MUSIC
Doc Shows Women’s History in EDM
Cis and trans women shaped today’s electronic music
BY STEVE ERICKSON
“Sisters with Transistors”
conjures nostalgia for
a past most of us never
knew existed. At this
point, most pop music is recorded
to computer and made largely, if
not entirely, with electronic instruments.
Mac laptops come bundled
with the digital audio workshop
Garage Band. The Fairlight, which
was the fi rst sampler to hit the market
in 1980, was so expensive that
wealthy rock musicians like Yes
and Peter Gabriel were its earliest
users. (William Gibson’s quote “the
street fi nds its own uses for things”
applies to hip-hop DJs using turntables
to get similar effects around
the same time.) Now, free applications
offer a level of ability to make
music on your phone that makes
the synthesizers and samplers
available in the ‘80s look puny.
Lisa Rovner’s documentary “Sisters
with Transistors” shows how
we got to this point, arguing that
technological innovation stemmed
from women’s exclusion from conventional
musical fi elds. To this
day, classical music is dominated
by the idea that Beethoven, Bach
and Mozart were the greatest composers
who ever lived (or, crucially,
will ever live), drowning out women’s
voices.
If electronic music wasn’t considered
“real music” (and, often, still
isn’t), why not compose and produce
music from pitch-shifted tape
loops of fi eld recordings or one’s
own drumming on household objects?
No matter how talented a female
pianist was in the ‘50s or ‘60s,
she would never be recognized as a
genius on par with Glenn Gould, so
why play by those rules?
“Sisters with Transistors” profi
les 11 female electronic composers
and musicians. They worked in
different fi elds and styles. Éliane
Radigue makes austere, abrasive
drones whose slow shifting resembles
layers of feedback. By contrast,
Clara Rockmore relied on the theremin
to generate eerie, futuristic
sounds, Daphne Oram composed
the original theme to “Dr. Who,”
Out lesbian Pauline Oliveros, who died in 2016, was one of the early trailblazers in electronic music.
The late Daphne Oram was a British electronic music composer and musician.
and Laurie Spiegel’s computer-generated
music from the ’70s follows
similar paths to the avant-garde
edge of Krautrock. (In some alternate
universe, her songs “Drums”
and “Appalachian Grove” received
an Italo-disco remix and became
leftfi eld dance club hits.)
“Sisters with Transistors” completely
avoids talking-heads interviews.
In their place, Rovner plays
audio recordings of her subjects
over archival footage. While not the
most radical technique, it avoids the
formulas so many music documentaries
fall into. It also makes her
subjects, several of whom are now
dead, come back to life. The use of
period newsreels can get a bit glib.
Out of the musicians depicted in
“Sisters with Transistors,” Pauline
Oliveros was lesbian (the fi lm mentions
the fact that she was openly
gay as part of a radicalism that included
her feminism and philosophy
of “deep listening”) and Wendy
Carlos is transgender. Carlos, who
did not seem to cooperate with
MILLS COLLEGE AND METROGRAPH PICTURES
PHOTO DAPHNE ORAM TRUST AND METROGRAPH PICTURES
Rovner, is treated fairly dismissively.
While her album “Switched-
On Bach” was a hit that introduced
electronic music to a wide audience
and she composed and performed
music for Stanley Kubrick’s “A
Clockwork Orange” and “The Shining,”
the fi lm treats her as a fairly
conservative fi gure who souped up
past classical music instead of trying
to fi nd new sounds.
By the time electronic music be-
➤ SISTERS, continued on p.33
April 22 - May 5,28 2021 | GayCityNews.com
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