One persistent, hydra-headed problem of warped gender perception is as deep as the internalization of the bias that perpetuates it. The media underrepresentation of women normalizes pre-existing prejudice. Half of the population is visible in disproportionately smaller measure, bolstering the invisible barriers that still crudely affect significant female contributions. Factually, the male to female ratio in the human species is approximately 1:1. Fisher’s principle explains this as evolutionary stable strategy, and no one would argue with nature’s egalitarian wisdom. Sadly, a lack of similar wisdom in the social sphere makes gender inequality, female marginalisation and invisibility persist as pressing issues in 2017. On the surface of the 21st century’s supposedly liberal art world everything seems fair, but scratch it with a simple fact check and the results are alarming. Collective Female: pressure recently offered a FACTS study reflecting this omnipresent issue in the electronic music scene and reopening a much…
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A lean, blue-hued futuristic city adorns the cover of Ikonika‘s Distractions, her first album in the last four years. It’s not clear whether the processor-like structures depict a city or the inside of a computer, which positively describes the old metaphor of cities as relentless modern machines. This place, however, is not overbearing and it does not attempt to overwhelm your senses – on the contrary, it is quiet, almost ascetic, at least in comparison to the usual cyberpunk images of future electronic cities. The music is equally lean and direct, a reduction of the relentlessly mechanical to its simplest emotional keys: great beats, short experimental voice clips, a sense of echoing space at slow speeds and considered paces. The distractions within an ordered, functional machine are not the product of spectacle but of something much more low-key, a reductive passion in which speed and light do not…
Editors’ note: As an interdisciplinary field, sound studies is unique in its scope—under its purview we find the science of acoustics, cultural representation through the auditory, and, to perhaps mis-paraphrase Donna Haraway, emergent ontologies. Not only are we able to see how sound impacts the physical world, but how that impact plays out in bodies and cultural tropes. Most importantly, we are able to imagine new ways of describing, adapting, and revising the aural into aspirant, liberatory ontologies. The essays in this series all aim to push what we know a bit, to question our own knowledges and see where we might be headed. In this series, co-edited by Airek Beauchamp and Jennifer Stoever you will find new takes on sound and embodiment, cultural expression, and what it means to hear. –AB
Feminatronic 
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