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When we think of pioneers in electronic music, who comes to mind?
Perhaps Brian Eno, with his professorial vibes and conceptual strategies. Or Kraftwerk, with their avant-garde robot pop and future-obsessed lyrics. Or maybe, Nils Frahm or another contemporary-classical boffin, squirrelling away behind vintage synths and wowing concert halls with their unconventional way with a grand piano.
Whoever it is, the person you’ve thought of is almost certainly male.
Now a new documentary aims to give voice to “electronic music’s unsung heroines”.
Sisters With Transistors, by French-American first-time director Lisa Rovner and narrated by Laurie Anderson, maps out a revisionist history of machine music focusing on female pioneers, twiddling away behind early synthesisers and creating otherworldly soundtracks, often armed with little more than magnetic tape, scissors and a lot of patience.
Amplifying the Women Who Pushed Synthesizers Into the Future
Lisa Rovner’s “Sisters With Transistors: Electronic Music’s Unsung Heroines” spotlights the pioneers who harnessed technology to do more than “push around dead white men’s notes.”
Daphne Oram, a crucial figure of electronic music history, was the first woman to set up her own independent electronic music studio.Credit.Via The Daphne Oram Trust and Metrograph Pictures
By Lindsay Zoladz
April 21, 2021, 2:44 p.m. ET
When you hear the phrase “electronic musician,” what sort of person do you picture? A pallid, wildly coifed young man hunched over an imposing smorgasbord of gear?
Peggy Wells
Sisters with Transistors. “With two oscillators, a turntable and tape delay.”
Directed by Lisa Rovner, this archival documentary celebrates the women whose breakthroughs in early electronic music laid the foundations of modern styles – and whose work has been overlooked by many.
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th century shaped women and electronic music alike. Though
Sisters with Transistors begins in the 1930s with Clara Rockmore, a virtuoso theremin performer, it takes wing when it reaches the second world war. Experimental musician Delia Derbyshire cited the air raid sirens during the bombing of Coventry, UK, in 1940 as the beginning of her obsession with abstract noises. From the carnage of the old world, a new, electrified sound was born, one that women would be key to defining.
Sisters With Transistors Documentary
Sisters With Transistors film.Photo: Peggy Wells
The documentary film
Sisters With Transistors tells the untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers; remarkable composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today.
Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel are among the greatest pioneers of modern sound and we continue to feel their influence today, yet most people have never heard of them.
Written and directed by Lisa Rovner with voiceover by Laurie Anderson, the film has its Virtual Cinema release in the UK and Ireland, alongside a programme of special events and panel discussions, from 23 April 2021. The film will also be released in the USA by Metrograph Pictures on the same date.