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June 11, 2018  

#MMLPQTP Politics: Soccer Chants, Viral Memes, and Argentina’s 2018 “Hit of the Summer”

Note: all translations of quotations from linked media are the author’s own.

In early March, viewers of the Argentine public television cooking show Cocineros Argentinos were treated to a jaunty bit of live interstitial music as the program returned from a commercial break. In keeping with the day’s Italian theme, a small band consisting of an accordion, violin, and sousaphone played a lively but simple minor-key melody in a brisk tarantella rhythm. “Those boys can play anything,” one of the hosts remarked approvingly. The other observed, “It’s the hit of the summer!”

These sixteen seconds of seemingly innocuous instrumental music on a government-sponsored television program sparked a minor firestorm in the Argentine press. One channel wondered whether they were deliberately “picking a fight with [President] Mauricio Macri,” while another categorized the musical selection as “polemic.”  Social media voices in support of the embattled president called for Cocineros Argentinos to be cancelled. Ultimately, the program’s directors apologized to the public for having “bothered or disrespected” their viewers with “ingredients that do not belong in the kitchen.”

How could a bit of instrumental, pseudo-Italian kitsch cause such an uproar? Understanding the offense – for the musical selection was indeed intended as an obscene insult to the nation’s president – requires a bit of a dive into the history and culture of Argentine politics, protest, and sports fandom. The “hit of the summer” of 2018 in Argentina is not a pop song, but a chant that started in a soccer stadium, and has become a viral sonic meme, multiplying across social media and fragmenting into countless musical iterations. By early March, listeners in Argentina heard a clear meaning in this melodic sequence, and no singer was necessary to hear the words it invoked: Mauricio Macri, you son of a whore.

The melody comes originally from a source that expresses quite a different political sentiment. In 1973, after eighteen years of forced exile, ousted populist president Juan Domingo Perón was allowed to return to Argentina, and was shortly thereafter re-elected president. Perón died in office ten months later and was succeeded by his vice president and third wife Isabelita. Isabelita’s reign would soon devolve into an infamously brutal military junta, but in 1973 populist national fervor was running high in the country, and the airwaves were full of catchy, simple patriotic marches:

“Es tiempo de alegrarnos” (“It is time for us to be happy”), by Raúl “Shériko” Fernandez Guzmán, is full of optimism for what Perón’s return means for the country. The second stanza celebrates: “I see that my people returns once more to laughter / It’s that my country has begun to live again / Pain and sadness are left behind / The days of happiness and bliss have returned.”

It’s a sentiment that would be difficult to find today in a country where political discourse is polarized and acrimonious. Macri was elected in November 2015 on a platform that was largely about undoing the policies of the decade of Peronist administrations that preceded him (his party itself is called “Cambiemos” [Let’s Change]). Since coming to power, Macri’s party has pursued a neoliberal agenda that has been increasingly unpopular with the working and middle class. Cuts to state subsidies have made the cost of utilities and mass transit skyrocket, and groups from truck drivers to teachers have organized large-scale protests in response to the austerity measures and budget cuts to the public sector. In response to these increasingly fervent protests, Macri has even authorized violent police repression of crowds. In short, as of the beginning of 2018, he’s politically embattled and a target of widespread criticism from a wide range of sectors.

Yet the “hit of the summer” is not merely an ironic repurposing of an old bit of patriotic musical fluff in a time of unrest. In fact, as the phenomenon first went viral, most Argentines were unware of the music’s original source, which had been a fleeting fad. Instead, the melody had lived on and been transformed through the great repository of popular musical memory that is Argentine soccer culture.

Soccer fandom in Argentina is a full-throated affair. As Kariann Goldschmitt has observed in the case of Brazil, the soundscape of mass gatherings in the soccer stadium, and the affective charge of crowds experiencing the collective pain of loss or the exultation of victory, is a fundamental ingredient of popular identity in Argentina. But it is not the commercial, mediatized end of what Goldschmitt calls the “sports-industrial complex” that is primarily influential here.

Rather, hinchadas, or fan clubs, pride themselves on being able to sing loudly throughout the match, arms extending in unison, typically accompanied by bombos (bass drums), trumpets, and other loud instruments. Fan clubs pride themselves on the variety and creativity of their cantitos – the ‘little songs” that repurpose popular melodies with new lyrics that praise their own side, and insult their opponents’ lack of fortitude. Any memorable melody is fair game: for example, fans of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising” might have found the cantito that Argentina embraced during the 2014 World Cup vaguely familiar.  In the decades since its release, “Es tiempo de alegrarnos” had been used periodically by the clubs of several teams, in variants whose unifying factor was the use of the obscenity “la puta que te parió” (literally, “the whore that birthed you”) for emphasis.

Hinchada Argentina – Copa do Mundo Brasil 2014 – Estádio Beira-Rio – Porto Alegre, June 24, 2014, Image by Flickr User Felipe Castilhos

It was San Lorenzo’s fans who gave the cantito a new life in politics, during a match against Boca Juniors. The connection between Boca and President Macri was obvious for fans of both teams; Macri began his political career as the president of that team. When San Lorenzo fans felt they had been the victim of biased refereeing, the song began:  “Mauricio Macri, la puta que te parió…”. All four phrases of the melody repeated the same words.

Unusually for a soccer cantito, the chant was soon picked up by the fans of another team, River Plate, who used it in similar circumstances when facing Macri’s Boca Juniors, their archrivals. Even more unusual, though, is the life that the chant has since taken on outside of the soccer stadium, where it is directed at the President not due to his association with his former club, but because of growing discontent with his political career. In the last weeks of February the cantito, now popularly known by its initials as “MMLPQTP” was heard in concert halls, basketball stadiums, and even in a crowded subway station (where, despite fare prices that have risen at eight times the rate of inflation, service remains irregular and delays are common). Journalists covering the phenomenon began to refer to it as  “el hit del verano,” or “the hit of the summer.”

“Suena en las canchas, suena en los recitales, suena en el subte… Ahora también suena en los celulares!!!” Click to download an Mp3 Ringtone of “MMLPQTP”

Using the English-language “hit” made clear that the allusion was not merely to the season (February is, of course, summer in the southern hemisphere, and a popular vacation time for Argentines) but to the seasonal nature of pop music consumption. The popular music critic’s thinkpiece seeking to define the essence of the summer song, celebrate it or lament its banality is almost as much of a trope as the phenomenon of the hit summer song itself. The sonic zeitgeist of summer 2018, these journalists suggested, could best be defined  not with a breezy club banger, but with the hoarse and irate voices of a nation embroiled in an economic crisis that would make idle days at the beach unthinkable for many of its citizens.

There were attempts to curtail the spread of MMLPTQTP: the national referee’s association debated suspending future soccer matches if the chant broke out, characterizing it as potentially “discriminatory” speech (some cantitos do traffic in racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic epithets, and referees have suspended games in the past to control them). In the end, no such suspensions occurred, perhaps because soccer fans and other musicians alike had already realized that the MMLPQTP chant had re-signified its melody so strongly that the lyrics were no longer necessary.  One political cartoonist pointed out the referees’ conundrum perfectly: “They’re not singing the lyrics, sir, just humming the music,” the referee observes, asking, “should I suspend [the game] anyway?” Faced with the specter of censorship, Argentines embraced the full expressive potential of non-linguistic sonic signifiers, and the democratic possibilities of virally distributed, user-created content. A sonic meme was born.

The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, who used it to mean a basic unit of information analogous to a gene, only for information or ideas. I use the term here, though, in keeping with the more contemporary popular usage, to refer to user-generated humorous content – generally captioned images — shared online. Meme sharing sites often provide templates to help users easily generate variations on a theme. In this case, the structural template was a melody and two simple chords (which musicians helpfully transcribed and shared, both in standard Western notation and instructional video formats).

Musicians of all backgrounds flocked to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to riff on MMLPQTP. In a catalog too long to list in its entirety here, a greatest hits compilation might include solo versions for piano and charango, covers in popular genres from blues to cumbia to metal. Argentines with a strong sense of national identity might prefer tango, but Brazilian-style Carnival samba also made an appearance (playfully invoking the possibility of censorship with Spanish “subtitles” that replace the offending phrase with “la la la”). And thus finally, scandalously, the hit song made its way to national television on a cooking show, where despite its transformation into an Italian-style instrumental ditty, the sting of its insulting words was still clearly heard.

The viral success of instrumental versions of MMLPTQP is a prime example what ethnomusicologist Anne Rasmussen has recently called “the politicization of melody.” In music’s potential to comprise and thus link simultaneous linguistic and non-linguistic codes lies its ability to render those linguistic codes superfluous. These linkages provide the potential to signify political messages through melody alone, opening up possibilities for protest that are more difficult to prevent through legal means (broadcasters’ obscenity clauses, for example), or easier to circumvent through technological means (amplified instruments). It would be easy to overstate the durability or pervasiveness of such linkages, however. One need only look back to that same melody’s entirely differently politicized origin, which is today largely forgotten or seen as a curiosity, to imagine that the linkage between the melody to “Es tiempo de alegrarnos” and its current manifestation of partisan abuse might one day fade from popular memory like the one-hit wonders of summers past.

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Featured Image: Screencapture from “Monumental MMLPQTP”

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Michael S. O’Brien is an assistant professor of music at the College of Charleston. He has been conducting ethnographic field research on music and cultural politics in Argentina since 2003. His article examining the use of thebombocon platillo in Carnival music, soccer fandom, and political culture is forthcoming in the journal Ethnomusicology this fall. He has also published research on protest music in the U.S. in the journal Music and Politics and Smithsonian Folkways Magazine.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

Heard Any Good Games Recently?: Listening to the Sportscape–Kaj Ahlsved

In Search of Politics Itself, or What We Mean When We Say Music (and Music Writing) is “Too Political”–Elizabeth Newton

Twitchy Ears: A Document of Protest Sound at a Distance–Ben Tausig

The Sounds of Selling Out?: Tom Zé, Coca-Cola, and the Soundtrack to FIFA Brazil 2014–Kariann Goldschmidt

 

January 30, 2017  

Singing The Resistance: January 2017’s Anti-Trump Music Videos

soampSO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

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The US presidential campaigns in 2016 were escorted by a number of songs regarding the person who was recently inaugurated as president.  These songs served mostly as a kind of dystopic, fear-indulging, angsty “comedy music”—to reference Frank Zappa’s 1971 “Dental Hygiene Dilemma”—with a perverted thrill, or functioned in the retro manner of balladesque storytelling in songform. Performance art band Pussy Riot’s rather blunt “Make America Great Again” falls in the former category, while many examples from the brave and radiating 30 Days, 30 Songs project fall in the latter, summoning indie-rock icons as Death Cab For Cutie, R.E.M., Bob Mould, EL VY, Jimmy Eat World and Franz Ferdinand.

Lesser known tracks like “Trump,” produced by German DJ and producer WestBam, used a collage with sampled footage organized on a 4/4-beat to uncover Trump’s lies and remodel them into articulations of the vocal intentions of this subject: “We need drugs. We need crime.” However, as horrific and uncanny as this video seems, this subject as head of government then figured only in an unthinkable, impossible world.

In June 2016, Los Angeles rappers YG and Nipsey Hussle apparently sensed the horrible threat so creepily approaching the Oval Office, releasing “Fuck Donald Trump,” which produced a long string of versions, extensions, and new parts in the months afterward: “Don’t let Donald Trump win, that nigga cancer / He too rich, he ain’t got the answers / He can’t make decisions for this country, he gon’ crash us / No, we can’t be a slave for him.” In this song, before the votes were cast, the rappers and the Angelenos in the video address the urgency of a pending openly white supremacist government and the need to publicly resist it. For very good reasons, these musicians did not put the subject now in power into the box of a neglectable funny weirdo candidate. They recognized the threat as being as serious and imminent as it really was. “Fuck Donald Trump / Fuck Donald Trump / Yeah, nigga, fuck Donald Trump/ Yeah, yeah, fuck Donald Trump.”

In the week before the inauguration, artists released a string of music videos that struck very different tones from 2016. A comedy? No more. A gruesome, colorful story to tell? Too vague, too meek. “Hallelujah Money,” sings Benjamin Clementine in the song by the ever-so dystopic anime-band Gorillaz. The new song—the band’s first release in almost 7 years—is a freaked out lament, engendering bewilderment and prayer, taking on a sonic persona that cries out to The One & Only God Of Mammon – the lyrical subject is here the governing subject: “And I thought the best way to perfect our tree / Is by building walls / Walls like unicorns / In full glory / And galore.”  In the video, the KKK marches along, the pigs in George Orwell’s animal farm blare, a lone and deathstruck cowboy meditates on the horizon behind Clementine, swinging in distorted rhythms and harmonies. In the end, Clementine burns his hair in a gigantic megaton-explosion while praying for money, praying for the last credible authority: “Hallelujah money (Past the chemtrails) / Hallelujah money (Hallelujah money).”

An angered, revolutionary will also stokes the song “Smoke ’em Out,” released on Jauary 17th, 2017 by a feminist trio consisting of sisters Sierra Casady & Bianca Casady (known as CocoRosie) and transgender singer Anohni (also known as the lead singer for Antony and the Johnsons).  The song matches solid beats with serene pizzicatos, creating a surprisingly catchy melody of intriguing courage and uplifting collective resistance: “Burning down the house / The dead girl shouts / Smoke em out!”

Rhythmically demanding and just as sonically unforgiving comes “I Give You Power” by the Arcade Fire featuring Mavis Staples, an amalgamation of anger and the will to move ahead, to transcend current limitations of micro politics into a desired and imagined near future. The song opens with a flat electronic beat that builds up to a fat bulldozing bass sequence with added effects over which Mavis Staples’s multiplied voices lament and demand and call out in grief and angry bewilderment. The song merges disco, soul and funk with traditions of protest chanting, topped off with church organ chords. The music video reveals nothing beyond an older analog mixing desk operated now and then with calm sensitivity and deep knowledge of how this production tosses and turns: bright and glaring lights flicker over the image of the desk.

The Brooklyn-based Sateen, in contrast, perform “Love Makes The World” in a lavish scenery replete with luxurious flashing red gowns of large ruffles.  They sing in the woods and  in a brick underpass, while joined and complemented by a series of queer singers, dancers & personae presenting themselves, their love and their resistance in public and in private situations.  Angelic voices sing over the cycling and motorized club beats, providing electronic sounds of hope whose joyful alien flavors are often in tension with the song’s lyrics: “How can we progress: / When we’re ruled by racists?”

The first music video, however, that drew my attention to this prolific phenomenon of songs against the US’s new governing subject was a cover of Morrissey’s “Interesting Drug” (1989), released by the notorious OK Go:

This time OK Go does not flatter us with their usual acrobatic and meticulously choreographed video performance, but rather present plain white-on-black-text between brief seconds of footage and screenshots of “the bad people on the rise” now in charge of the US, images ready to become the memes and gifs of a resistance movement. The music video ends with an explicit call to action–“It’s a difficult time but fear and anger aren’t the answer. Work to make a better world” followed by a list of five civil rights organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Immigrant Defense Project and Planned Parenthood, headed by an unmistakable imperative: “Volunteer and donate.”

Discovering this song and video, I soon stumbled across yet another song that struck me first of all as a very clever and all too obvious marketing move, Green Day’s “Troubled Times,” which of course resonates with the band’s hit record “American Idiot” about the George W. Bush presidency.

“What good is love and peace on earth / When it’s exclusive.” In the visual style of traditional black and white newspaper collages—with splashes of red that summon Schindler’s List–the band animates the contemporary pandemonium of hatred, racism, sexism and plutocratic sadism to stage yet another traditional Green Day pop punk song, though one with a rather less disruptive, and much more forlorn note. I have to note a ertain awkwardness here, as the business model of lining up with this protest movement seems rather obvious, and many sections of these lyrics and the video’s imagery seems more cliché than genuine. Are these times really only structurally and anonymously “troubled? Are there no actual wrongdoers, criminals and hatemongers to be named, accused, and condemned? Roger Waters truly unexpected—and much more direct—recent live performance of “Pigs” in Mexico City in October 2016 comes to mind, with its massive projection of KKK & TRUMP-imagery as icons of hate – reinvigorating the political urgency present in a song from 1977.

Still, the song by Green Day might get airplay on nationwide rock radio unlike many of other songs of resistance, and by this it could actually succeed in its overstated mission.

The most aggressive and decidedly agitprop-productions come from Moby and Fiona Apple. Collaborating with Michael Wahlen, Apple recorded a chant for the massive Women’s March on Washington (and the many simultaneous marches occurring across the US and the world) the day after the inauguration:

With lines like “We don’t want your tiny pants / Anywhere near our underpants” Wahlen and Apple revive the protest chant traditions of the 1960s with its mean, challenging, and unforgiving humor.  Late last year Apple already released a joyful yet sadistic little piece in the style of a sentimental Christmas carol that keeps “Trump’s nuts roasting on an open fire (…) Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas: Donald Trump, fuck you.”

In contrast, Moby merges his 1990s rave skittishness with an unrepentant love for precisely-targeted guitar punk riffs in “Erupt & Matter.”  Original footage of demonstrations, resistance gatherings, and a selection of the absurd and terrifying authoritarian and nationalist figures of our time – first Erdoğan, Farage, Assad, then Duterte, Trump, Wilders, Le Pen, Petry, Hofer and many more – alternate with classic performance shots of Moby and his band The Void Pacific Choir, generating a sentiment of accelerating urgency: “WE DON’T TRUST YOU ANYMORE. WE DON’T TRUST YOU ANYMORE.”

But the anger against sclerotic oligarchies and a condescending establishment is ironically mimicked by exactly the most unsettling and authoritarian protagonists of various nationalist parties worldwide. Even as Moby’s aggressive protest chant becomes an infectious and intriguing earworm, does he render such a revolutionary impetus dubious?   Pondering this reminded me of the Atari Teenage Riot line from 1995: “Riot sounds produce riots.” (Atari Teenage Riot 1995)

In the first few weeks of January alone, several consortiums have launched protest song campaigns to ensure that songs like these will just keep coming.  On inauguration day, the platform “Our First 100 Days” was launched.  Here, one new protest song will be released on every day for the first one hundred days of the current president’s administration, with all profits raised from the sales of songs by groups such as PWRBTTM going, as their website states, “directly to organizations working on the front lines of climate, women’s rights, immigration and fairness.”  Paste Magazine expanded its “30 Days, 30 Songs” campaign for the long haul, offering up to 1000 Songs in 1000 Days— one song a day for every weekday of Donald Trump’s term.

However, as I write these last lines, the global public is remixing the resistance in its own lightning-fast ways. The recent public sucker-punch of white supremacist neo-Nazi Richard Spencer has already become a legendary object of meme culture.  Folks have synched this clip to multiple—and diverse—soundtracks that invite repeated viewings, from Celine Dion’s “My Heart WIll Go On,”  Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The USA,” Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” Pharrell Williams’s “Happy,” The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” to Frank Zappa’s “Black Page #2”. . .and the list continues.

Singing the resistance in the 21st century poses a truly complex task. Artists must sonically navigate a wide array of musical aesthetics—some geared toward more immediate public appeal, while others evoke more erratic and dissonant affects—and keep an eye toward combining sound with impactful media events and artifacts, while never forgetting to consider the critical question “How Does it Feel?”

 

This blogpost has its own playlist: click here

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Holger Schulze is full professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His research focuses on the cultural history of the senses, sound in popular culture and the anthropology of media. Recent book publications are: American Progress (2015), Sound as Popular Culture (2016, ed.) and Krieg Singen: Singing The War (2017, ed.).

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tape reelREWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

On Ventriloquism, Dummies, and Trump’s Voice – Sarah Kessler

À qui la rue?: On Mégaphone and Montreal’s Noisy Public Sphere – Lillian Radovac

The Noise of SB 1070: or Do I Sound Illegal to You? – Jennifer Stoever

July 11, 2016  

SO! Amplifies: Indie Preserves

soamp

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

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In July 2016, we, Scott Carlson and Norie Guthrie, ­­began the Indie Preserves blog, but this is actually not the best place to start. About six months earlier, Scott became concerned about the preservation skills of Indie and DIY music label owners and musicians. The thought of someone’s creative output disappearing in a flash from a hard drive sent shivers down his spine. After speaking with one label owner who was nervous about losing his stuff, we thought it might behoove us to see if others had the same fears.

“Sometimes [I’m] scared of how easy it would be to lose everything,” [Burger Records’s] Sean Bohrman told us. “All it would take is a fire, or a flood, or for someone to come in and take our equipment, and it’d be years of work lost.”

We created a survey to ascertain the types of materials and files that Indie and DIY labels save, and how they would gauge their knowledge of physical and digital preservation. Of the 500 labels contacted, we received responses from 168. Of that group, 60% were “somewhat to very concerned” about preserving their stuff.

There were two motivations for Indie Preserves, then. Firstly, we wanted to help respondents who wanted to learn preservation techniques (58% for digital and 63% physical). Secondly, a library colleague suggested that we present our findings at Austin’s annual SXSW festival. To make it there, we needed an online presence. Thus, our blog was born.

The main subjects of our blog fall in three categories: physical preservation, digital preservation, and interviews. Our physical preservation posts cover what items to save, what archival supplies to buy, how to organize your papers, where to store them, and items to avoid (like metal paper clips). Digital preservation, on the other hand, takes a bit more work. We wrote posts about embedding metadata in photographs, PDFs, and audio; the 3-2-1 rule; and issues to consider when using cloud storage. As for our interviews, we talked with archivists on the front lines curating music archives at their institution, DIY archivist and punk legend Ian MacKaye, and other preservation professionals like Jessica Thompson, Mastering/Restoration Engineer and Archival Specialist at Coast Mastering.

Essentially, Indie Preserves exists to provide advice and a chuckle while hammering home the reasons why our audience should listen. Early on, it was clear that we had caught the attention of library and archives professionals, but we were concerned that we had not connected with the labels.  We hoped that presenting at SXSW would help.

Panel

Indie Preserves Panel at SXSW 2016, All images supplied by authors

Our panel consisted of Jessica Thompson, Sean Bohrman of Burger Records, and us. The presentation went well, though our audience was a bit light. We did, however, manage to connect with audience members and fielded several questions afterwards.

Moving forward, we are putting together a book proposal that will explore music preservation from a variety of angles. Proposed contributions currently range from the actual restoration and preservation of recorded sound to citizen archivist projects to case studies about the preservation of music culture and “scenes” from particular cities. Along with our contributors, we will discuss music preservation in institutions, our Indie Preserves project, and the ways researchers use popular music archives.

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Norie Guthrie is an Archivist and Special Collections Librarian with the Woodson Research Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library. She has been building the Houston Folk Music Archive at Fondren Library. 

Scott Carlson is the Metadata Coordinator at Rice University’s Fondren Library. An active member of the independent record label community, he runs Frodis Records, an independent reissue label.

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tape reelREWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig:

SO! Amplifies: Shizu Saldamando’s OUROBOROS–J.L. Stoever

SO! Amplifies: Feminatronic

SO! Amplifies: Carleton Gholz and the Detroit Sound Conservancy–Carleton Gholz

SO! Amplifies: Josh Shepperd on the Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress (from FlowTV)

August 17, 2015  

SO! Amplifies: Feminatronic

Document3

SO! Amplifies. . .a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series by which we editors hip you to cultural makers and organizations doing work we really really dig.  You’re welcome!

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FEMINATRONIC began with a simple idea : link with other women who were–and are–creating electronic music, particularly in the Ambient / Space community and then spur each other on by being part of an all-female electronic artist podcast.

I quickly realised that there were more women creating electronic music out in the aether than I had known—and I was shocked by the lack of visibility on my part. If I didn’t know these artists—someone who follows the scene closely–how was our music getting to listeners?  especially with the lack of wider publicity?

After a short while, I quickly concluded that this perceived invisibility occurred in all genres of electronic music creation by women. At best, the electronic music scene is fractured and comprised of a myriad of genres. Across the Internet, playlists are heavily geared towards male artists. As an electronic musician myself, who just happens to be female, working in isolation from many other artists and genres meant I wasn’t really aware of the great female electronic artists out in the world. I had a feeling that there were others like me quietly creating music, soundscapes and sonic art, beavering away using a huge plethora of electronic means to create music, a sound, installations and a voice for themselves but they were unknowns to me and to a wider audience. Provoked by my sense of isolation and invisibility, I set up the website Feminatronic to get word out that there were and are, women from all genres of electronic music making, creating music in a variety of interesting ways.

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The site’s main aim is to highlight and promote women who create music and sound via electronic processes. My definition of “electronic music” has evolved from the original synth studio based electronic music to include sound art, installations, field recordings, noise, classical, electroacoustic and everything in-between. I designed Feminatronic as an inclusive site that would appeal to those interested in a huge range of genres, from Ambient and Space to Field Recording, DJing and EDM to Sound Installation and Experimental. The site features an A-Z catalogue of electronic artists who identify as female, as well as women behind the scenes, the producers, sound designers, and engineers who help make music possible.

In addition to keeping up the catalogue, Feminatronic shines a spotlight on as much electronic music, artists, news, events and sites as possible, via the website and social media (Twitter handle: @feminatronic; Feminatronic is also on Soundcloud, Facebook, and 8tracks). I believe strongly in collaboration through curation; therefore Feminatronic frequently reblogs articles and reviews from other sites, creating a chain reaction of posts and tweets that increases visibility and widens the audience for artists and the forums that feature them.

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Despite all the creativity that I have uncovered since beginning my work, only a fraction of female electronic artists ever get their heads above the parapet and get huge coverage, or even minimal props. Since beginning this site in 2013, I have discovered for myself so much talent and much of it remains well under the radar. Such continued omission gave me the idea to begin an ongoing series of posts called “Today’s Discovery,” a very effective way to give publicity to new releases, back catalogues, and artists both new and established. This series also creates more space for genres that don’t often get a wider audience and to challenge the perception of so-called “women’s music.”

 

One of Feminatronic’s most popular features is our “Sunday Mixes.” These are monthly playlists based on a theme that intertwine poetry and electronic music. This project allowed me to combine two things that I love and to explore the music of poetry and the poetics of sound, while introducing new listeners to electronic music and new readers to poetry. Past mixes explored themes such as “Voices,” “Forests,” and “The Moon.”

Alongside sites such as Pink Noises, Female Pressure, Her Noise, and Her Beats, Feminatronic is a small but vital cog in a growing movement to shed light on artists who create music and sound via electronic processes, artists who just happen to be women and who deserve to be seen and heard. My work is a voyage of discovery and as such, the site remains an on-going evolving project perennially under construction.

cropped-femfractal

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Aural Guidings: The Scores of Ana Carvalho and Live Video’s Relation to Sound–Maile Colbert

SO! Amplifies: Mega Ran and Sammus, The Rappers With Arm Cannons Tour–Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

SO! Amplifies: Mendi+Keith Obadike and Sounding Race in America–Mendi + Keith Obadike

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