Patrick Clarke
, May 27th, 2021 23:56
From exuberant pop to all-out brutality, via everything in-between, here are tQ s favourite albums and tracks of May 2021
I received my first dose of Pfizer vaccine yesterday, having heard from a friend of a friend of a relative of my partner that an old function hall in Woodford had some spares for walk-ins. When I got home I checked my emails and saw that I was invited to a gig. Typically, after a year and a half of waiting for such an opportunity, I m busy that day, but nevertheless if I were to stretch for a sign, it s fitting that it was the first day in weeks that the rain clouds that have been clinging over London for the last month finally went away, leaving a balmy blue sky in their place. Not to labour the point too much, but it feels like things might be getting better.
Dedicated to Ankersmit s friend and collaborator Maryanne Amacher,
Perceptual Geography is a wild trip into inner space, finds Daryl Worthington
“When the ‘events’ of May ’68 took place, suddenly everything went quiet. The masses had their fill of the ‘underground,’ and freedom had been expressed on the streets,” writes François Bayle in an essay in
Spectres: Composing Listening. Tracing the history of experimental music in France, he recalls the French protests of 1968 “sweeping away any desire to come back into an auditorium to listen to a concert of electroacoustic music.”
It was a temporary blip. Thomas Ankersmit’s
Perceptual Geography is acutely visceral, brilliantly dynamic electroacoustic music – it even had its live premiere on the Acousmonium, the diffusion system designed by Bayle. When more forces are competing for our attention and our time increasingly enclosed, the piece’s rendering to CD and mp3 also provides a conduit to a temporary, p
Sisters with Transistors. Photo: Peggy Weil. Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures.
Such care is taken with the visual and aural elements of Lisa Rovner’s
Sisters with Transistors, a new documentary profiling women composers from the early days of electronic music, that watching it feels more like observing a cinematic poem than a cut-and-dried work of nonfiction. Featuring a voice-over by Laurie Anderson alongside decades’ worth of rare archival footage, the movie examines the careers of ten women Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Wendy Carlos and the gender disparity that has led to so many of them being overlooked, forgotten, or outright erased from the history of electronic music. The relationship between art, humans, and machines is one I find constantly fascinating, and
Rolling Stone Menu ‘Sisters With Transistors’: A Brief History of Electronic Music’s Unsung Pioneers
80-minute documentary is a much-needed spotlight on women like Pauline Oliveros and Suzanne Ciani, despite significant gaps in the story it tells
By
Electronic music or, as we think of it today, most popular music is so taken for granted that it’s easy to forget its original pioneers were iconoclasts of their time. Lisa Rovner’s new documentary
Sisters With Transistors, about the women who expanded the technological and artistic possibilities of the form during the 20th century, presents those forebears with grace, accessibility, and a touch of the avant-garde.