Rodgers — Pink Noises

Author: Tara Rodgers
Title: Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound
Year: 2010
Type: Academic book (Duke University Press)

Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound is a book of interviews by the electronic musician, composer and scholar Tara Rodgers, published by Duke University Press in March 2010. It collects twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound, among them Éliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Ikue Mori, Pamela Z, Laetitia Sonami and DJ Rekha, and it extends Pinknoises.com, the website Rodgers started in 2000 to support women working in the field. Its publisher presents it as an account of electronic music practice told through women artists of several generations and backgrounds. Tiffany Naiman’s review describes an introduction concerned with history, gender and technology in electronic music. The book won the International Alliance for Women in Music’s Pauline Alderman Award in 2011. The reviews Duke quotes praise it, Betsey Biggs calling the introduction groundbreaking. Drew Daniel held that no book could resolve the gap between female difference and sonic difference and found the conversations ample compensation, and Naiman found the interviews at times journalistic.

Duke says Rodgers founded Pinknoises.com in 2000 “to promote women in electronic music and make information about music production more accessible to women and girls.”¹ Duke University Press published Pink Noises in March 2010, in 336 pages, describing it as offering “new and lengthier interviews,” a critical introduction and resources for further research.¹ Its twenty-four interviewees work across the field, in clubs and on radio, in composition and improvisation, in building instruments and in installation and performance; among them are Maria Chavez, Christina Kubisch, Annea Lockwood, Kaffe Matthews, Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Pamela Z, Chantal Passamonte (Mira Calix), Maggi Payne, Éliane Radigue, Carla Scaletti, Laetitia Sonami and Rekha Malhotra (DJ Rekha).¹ The interviews are grouped in six parts, from “Time and Memory” to “Alone/Together,” that move through space, nature, circulation, language and the body.¹

Naiman writes that Rodgers’s introduction announces the book as “concerned with how histories are contained and contested in movements of sound in the present” and “discusses the relationships between gender, technology, and electronic music cultures.” She contrasts the interviews’ talk of technology as discovery and expanse with the “macho control” that Rodgers points to in her introduction, and writes that Rodgers “was inspired by the legacy of Riot Grrrl,” the 1990s movement that made an inclusive space for women in American punk.² Betsey Biggs, in Women and Music, called the introductory essay groundbreaking “in its attempt to birth an alternate historiography for electronic music.”¹

The reviews quoted on Duke’s page praise the book, and Naiman’s review qualifies its praise. Duke’s page quotes Elizabeth K. Keenan, in Current Musicology, writing that through the interviews Rodgers makes “a convincing case” for reconsidering how women are represented, “as a central part of the history of electronic music,” and Biggs calling the book “an original and important contribution to discourse in electronic music, musicology, and gender studies.”¹ It also quotes Drew Daniel, in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, who called the book “a welcome rethinking of the theory and practice of electronic aesthetics.” Daniel wrote that the volume “cannot ultimately resolve” the questions raised by the incongruity between “female difference and sonic difference (and given their disjunction, how could it?),” and that the “exuberance, eloquence, and authority” of the conversations is “ample compensation.”¹ Naiman, writing in Ethnomusicology Review’s Sounding Board section in August 2013, found that it “functions as a corrective, working toward remedying the long silence,” and is “a valuable resource for women who hope to create electronic music and sound,” but that Rodgers’s interview questions “at times tend to feel journalistic and the results anecdotal.”² The International Alliance for Women in Music gave the book its Pauline Alderman Award in 2011.¹

Key contributions

• Twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound, from DJs to instrument builders, newer and longer than those on Pinknoises.com.
• An introduction concerned with how electronic music’s histories are contained and contested in sound, which Biggs read as an attempt at an alternative historiography of the field.
• An account of music technology through women’s practice, which Naiman reads against the “macho control” Rodgers identifies.

See also

• Electronic and Experimental Music — Thom Holmes’s survey of electronic music, first published in 1985
• Assembling a Black Counter Culture — DeForrest Brown Jr.’s 2022 history of techno as Black music