,
let us know all of your thoughts. Any DJs listening,
do you ever confront this kind of stuff? Because really
we touched on so many different things. So whatever sparked
your interest, let us know. Moms Stuff at house stuff
works dot Com is our email address. You can also
(41:30):
tweet us at mom stuff podcasts, or messages on Facebook,
and we've got a couple of messages to share with
you right now. So I've got a Facebook message here
from David and I wanted to share this because sometimes
we hear from fellas who are like, hey, we never
hear from the fellas who right in. So David, you're
(41:54):
a fella and this is what you have to say,
David Rights. I'm currently listening to your social justice or
yours episode, and I thought i'd let you know that
I'm super glad I found your podcast recently. I'm a
Christian who is white, upper class, this gender, heterosexual, and mail.
I love how balanced and neutral you are in your discussions,
and I find it very helpful to think about how
(42:15):
things are for those who aren't given the same opportunities
as I've been. Well, I don't know if I'll ever
be able to remove all of my biases. Your podcast
definitely helps me remove some of them, So thanks, he says. Ps.
I've just graduated as a nurse and would love it
if you did an episode on the nursing profession as
a whole, or if you wanted to go a bit
(42:35):
more in depth. Males in Nursing would make for a
great episode, And I sent David a link to our
nursing podcast because friends, we have done it and you
can find it over at stuff Mom Never Told You
dot com. So thanks, David. Well, I have a Facebook
message here from Becca about our sci Fi episode. She says,
I got really excited this week on my drive to
(42:56):
work when I started listening to your science fiction podcast.
As I type, I'm sitting in my pajamas with a
cup of coffee, watching Battlestar Galactica, researching time travel and
making notes on the storytelling and characters from my own
sci fi novel. Well, I do want a very real
science background to what I'm writing. I hadn't even thought
about the social impact that a hopefully one day successful
(43:17):
sci fi novel could have. Then I remembered The Time
Machine by H. G. Wells that I have only recently
just read. A writer friend of mine and I were
discussing the fact that it seemed more like a social
commentary than science fiction. It reinforced everything you were saying.
The point I'm trying to make is that it has
influenced how I want to write and the ideas that
I want to get across to the reader. Even more
(43:40):
than that, I'm twenty six weeks pregnant with a little
girl whose name will be Aria after Arias Stark, a
strong female character, and I want to make my own
small change that will make a difference to the world.
She will grow up in I'm still working and developing
my story and plan to do a lot of writing
on maternity leave, but thanks to you, there will be
something more that wasn't there before. Again, thanks for all
(44:01):
your efforts, and if one day I'm lucky enough to
have this story published, I would love to point out
your influence well. Thank you, Becca, and thanks to everybody
who's written into us. Mom step at house Stepworks dot
Com is our email address and for links to all
of our social media as well as all of our blogs,
videos and podcasts, including this one. So you can read
up on the fascinating history of women in electronic music,
(44:25):
head on over to Stuff Mom Never Told You dot com.
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