Sisters With Transistors review – a gloriously geeky music doc

Laurie Anderson narrates this fascinating film about the female pioneers of electronic music

What a joy is a documentary that neither talks down to its audience nor diminishes its subject. Lisa Rovner’s Sisters With Transistors is an unapologetically geeky look at the female pioneers of early electronic music which veers fearlessly into the experimental end of the knob-twiddling spectrum. Laurie Anderson narrates a fascinating film that takes in, among others, theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore; a beatifically smiling Suzanne Ciani sensually stroking a suitcase full of wires; Éliane Radigue, engrossed in her minimal tonal experiments; and the great Delia Derbyshire, with the mathematical precision of her diction and her demure slingback tapping to a throbbing loop of noise.

Related: Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers

For viewing details, go to Modern Films

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by Wendy Ide via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sisters With Transistors: inside the fascinating film about electronic music’s forgotten pioneers

They turned drawings into symphonies and made black boxes sing. Why were they never given their due? The maker of a new film, full of revealing archive footage, aims to put this right

Wearing a black cocktail dress and a foil-bright silver headscarf, a woman stands in the corner of a drawing room performing The Swan by Saint-Saëns, while a group of men look on. Although the scene has a sedate Edwardian air to it, this is actually 1976. The woman whirls her red nails around a mysterious black box, making it sigh and lament, whisper and sing. This is Clara Rockmore, the first virtuoso of the theremin, and her audience – all there to learn – includes Robert Moog, inventor of the synthesiser.

A year later, aged 66, Rockmore would release her first album, recorded by Moog, 35 years after she made her concert debut on the instrument at New York’s City Hall, where she arranged spirituals for a black male sextet with composer Hall Johnson. Rockmore also toured widely with the bass baritone Paul Robeson in the 1940s, and turned down a request to perform on the spooky soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 thriller Spellbound, as she wanted her instrument to be valued, not treated like a novelty.

Some of them wanted to do nothing less than change the way people listened

Related: ‘It has never been more pertinent’ – Margaret Atwood on the chilling genius of Laurie Anderson’s Big Science

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian

Experience: I accidentally became a global fashion brand

People across the world were wearing unofficial merch with my band’s logo on it. I decided to cash in, but do it ethically

I’ve been playing and recording music since 2012. Working under my surname Boothroyd, I’ve gained a small committed fanbase through releasing on independent labels and performing live. But in 2015, I decided to give up touring after a final headline show at Milton Keynes Gallery. I’m a big fan of the Beatles, and much like they stopped playing live in 1966, I did the same, in order to concentrate on studio material. Also, I wasn’t getting many bookings – it wasn’t exactly Boothroydmania.

Five years later, having yet to come up with my Sgt Pepper, I was living alone in a caravan in Morecambe. One morning, I received a message on Instagram: it was a photograph of the Argentinian pop star Chule Von Wernich wearing a T-shirt with my name on the front and the poster for that final gig on the back.

Related: Experience: I carried a twin in each of my wombs

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by Peter Boothroyd via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sisters With Transistors review – an electrifying study of musical heroines

The unsung trailblazers behind electronic music are paid harmonic homage in Lisa Rovner’s enchanting documentary

Lisa Rovner’s superb documentary pays a deeply deserved, seldom-expressed tribute to the female composers, musicians and inventors from the brief history of electronic music. The focus falls on about nine or 10 women in the field, from experimental music pioneer Clara Rockmore, a Theremin maestro in bias-cut evening dress, through to the British composer and mathematician Delia Derbyshire (probably best known for co-creating the Doctor Who theme), up to Suzanne Ciani, the first woman to score a major Hollywood movie (The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1981) and her contemporary, composer and early software designer Laurie Spiegel.

Related: The 20 best music documentaries – ranked!

Sisters with Transistors is released on 23 April on digital platforms.

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by Leslie Felperin via Electronic music | The Guardian

Dawn Richard: Second Line review – joy and mess from a musical eccentric

(Merge Records)
The former Diddy collaborator brings Black female perspective to the fore in an ambitious collection of electronic sound

Dawn Richard has a buoyant track, Bussifame, on her sixth solo album, Second Line, which explains that the album’s title refers to a New Orleans funeral parade in which passersby are invited to join in and celebrate the dead person’s legacy.

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by Kemi Alemoru via Electronic music | The Guardian

Kučka on her debut album Wrestling, the electronic music ‘dudefest’ and turning down BTS

She’s worked with heavy hitters including Kendrick Lamar, ASAP Rocky and Flume – but now the Australian producer is writing for herself

Sunlight pours through the window of Laura Jane Lowther’s bedroom in Los Angeles, catching a gold record that hangs unassumingly in the corner. Recognising her input on 2015 hit Walk With Me from Australian duo Cosmo’s Midnight, the plaque seems like a lifetime ago for the Australian songwriter, producer and vocalist also known as Kučka (a moniker lifted from the Serbian slang for “bitch”).

Related: Baker Boy, Hiatus Kaiyote, Montaigne and others: Australia’s best new music for April

Related: Troy Cassar-Daley: 'I looked in the mirror and thought, stop it. You are destroying everything you love'

Kučka’s album Wrestling is out via Soothsayer/LuckyMe on 30 April

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by Jonno Seidler via Electronic music | The Guardian

The month’s best albums

Discover all our four- and five-star album reviews from the last month, from pop to folk and classical

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by via Electronic music | The Guardian

Bassnectar: EDM DJ denies allegations of sexual abuse and human trafficking

A lawsuit accuses the US producer of grooming two underage women and manufacturing and possessing child pornography

Two women have accused the EDM DJ Bassnectar of sexual abuse, human trafficking, grooming, and the manufacture and possession of child pornography in a new lawsuit.

On 5 April, Rachel Ramsbottom and Alexis Bowling filed a claim against the US producer, born Lorin Ashton, as well as his label, management, touring and charitable giving organisations.

Related: Sign up for the Sleeve Notes email: music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras

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by Laura Snapes via Electronic music | The Guardian

Iglooghost: Lei Line Eon review – enchanting electronic world-building

The young Dorset producer expands on the sonic assault of his debut with beauty, space and actual songs

Strange energies run through rural Dorset. Picking up on their irregular frequencies is 24-year-old producer Iglooghost, AKA Seamus Malliagh, a prolific laptop jockey whose latest output sounds a little like Boards of Canada remixed by PC Music. Ancient and hypermodern rub up against each other in his latest work, which also extends to detailed visuals; Iglooghost isn’t so much a musician as an overarching world-creator. His first album, 2017’s Neō Wax Bloom, supplied a sustained digital barrage; its ear-bleeding delights came with extensive lore whose complexity felt akin to that found in anime or gaming.

On Lei Line Eon, his second album, those shock-and-awe tendencies give way to more spaciousness and beauty – Big Protector is probably this album’s most eloquent and inviting portal. Elsewhere, keening violins lend a bittersweet timelessness to tracks that also draw heavily on trap and bass music. Iglooghost’s formerly punishing BPMs give way to atmospheres and tracks – such as Light Gutter, featuring a female vocalist called Lola – that might be mistaken for actual songs. This time around, the lore is, if anything, even more developed. There’s an entire website dedicated to the Glyph Institute, which seeks to document and “test-summon” the energy-beings – “hovering, drone-like organisms called Celles” – to which this music is tied.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi: 'Can you spot which of us is the rock star?'

As bandmate of musician Torabi, ex-snooker champ Davis is these days more about modular synths than big breaks. Now the odd couple of psychedelia have written a memoir

Steve Davis is waving a modular synthesiser at me. He’s 10 minutes early for our scheduled chat, and his music-and-book-writing compadre, Kavus Torabi, hasn’t logged on to Zoom yet, so Davis is showing me his favourite toy: a synthesiser without a keyboard. There are a lot of knobs and switches, and holes where you slot in sound modules.

“It’s not lost on me that this is a bit of a blokey hobby,” he says cheerfully. “I was checking out online demos about how to use these synths and I ended up watching soldering. A bloke soldering modules. But there was nothing else to do, so I watched it for quite a bit.”

You’re really on the seat of your pants. I have absolutely no knowledge of playing a rehearsed piece of music

When I’m with Steve, I feel like I’m a decent guy. I like myself when I’m with Steve

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by Miranda Sawyer via Electronic music | The Guardian

Malcolm Cecil obituary

Musician whose championing of the synthesiser helped shape a new sound for Stevie Wonder in the early 1970s

When Stevie Wonder met Malcolm Cecil at a New York recording studio one May weekend in 1971, he was holding a copy of Zero Time, the album of electronic music that Cecil and Bob Margouleff had just released under the name of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band. A couple of weeks away from his 21st birthday, Wonder was looking for a way to establish his musical independence. Cecil invited him in, demonstrated the newly developed Moog synthesisers with which they were working, and began a relationship that would help transform Wonder, already a successful soul singer, into an international superstar.

Cecil, who has died aged 84, was an English musician who had once been the double bassist in the house band at Ronnie Scott’s club in London. But it was his other vocation, as a recording-studio technician, that took him to New York and a partnership with Margouleff, a sound-effects expert.

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by Richard Williams via Electronic music | The Guardian