For the past ten years, Tara Rodgers, a.k.a. Analog Tara, has dedicated herself to studying female electronic musicians and the evolving dynamic of gender, creation, and community. With her website, PinkNoises.com, she publishes interviews, investigates the supposed dearth of women in electronic music, and develops collaborative relationships with the many fascinating women that she finds.
In a new book, Pink Noises: Women On Music and Sound (Duke University Press), Rodgers republishes and expands 24 of those interviews (including Ikue Mori, Le Tigre, and DJ Rekha), along with some striking black-and-white photographs and academic meditations on the meaning of her project. Along the way, she tries to address some of those big questions of gender and music with what she has learned in the past decade.
In the introduction, Rodgers discusses her early experiences with the field of electronic music: how she thought her talents as a composer and self-taught pianist were passed down from her audiophile father; how she learned that she was really descended from a long line of music- and technology-friendly women; and how she began to see the hidden, unacknowledged women that populate the world of electronic music. In what is usually understood as a highly technical and male-dominated field, it took some deep digging for Analog Tara to find the female musicians and composers and inventors.
PinkNoises.com, for Rodgers, was at once a personal and academic project. She wanted to understand why women are so underrepresented in mainstream discussions of electronic music and the unique ways that gender forms our perceptions of these women, but also to promote them, bring them to our attention, and collaborate with them.
The interviews in Pink Noises are arranged thematically, or as Rodgers says, they “forge connections between electronic-music practices and feminist philosophy, media, and cultural studies.” Sections like “Time and Memory” and “Circulation and Movements” are appropriately vague and allow expansive and digressive explorations of what these terms mean to the facets of electronic music.
She alerts us to the pervasive canon of male composers and musicians in the electronic field, and the double standard at work. In one telling interview with members of Le Tigre, Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman note that when a man makes a mistake, it’s an experiment or an invention; if a woman makes a mistake, it’s just a mistake. Even when they achieve a modicum of fame, female musicians and artists are still seen as less creative, less daring, and less experimental than male musicians.
Rodgers does an excellent job of proving just how untrue this is, by spotlighting groundbreaking female DJs, composers, performance artists, software engineers, musicians, and others – especially the multi-talented or those who resist easy categorization. The idea is that unless you are heavily involved in the dance or art scenes, it’s unlikely that you will have heard of these women. However, their influence and importance are felt across genres and scenes.
In this way, much of Pink Noises is about revising the history of music to include the overlooked or under-appreciated. Though Rodgers mentions that her book is a feminist one, her larger goal is the expansion of this musical history by looking at both sides. As electronic improvisation pioneer Kaffe Matthews replies when Rodgers asks if men and women make music differently, “Yes, differently. Simply because we’re different creatures, so of course we do it differently. And that’s marvelous. So us playing together, or us listening – let’s get all these different combinations happening.”