The book Pink Noises emerged from the website <pinknoises.com>, which was conceived in 2001 by Tara Rodgers, a scholar, composer and musician with a background in electronic dance music production. Rodgers decided to create <pinknoises.com> after observing the distinct lack of women active in the field of electronic music. On the website she states that she wanted to promote the work of women artists, create a resource on production methods that is more accessible to women and girls than many others, and provide an online space where issues of music and gender could be discussed.
As an expansion of the website, the book enables Rodgers both to include more substantial interviews with the 24 women DJs, electronic musicians, and sound artists she has met through her research, and to further elaborate her thinking about electronic music from a feminist perspective. The book is structured into chapters under headings such as ‘Time and memory’ and ‘Languages, machines, embodiment’, each containing four artists' interviews. Given the wide-ranging, intimate nature of the interviews, these broad categories seem, at first, something of an incongruent formality. But on further acquaintance it becomes clear that they do provide a useful way to highlight interconnected experiences within a diverse field.
Overall, the interviews offer rich, multi-generational accounts of lives spent creating in the field of electronic music. Rodgers continually directs her discussion towards issues such as the use of language – for example, highlighting the metaphorical militaristic terminology that could be said to compound divisive gender roles in electronic music (pp. 6–7). She credibly suggests that this language itself contributes to the one-dimensional history of electronic music. She desires at the very least to open up the potential for re-imagining the story of sound, technology and gender.
The interviews range widely, touching on the artists' personal histories, creative methods and practices, and asking whether and how the issue of gender informs their work. No doubt some might question the value of first-person reportage as a mode of academic discourse; occasionally we could have benefited from a bit more sense of critical historiography. But ultimately the belief Rodgers herself clearly conveys in the value of these first-hand accounts adequately makes a case for her method. Such stories, which otherwise would remain untold, undoubtedly contribute to a richer, more integrated sense of current-day practice and indeed open up alternative perspectives about what electronic music is and can be. To put it bluntly, the need for diverse role models should be obvious, not only to women and girls but to all who might dip into creative practice with sound. Along the way, the book does make a contribution to historical understanding even though it does not aim to fill in all the gaps of an exhaustive chronology. Rodgers is more concerned with exploring ‘how histories are contained and contested in movements of sound in the present’ (p. 5).
One of the signal values of the book is the multiplicity of practices it encapsulates. They range from the metaphorical, biological and chemical processes that inspire Carla Scaletti's object-oriented music programming to the evocative temporalities of death and rebirth that shape Eliane Radigue's compositions; from the boundary-pushing use of drum machines for much more than beat-keeping in Ikue Mori's fragmented rhythmic improvisations to the palette of vinyl records and styluses that Maria Chavez uses in her work as an abstract turntablist and improviser; from the prolific Bhangra music events of DJ Rekha to new gestural controllers for music performance such as the Lady's Glove, designed and constructed by Laetitia Sonami.
Again and again the book's presentation of such neglected variety implicitly highlights the degree to which the standard story of electronic music history has been weighted on the side of male innovation and production. As is the case for so many artistic practices, the canon of male composers and writers has prevailed to a striking degree. To remind ourselves that this unbalanced perspective is still operative today we might, with Rodgers, take a look at Modulations: Cinema for the Ear, a film history of electronic music produced as recently as 1998. On the website for the film is a list of 82 contributors – all of whom are men. The only shots of women in the entire film are clips of labourers in factories – images that only serve to compound the one-dimensional story.
Still, while most artists here recognise that such stark gender imbalance needs to be addressed, not all are equally comfortable with an explicitly feminist stance. For example, Beth Coleman (co-director of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy, DJ and multimedia artist), states ‘it's too bad, but necessary, that we still need to organise things under the title of “women in music”, it is too bad, but necessary, to have a big, bold placard …’ (p. 93). Kaffe Mathews (director of the award-winning ‘Music for Bodies’ research project) explains that when she discovered a lack of female electronic improvisers she says, ‘it was the first time it ever bothered me. And it's not a feminist thing, it's more to do with the fact that Jesus, it would just be more fun … we'd have something other than shaved heads and gray everywhere … we do it differently, we make music differently’ (p. 42).
Such instances vividly illustrate the difficulties inherent in any attempt to redress a deep imbalance in historical perspective, particularly given the contested status of a label like ‘feminism’ today. Perhaps it is always the case that when the protests begin, at first the voices seem too loud, the attitudes polarised, even aggressive. But in Pink Noises, the tone of the author is quietly astute, convincingly assertive. Ultimately, this is one of its main strengths. Rodger's committed engagement with her subject material renders her book an important reference point in the ongoing discussion of gender issues in electronic music and sound art. It does not take a hard-line, polemically feminist stance that might alienate potential readers, but rather is a celebration of the sheer diversity in the work of these creators, innovators and producers.
