Synopsis
Sisters with Transistors is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. The film maps a new history of electronic music through the visionary women whose radical experimentations with machines redefined the boundaries of music, including Clara Rockmore, Daphne Oram, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire, Maryanne Amacher, Eliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel.
A word from Tënk
How can I express my passion for the modular synthesizer? I would say it began with the album Ears by the young American musician Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. The first time I listened to this album, it felt like a moment of realization, an avalanche of sensations, sometimes bordering on an overflow of indescribable emotions. This discovery gave me with the opportunity to experience the presence and sensory envelopment of a multiplicity of sonorous textures, despite their machine-like and abstract nature. Through this experience, I felt the opening of an intergenerational dialogue whose words still eluded me. This dialogue has indeed existed for a long time. Here, it unfolds under the gaze of the director of Sisters with Transistors through a series of archives, interviews, and never-before-seen performances. In this context, the various appropriations of the electronic machine serve to subvert gender norms and destabilize a predominantly male artistic tradition, as exemplified by Clara Rockmore placing a few well-dressed men at the mercy of her instrument. Carried by the iconic voice of Laurie Anderson, the film traces a musical universe exploring the lineages of radical sonorities experimented with by a generation of female musicians in search of emancipation, whose technical innovations are duly celebrated by the filmmaker.
Julia Minne
PhD student and programmer
