2020 Directed by Lisa Rovner
Think of early electronic music and you’ll likely see men pushing buttons, knobs, and boundaries. While electronic music is often perceived as a boys' club, the truth is that from the very beginning women have been integral in inventing the devices, techniques and tropes that would define the shape of sound for years to come.
Электросестры, 일렉트로니카 퀸즈 - 전자음악의 여성 선구자들, Электросёстры, Електросестри
Denmark
CPH:DOX
USA
AFI Fest
France
FIPADOC Festival
Luxembourg
Luxembourg City Film Festival
Spain
Punto De Vista International Documentary Film Festival
Canada
DOXA Documentary Film Festival
Israel
EPOS International Art Film Festival
Australia
Melbourne International Film Festival
South Korea
Seoul International Women's Film Festival
Australia
Ukraine
UKPG
USA
Australia
Canada
Denmark
France
Israel
Luxembourg
South Korea
Spain
UK
USA
Ukraine
The one trans musician featured (Wendy Carlos) has by far the least amount of screen time, limited to one Bach inspired piece. Suzanne Ciani interrupts to say this isn’t how electronic music should be, then Ciani gets another entire section to herself. It really dampened my enjoyment for the rest of the film.
(I am excited to hear the live music performances about to happen, following the break after the movie. Might cheer me up a bit)
On the one hand, I do really love this a LOT. I think it's a great place to start if you're curious about electronic music in general. It's a real showcase for the different philosophies among female electronic musicians, and it is absolutely WILD seeing some of them working with tape players, manually cutting and stitching tape. Truly incredible. I could have watched an entire biography about each of these women. I especially love Laurie Spiegel, who was very much about sharing and helping others make music.
On the other hand, this is extremely white and extremely Western-focused. It feels weird to not mention any Black artists or anything going on in Asia. Related: it is...really really really weird how…
•Laurie Anderson
•Clara Rockmore
•Suzanne Ciani
•Delia Derbyshire
•Daphne Oram
•Éliane Radigue
•Bebe Barron
•Pauline Oliveros
•Maryanne Amacher
•Wendy Carlos
•Laurie Spiegel
I really wanted to love this movie, and for the most part I did. But the erasure of Wendy Carlos's career soured it for me so much. At one point, Suzanne Ciani says that her score for the 1981 Incredible Shrinking Woman was the first one for a major Hollywood picture composed by a woman, and there wasn't another for 14 years later. When in fact, Carlos scored Clockwork Orange in 1971, the Shining in 1980, and Tron in 1982. I feel like they included Carlos as a really shallow attempt at representation, but including this line here without ever correcting it is basically admitting that they don't think Wendy Carlos counts as a female composer. This is made all…
Sisters with Transistors but no trans sisters, apparently!
Went into this film fully crossing my fingers for Wendy Carlos content, and then finally halfway through the film her name pops on screen with a big titlecard as all the other women's names have popped on screen, and I sat forward in my chair, and a modern artist praises how Carlos was able to recreate Bach entirely with a synthesizer, a news clip shows how her album is selling as many units as THE FUCKING BEATLES, 9000 vinyls a DAY, and then that's it.
She is never mentioned again.
Suzanne Ciani butts in in a voiceover, as Carlos effortlessly emulates a trumpet with a Moog in under 15 seconds, saying how…
The debut feature from French-American filmmaker Lisa Rovner is a hidden narrative of electronic music, told via the women who helped bring it to fruition. Narrated by avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson, a pioneer in circuitry-based music, it showcases about a dozen unsung innovators of electronic art, drawn from various musical styles and continents.
It's sewn together with some terrific archival footage, along with a few new interviews hurled in from the surviving subjects. It includes forerunners such as classical violinist Clara Rockmore's adoption of the Theremin in the 1920s, Daphne Oram, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and famed for her experimental drama effects to the importance of Laurie Spiegel's 1974 composition Appalachian Grove.
Rovner, who is currently living in…
obsessed with the fact that very smart women were collectively like.... music needs to sound more haunted
The women of Sisters With Transistors and the music they produce are so cool it's a shame the film doesn't match their standard. Feels disconnected, each woman not paying tribute to the others, so it has the vibe of watching various YouTube clips rather than a full project. The treatment of Wendy Carlos (introducing her, playing a short segment of her music, only for another musician to dismiss everything Carlos did and move on) leaves much to be desired. Worth it for the sounds.
Watched this mainly because I LOVE Delia Derbyshire (a pioneer in the field, the creator of the Doctor Who theme and some of the more unusual soundscapes that make those early stories pop), but in doing so discovered that the soundtrack for Forbidden Planet was also made by a woman. Fond memories of that film's eerie, haunting, alien soundtrack.
1st Lisa Rovner
As a primer on the female founders of electronic music, Sisters with Transistors is exceptional. It's always a pleasure to go into a documentary and finding you only know about a quarter of the material; Derbyshire, Ciani, Carlos and Barron are names I know quite well, but Daphne Oram and Clara Rockmore were complete unknowns to me, and I'm a huge fan of electronic music. Rovner's film goes a long way in rehabilitating these figures by highlighting their important contributions to the form and their unique artistic styles. Oram, with her graph-based Oramics, especially captured my imagination, though Laurie Spiegel's computer-software work is exceptionally interesting. I would have wanted a longer, more complicated narrative with perhaps more…
The subtitle to Sisters with Transistors on its poster is 'Electronic music's unsung heroines'.
To the surprise of nobody, every heroine from the formative stags of electronic music was and still is unsung. And will probably remain that way even beyond this documentary, while the likes of Henry and Stockhausen continue to get exactly the level of praise and reverence that they deserve.
It's sad that this documentary even needs to be made. Delia Derbyshire (about whom I'm watching a documentary tomorrow) and Daphne Oram, among several others covered in Lisa Rovner's film, should be household names. Whether you're a fan of electronic music or not, their work and influence is almost incalculable. Without them, there's…
☆"How do you exorcise the canon of classical music of misogyny? With two oscillators, a turntable, and tape delay."☆
One of the better music documentaries I've seen in a while, the fascinating Sisters With Transistors from Lisa Rovner in her debut feature tells the generally unknown story of the first women to create and explore electronic music. Like so many other aspects of history, it's assumed the dead white men were the first to do everything and that the lens is always shown through their eyes, but as she and narrator Laurie Anderson show us, when it comes to this new form of sound from the 1970s, the fairer sex was also there eight at the beginning.
