3rd Berlin Biennale, 14.2.–18.4.2004; Kevin Blechdom, Peaches, Chicks on Speed, 2003; courtesy Chicks On Speed Records/Disko B, XL-Recordings/Zomba
3rd Berlin Biennale, 14.2.–18.4.2004; Christiane Erharter, XX01, 2003; courtesy Christiane Erharter, installation view
For some time, it has been predominantly women who, with decidedly performative approaches, have provided the most interesting stimuli in electronic music and who have deconstructed gender clichés. Nearly all of these projects have in common considerations of how electronic music can be presented differently, as well as references to the aesthetic of punk and its disrespectful practice of do-it-yourself, which replies to "Are we allowed to do that?" with "Everything is possible!"
Berlin, with its past in music history, offers a fitting stage for this, and contemporary female musicians connect to a pop culture tradition marked by innovative female musicians and organizers.
These women’s contributions can be read as a chapter of music history in which female musicians have, since the 1970s – from punk, through the Riot Grrrl movement, up to the present – made use of deconstruction, subversion and affirmation as strategies to turn gender relations in music upside down, to work on an alternative to male-dominated guitar and computer music and to write their own (feminist) history.
Part 1 of HUB Sonic Scapes, entitled Re-Punk Electronic Music! contextualizes the activities of individual arts and shows the continuity existing between contemporary work and that of the late 1970s. By means of music, album covers, drawings, texts and videos, an archive of female strategies of representation in music, information and entertainment is fused together.
Second part of HUB Sonic Scapes: Performance Jam
