Despite their foundational contributions, women in electronic music have been systematically written out of its history. Increasingly in the last few decades, feminist scholars and artists have spearheaded efforts to rewrite normative renditions of experimental, electronic, avant-garde music history while disclosing the mechanisms that have presented and upheld its incomplete narration as a neutral, unbiased canon. Within this larger reckoning, Switched On: The Dawn of Electronic Sound by Latin American Women is the first book to place a dedicated focus onto the female pioneers of electroacoustic sound in Latin America. Through its subject matter and critical interventions, this edited volume aids in destabilizing the canonic history of twentieth-century electronic and experimental music, showing that it has not only prioritized male protagonists, but also the experiences of people in Western Europe and North America. Switched On unveils the nuances within this double axis of marginalization; constituted alongside gender dynamics, but also with regards to the global cultural imaginaries, discourses, technological access, and cultural infrastructures that steadily shaped and maintained unequal power relations between the Global North and its peripheral others.

Through different methods and a shared vision and aesthetic predilection, editors Luis Alvarado and Alejandra Cárdenas have spent decades intervening in the historical, conceptual, and aesthetic framing of experimental and alternative music emerging from their native Perú and its neighbouring countries. Alvarado most notably does this by managing independent record label Buh Records, which in the last few years reached international clamour for vinyl pressings of (often previously unreleased) experimental, avant-garde music – many of such recordings are referenced in this book. Alejandra Cárdenas, known artistically as Ale Hop, has spent more than twenty years as a participant of underground, experimental music scenes. A sound artist, historian, and PhD candidate at the Berlin University of Arts, she founded the editorial platform Contingent Sounds to foster new avenues of collaboration with artists, researchers, and activists via text and visual art first through the ‘Border Listening/Escucha Liminal’ volumes, and now through Switched On.

In organic fashion (which I invoke to mean both harmonious inevitability and Gramscian grassroots, community-oriented, intellectual work), Alvarado and Cárdenas emerged as the perfect nodes to bring to life this collaborative scholarly pursuit. They conceived Switched On as a ‘space for intergenerational dialogue and a meeting of aesthetics’ (p. 21) where contemporary women-identifying sound artists, writers, and researchers could shape avenues to appreciate the female sound creators who inspired their very own relationships with music experimentation. Switched On does not follow a traditional peer-review process; its knowledge production reflects alternative models for validation of knowledge rooted in community expertise. Because it explicitly addresses research practice and epistemologies while developing tools to level hierarchies of power and control in research relations, this book exemplifies a ‘feminist methodology’ that provides ‘the outline for a possible alternative to the distanced, distorting, and dispassionately objective procedures of much of social research’.Footnote ¹

Switched On models new methods of feminist research which emphasize the importance of intimacy and community, care, and repair.Footnote ² These approaches act against academic gatekeeping, which has been criticized for stifling feminist research due to its overtly political natureFootnote ³ and its relentless pursuit of perspectives marginalized from the knowledge-building process.Footnote ⁴ Rather than ‘passive spectators’, Alvarado and Cárdenas assert in the introduction of the edited volume, the authors participating in this publication are ‘part of the very fabric of this history, as active artists and instigators who have shaped the conversation about gender, music, and technology in Latin America over the past years’ (p. 30). Through different kinds of contributions, each author helps to recuperate a countercultural past once hidden, that always belonged to them.

Honouring the multimodal nature of the work celebrated inside its pages, Switched On is comprised of different kinds of texts. There are rich scholarly pieces with theoretical contributions to musicological work and sound studies: chapters such as the ‘Foreword’ by the editors which provides the necessary critical bearings that are echoed within the chapters; Chapter 3, where Susan Campos Fonseca and Susana Sánchez Carballo use Pauline Olivero's idea ‘the skin listens too’ to develop a framework to uncover the ‘sonic scars’ (following Pauline Oliveros) of cis women, trans, and non-binary people working with sound in Central America (p. 87), inviting us ‘to think of the works of these artists and their sonic-technological practices as acts of healing’; and Chapter 5, where Marcela Laura Perrone applies an affective theoretical approach to study the work of Argentine electroacoustic composer Nelly Moretto.

The strongest and most impactful chapters effectively link historical accounts with theory and method. Chapter 1, written by musicologist Daniela Fugellie, and Chapter 9, by cultural historian and media artist Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda, particularly stand out. Fugellie examines several radio dramas composed by German–Chilean artist Leni Alexander (her librettos, sound collages, source recordings, and editing techniques) and the themes and cultural identifications she explores with them. Invoking Alexander's own appreciation of these works as ‘vehicles of memory’ (p. 40), the author explores the connection between different radio dramas with the composer's own lived experiences with exile, migration, religious persecution, and diasporic cultural belonging (Alexander escaped Germany with her Jewish family in 1939). With insightful analysis, Fugellie discloses how Alexander's exploration of personal memory (through the diverse sonic and textual techniques deployed in her radio dramas) serve as vehicles for collective memory to deploy affective responses and maintain a dense remembrance of the human rights violations that unfolded during Chile's most violent dictatorship. Aceves Sepúlveda engages with the work of Mexican composer Alicia Urreta in Chapter 9. Her journey starts with a black and white photograph where Urreta is posing among others in a group portrait, out of focus and looking away from the primary camera. The photograph, dense in its metaphors, inspires Aceves Sepúlveda to ‘recover’ the story that should follow Urreta's gaze, the one that recognizes her wide-ranging contributions to dance, film, theatre, and musical compositions. In doing so, the author deftly theorizes around ‘acts of recovery’, showing that these are not an end but ‘a starting point from which to offer an alternative route to understanding the history of sound in the arts outside of its masculinist origins’ (p. 177).

Aceves Sepúlveda's framework of recovery helped me better appreciate other chapters in the book that privilege historical accounts of composers’ situated experiences and thoughtful explorations of their repertoire over more conventional modes of theory-making. Before we can engage in robust musicological or social-theoretical analysis, a more immediate and urgent level of work is required, one that this book intentionally undertakes. It involves uncovering the very existence of the experimental composers it honours and performing the archaeological and archival labour needed to situate them and their musical practices in history. This is a stage of scholarship that precedes, and ultimately enables, future theory-making. No one today needs to ‘discover’ John Cage in order to theorize around his aesthetics; by contrast, for the musicians featured in this volume, visibility itself remains a political and epistemological task which each chapter contributes to in its own way.

There are several ‘interludes’ across the edited volume which more directly act as that ‘space of intergenerational dialogue’ Switched On was modelled after. Each of these short interventions is a platform where contemporary protagonists of experimental sound art engage with the work of their predecessors in intentional, critical, sensitive, and often vulnerable ways. ‘I listen not only with my ears but through my neck’, writes Constanza Castagnet about FY MOR (1991) by Elsa Justel. Skilfully, she describes her sensorial connection to Justel's piece stating: ‘the sounds assert their autonomy, some dramatically close and others, elusively, distant. All are in perpetual motion’ (p. 105). Dissecting Di/Stance (1982) by Vania Dantas Leite, Cristina Collazos claims: ‘I feel that Leite occupies the sounds as if they were materialities that can almost be touched. She takes these sound matters and manipulates them, has fun with them, rummaging in the ears of those who listen to them’ (p. 188). Each interlude is completed with a contextualization of each author that is constituted along three main questions (around their backgrounds, artistic practice, and engagement with technology). This thoughtful intervention gifts us a closer relation to them while foregrounding their ongoing involvement in this larger history they are helping reconstruct.

There are moments in Switched On where the intergenerational dialogue it fosters is not merely metaphorical or asynchronous. Several interviews included in the volume capture constructive exchanges between women of different generations who jointly reflect on their experiences as intellectuals, artists, and performers navigating changing technologies and social dynamics. Providing space for these first-hand testimonies models an alternative mode of theory-building, one that aligns with Switched On’s collective project to challenge biased historical narratives and to confront issues of representation, exoticism, and exceptionalism. Through the care with which their interlocutors evoke their wisdom and experiences, figures such as Jocy de Oliveira and Beatriz Ferreyra (experimenting with electroacoustic sound since the early 1960s) or Oksana Linde (whose 1980s compositions were released for the first time in 2022) offer moving reflections on their struggles for cultural legitimacy and their commitment to sonic experimentation. Each author (Marcela Lucatelli, Isabelia Herrera, and Natasha Tiniacos, respectively) carefully describes the composers’ work and significance, often revealing their own artistic or affective connection to them. The testimonies of these composers, some now nearing their ninetieth year, deepen the book's offerings while reminding readers that many of those honoured in Switched On received their long-deserved recognition only belatedly, if at all. Women such as Leni Alexander, Jacqueline Nova, Nelly Moretto, and Renée Pietrafesa Bonnet live on through the resonant memory of their art and the listening paths they carved for future generations.

In its interventions, Switched On aids in larger efforts to examine electronic music as a space where normative gendered associations around culture are historically sustained. The authors who ignited a push against a ‘patrilineal history of electronic music production’Footnote ⁵ from the Global North galvanized critical and reparative reckonings with biased presentations of music history that expanded across genres throughout classical, traditional, avant-garde, and popular music. But from their place of enunciation, they often missed examining the deep ties that biased gendered constructions have with (white) imperialism and its epistemologies, issues of technological access, infrastructural dispositions, or with the longstanding discursive and oppressive designs of coloniality and modernity. In Central America, for example, Susan Campos Fonseca and Susana Sánchez Carballo note that armed conflicts and natural disasters left the artistic community with little access to the technological resources needed to both create sound technological projects and to properly document them (p. 83). One of the most pressing contributions in Switched On is thus the meticulous and creative archaeological work of many of its pieces. Several authors were tasked with sharing important stories that were never told, uncovering a past that was not immediately accessible, treasures awaiting to be found. A work of ‘recovery’, harkening back to Aceves Sepúlveda, foregrounds ‘that something has been previously ignored, silenced, or excluded by a hegemonic and patriarchal version of history and its archives’ and challenges us to ‘read and listen to the tensions between recognition and oblivion across different generations and different geographies’ (p. 177).

Addressing many of these exclusionary dynamics explicitly, Switched On builds a vital stepping stone from which to defy narratives of cultural domination which extend beyond gender lines, offering a framework to dispute the passive space that the Latin American region – as an enclave of colonial and neocolonial control – was pushed to occupy within the global narratives of experimental music-making. In doing so, it expands lessons brought about in the edited volume Experimentalisms in Practice: Music Perspectives from Latin America, which showed us how ‘despite their marginalization from mainstream narratives, Latin American experimentation has taken a pressing role as an anticolonial and decolonial strategy’ and a space ‘for advancing decolonizing projects’.Footnote ⁶ Through living testimonies, sensible descriptions of sonic phenomena, empathetic storytelling, and rigorous archival work, Switched On creates new rubrics for understanding complex musical formations which did not fit the aesthetic, cultural, or temporal parameters that the West had fixed for its former colonies; it provides us with a fresh schema to understand and value experimental culture from the Global South through a more factual, inclusive, and transformative historical account of counterculture, resistance, and sound-making.

Recovering the larger histories of experimental and popular music styles from where Latin American culture and women have been historically excluded can have transformative implications. Due to the multiple registers and formats through which it engages with sonic forms, Switched On amplifies its reach. The book will surely appeal to scholars working within popular and experimental music, researchers of science and technology studies, historical musicologists, composers, and those writing within the interdisciplinary domains of sound studies; it may also draw people working within critical regional studies and postcolonial theory, and scholars examining the lasting grip of coloniality and modernity in Latin America; naturally, it will also attract feminist researchers interested in community-based documentation, sound-making, and independent cultural production. But with the same ease, this book will appeal to electronic music performers and practitioners, curious listeners and avid supporters outside of academia – those who will most directly benefit from the discovery of these stories. Switched On is a powerful historical document with the potential to empower future generations of disruptive sound-makers in Latin America which through accessing the work of their sound-tinkering ancestors may now understand their curiosity, explosive ingenuity, and hunger for sonic discovery as part of a larger ongoing history that is neither just male, nor just white, nor exclusively Anglo/Euro-centric.