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“An electrifying study of musical heroines […] an enchanting and superb documentary” ~ The Guardian
The remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. Narrated by Laurie Anderson, the film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music and restored the central role of women in the history of music and society at large. The history of women is a history of silence. Until they insisted on being heard.
Director’s Notes:
This film is more than just the history of a music genre: it’s the story of how we hear and the critical but little-known role female pioneers play in that story. Once I came to understand the integral part that women had played in forming the soundtrack to our lives – from the dings and chimes when we receive a text message to the music we dance, cry
and sing to – I was compelled to break the silence that surrounded their stories.
And as easily as these stories have been forgotten, they all too easily could not have happened. As Laurie Spiegel says in our exclusive interview, “Composers were all white dead men. It was just not something I thought of as something I could ever do.” Classically there were no highprofile women composers. But with the discovery of electronic music, women no longer needed permission from their male counterparts to create – music now required just one person and a bunch of equipment, opening up a whole new avenue for female composers. Many embraced this opportunity from the outset to create a new genre of music that also gave rise to almost every sound you hear on a day-to-day basis.
The tools for making the first electronic music were the same as those found in physics labs and radar stations, hence it long being associated with masculine domains such as hard science and military technology. But, just as women were instrumental in early computer programming, telecommunications and broadcasting, there were also a number of innovative and groundbreaking female musicians who paved the way for modern music.
We know women and people of color have been silenced by hierarchies of privilege and oppression, but I’ve also come to believe that it’s the oversimplification of the way we tell stories, our learned longing for a (generally white male) hero that has led to the erasure of their groundbreaking accomplishments. That’s why I decided on a form featuring multiple heroines whose stories are told subjectively. As a way of confronting limiting storytelling practices, I opted for a chronology that weaves, a narration that’s not all-knowing.
In keeping with the vitality of the film’s subject, there won’t be any expert talking heads explaining the development of electronic music. Instead, the film fuses rarely seen and newly discovered moving images and stills culled from personal and public archives with multigenerational commentators in voiceover, present-day reflections of participants in that history and a younger generation who have been influenced by its legacy. The shortlist includes: Holly Herndon, Kim Gordon, Jean Michel Jarre, Nite Jewel, Morton Subotnik, Rhys Chatham. The result is an oral history that moves, a series of personal recollections about the key moments in the history of electronic music merged with collective culture that unfolds like a mixtape where the voice-over functions like lyrics.