9 to Know

This column highlights important stories, music, and more in the global female and nonbinary music communities.

by Geoff Shelton

These three superb autobiographies tell the stories of women as they struggle with societal norms to find peace and happiness in embracing their truths.

1. What Are You Doing Here?, Laina Dawes (check out our interview with Dawes on p. 50)

Our musical preferences can offer a sense of community, a sense of belonging to a tribe. But what do we do when our musical communities exclude us? In Laina Dawes’ paramount book, she reveals a personal and incisive story of the “dual-outsider dilemma,” with which black women who love heavy metal, punk, and hardcore are forced to reckon. Mixing her own autobiographical experience with interviews and survey results from her peers, this book makes the personal political. Dawes elucidates the long ignored history of black women artists and fans in these genres. She builds strong and intimate arguments for why this aggressive music offers a perfect and safe catharsis in a world that suppresses black women’s anger. The book asks us to face the cultural norms and built-in racism inherent in our musical scenes. It also reaches out a hand to other black women facing this predicament to say, “You belong.”

2. Art Sex Music, Cosey Fanni Tutti

What makes someone a pioneer? Is it how they were raised? Something they were born with? Or is it just being in the right place at the right time? Performance artist and musician Cosey Fanni Tutti gives us the chance to make up our own minds with this deeply detailed insight into her experiences, thoughts, and philosophies. As one of the game-changing forces behind the avantgarde musical group Throbbing Gristle, she helped open the boundaries of what was possible in music. Later, as one half of the duo Chris and Cosey (now Carter and Tutti), she helped define the electronic sound now called techno. She explores growing up on the rough streets of post-war Hull, U.K., with a repressive father and supportive mother, her work in performance art, stripping, pornography, and sound experimentation, the break-ups, the scandals, and the successes. Art Sex Music tells the story of a true artist that never let anyone tell her what was possible.

3. Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Carrie Brownstein

Before she went on to make a generation laugh with Emmy-winning TV show Portlandia, Carrie Brownstein was one of the three fierce musicians in the band Sleater- Kinney. In this beautifully honest and eloquent account of her life, Brownstein tells the story of an outgoing and precocious girl and the woman who decided to break-up the band at the height of its success. Brownstein’s book is a wonderful relief from typical rock memoirs and their self-aggrandizing reminiscences. At times almost self-deprecating to a fault, she uses masterful turns of phrase to illuminate the dark places of her experience.

THE PULSE

These podcasts feature female hosts who offer us the opportunity to learn more about the science and business of music.

4. Cadence, Indre Viskontas, indreviskontas.com

Cadence features wonderful stories at the crossroads of music and science through conversations with neuroscientists, musicologists, musicians, composers, and others. They discuss humans’ intrinsic relationship to music. It was created by cognitive neuroscientist and classically trained opera singer Indre Viskontas. She bridges the gap between the artistic and technical in her talks with some of the leading minds devoted to understanding the interactions between music and the brain. With two seasons under its belt and one more on the way, Viskontas gets the scoop on how we perceive rhythm, the relationship between music and memory, and how music can act as medicine. The perfect listen for anyone interested in looking under the lid of the piano (so to speak) to understand why these sounds resonate so deeply within.

5. Female Entrepreneur Musician, Bree Noble, femusician.com

Could you use a free, deep dive into some DIY business advice to jump-start or further your musical career? Then hit “subscribe” now to this unbelievably helpful podcast created by musician and musical entrepreneur Bree Noble. As someone who knows the day-to-day struggles of being a working musician in this business, she wanted to share the lessons she was learning with other women. Noble talks with many different professionals who offer immediately applicable advice—DIY public relations, working the YouTube algorithms, better strategies for your music merch, and more. There are also supplementary workshops, books, and other resources on the site.

6. Listening to Ladies, Elisabeth Blair, listeningtoladies.com

In 2016, New York’s Metropolitan Opera finally premiered its very first performance composed by a woman. In the 2015-16 season, the top 89 orchestras of the US presented only 2 percent of their programs with music composed by women. These facts alone, featured on the Listening to Ladies website, are a very clear reason why this podcast is a must for us all. Through musical excerpts and discussions with female-identified composers from around the world, Elisabeth Blair gives women an opportunity to share their creative ideas, processes, and struggles in the classical, opera, avant-garde, and new music circles. Blair continues to fight against a patriarchal culture, one conversation at a time.

LISTEN

With these albums, we can sink into the mess of our complicated human emotions and move forward together as a stronger collective.

7. Chamaleo, Never Sol

Czech songstress Never Sol, aka Sára Vondrášková, gently weaves the earthly and ethereal natures of the human condition into layers of voice and synthetic instrumentation in her release Chameleo. The songs, like the wonderfully surreal collages by Michaela Karásková that accompany the physical album, offer recognizable pieces in a novel construction. Vondrášková writes, produces, sings, and composes this exquisite music and creates a fully conceptualized experience of mortal fervor—a billowing, diaphanous fabric, backlit by the brightest moon.

8. Love Discipline, Debit

Mexican-born, Brooklyn-based Debit, offers her second release, Love Discipline. The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm inspired the heavy concept of this slim, five-song EP. Fromm writes about love as a practice, something active, not passive. It is a concept that Debit confidently furthers sonically, inviting us to engage with the harmonies and dissonances of her thickly layered designs. It is an all encompassing experience that offers few percussive rhythms to grasp or offer a sense of control. We must let go, feel her feelings in all of their complexity, and take the time to process our own.

9. The Drought, Puce Mary

You can describe Puce Mary’s The Drought as brutal, stark, honest. This latest release from experimental Danish artist Frederikke Hoffmeier may be one of the most perfect aural expressions of our current political and environmental state. It is a concept album that works as a post-apocalyptic vision of our potential near future and metaphorically as an emotional drought. Continuing in the traditions of industrial, noise, and power electronics, this confrontational palette is countered by her emotionally exposed narrative of acoustically clear spoken-word vocals. With The Drought, Hoffmeier presents the violent machine of our own making and the emotional intelligence to tear it apart.