Pink Noises. Women on Electronic Music and Sound

Pink Noises brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures, including club and radio DJs, remixers, composers, improvisers, instrument builders, and installation and performance artists. The collection is an extension of Pinknoises.com, the critically-acclaimed website founded by musician and scholar Tara Rodgers in 2000 to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls. That site featured interviews that Rodgers conducted with women artists, exploring their personal histories, their creative methods, and the roles of gender in their work. This book offers new and lengthier interviews, a critical introduction, and resources for further research and technological engagement.
Contemporary electronic music practices are illuminated through the stories of women artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. They include the creators of ambient soundscapes, “performance novels,” sound sculptures, and custom software, as well as the developer of the Deep Listening philosophy and the founders of the Liquid Sound Lounge radio show and the monthly Basement Bhangra parties in New York. These and many other artists open up about topics such as their conflicted relationships to formal music training and mainstream media representations of women in electronic music. They discuss using sound to work creatively with structures of time and space, and voice and language; challenge distinctions of nature and culture; question norms of technological practice; and balance their needs for productive solitude with collaboration and community. Whether designing and building modular synthesizers with analog circuits or performing with a wearable apparatus that translates muscle movements into electronic sound, these artists expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noisemaking. Pink Noises is a powerful testimony to the presence and vitality of women in electronic music cultures, and to the relevance of sound to feminist concerns.
Interviewees: Maria Chavez, Beth Coleman (M. Singe), Antye Greie (AGF), Jeannie Hopper, Bevin Kelley (Blevin Blectum), Christina Kubisch, Le Tigre, Annea Lockwood, Giulia Loli (DJ Mutamassik), Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha), Riz Maslen (Neotropic), Kaffe Matthews, Susan Morabito, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Eliane Radigue, Jessica Rylan, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami, Bev Stanton (Arthur Loves Plastic), Keiko Uenishi (o.blaat)
Le Tigre is proud to be included in this long-awaited book by Tara Rodgers AKA Analog Tara, founder of pinknoises.com. This is a diverse group of interviews with women working within the field of electronic music -- producers, composers, performers, and DJs. Rodgers has compiled her conversations with these artists within a graceful academic framework, and she has elicited fascinating responses from her interviewees. Rodger's perspective as a peer lends the discussions transcribed in "PINK NOISES: Women on Electronic Music and Sound" an intimacy and thoroughness not often found in music journalism. She addresses issues of gender, sexism, and economics alongside/intertwined with details of artistic processes and technologies.
Review
"Pink Noises is a breath of fresh air when you look at how many electronic music books are about more of the same: boys with toys. From the Middle Eastern-inflected electronica of DJ Mutamassik, to the Punjabi rhythms of DJ Rekha, to the academix of Pamela Z and Pauline Oliveros, Tara Rodgers's examination of women as central figures in the creative processes of twenty-first-century art and music is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of music in our hyper-connected and hyper-post-everything contemporary life."oPaul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky "A wonderfully diverse international mix of interviews, essays, reviews, and links."oMichael Paoletta, Billboard "Great practical advice on music making."oURB "Everything you ever wanted to know about electronic music and the women making it."oTamara Warren, Nylon "Pinknoises doesn't just talk girl power, they enable it."oSoo-Hyun Chung, Mixer "Acknowledges women's space in the world of electronic music and celebrates it with information, education, and innovation."oFlavorpill "Go girls!"oAnne Hilde Neset, The Wire
From the Back Cover
“Pink Noises is a breath of fresh air when you look at how many electronic music books are about more of the same: boys with toys. From the Middle Eastern–inflected electronica of DJ Mutamassik, to the Punjabi rhythms of DJ Rekha, to the academix of Pamela Z and Pauline Oliveros, Tara Rodgers’s examination of women as central figures in the creative processes of twenty-first-century art and music is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of music in our hyper-connected and hyper-post-everything contemporary life.”—Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky