Eclectic Electronic Soundscapes
In March 2020, TQ zine ( tqzine.blogspot.com/ ) put out a call for music related things for an upcoming special edition in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. I thought it might be a good chance to get the word out there to a wider audience that there are many female identifying artists creating ” left field, NAU – No Audience Underground “music. To be honest, some of us have had no audience at all and is one of the original reasons why I began Feminatronic 8 years ago.
That aside, I decided to take one of the playlist themes I use here and create an 8Track list with links to tracks and artists based on my then recent listening, from some of the Covid -19 hit countries around the world. Of course, we all know that now in September 2020, this list could be so much larger and would probably include everyone I follow here. In lieu of that here’s the link to who I am following on Soundcloud, which I add to regularly – https://soundcloud.com/feminatronic/following
As with all the playlists there are no preferences. They are jumping off points to discoveries. They are not meant to be definitive. Just let some of the tracks play onto the next….follow up on “sounds like”….see who’s following, many artists follow other artists….
Artists on this playlist are Poulomi Desai (UK / India), _blank [also known by human alias: Blanca Rego] (Spain ), Marta Zapparoli (Italy / Germany), Lương Huệ Trinh (Viet Nam), Todas Las Anteriores (Mexico / USA ), Laughing Ears (China ), Ch. Webster (France ) and Yuko Araki(Japan).
As a final note, I was asked if I would continue to contribute 8Track playlists to TQ for both publication and online and agreed to do it. The playlists are primarily but not wholly electronic artists, as I listen to so much that doesn’t quite fit the genre. I do try and include as much as I can on Feminatronic but some things stretch the general criterias I work to. This is where creating my 8Track choices for TQ has been liberating, because there I can include these artists and sounds, although I am sticking with two general rules. Firstly, to focus on artists that create music who mostly, but not exclusively, just happen to identify as female. Secondly, my listening suggestions fit loosely into the NAU soundworld, although there may be some leeway with this, but I think it’s always good to expand your listening horizons.
There’s a memorial aspect to acousmatic sounds that can lead towards a conceptual end-point usually avoided by Schaefferian humanism: the severing of the sound from its source is a kind of death. Echos + is an in-depth exploration of their afterlife, the composer turned into a caretaker (without the apocalyptic overtones of the famous project of the same name) dedicated to the consideration of sounds’ new state. Like a written document, the recording marks an aural element’s transition from life into its other, a technological aid that turns preservation into an art of re-signification. To care for these sounds in death is not to simply reproduce them, nor is it to circumscribe them in a narrative about mourning for the loss of a certain world, but to help reconfiguretheir meaning in a context that is no longer their own.
Feminatronic 
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