Film review: Sisters With Transistors celebrates the early female trailblazers of electronic music, at DOXA
Musical mavericks like Daphne Oram, Suzanne Ciani, and Laurie Spiegel found a new voice through technology
Britain’s Daphne Oram rips it up with the hulking technology of her day.
DOXA Documentary Film Festival streams Sisters With Transistors until May 16
KNOB TWIDDLING, switch flipping, and tape splicing has never looked so empowering as it does in Sisters With Transistors, a documentary that tracks the female pioneers of electronic music.
Lisa Rovner’s film doesn’t just revel in the cool-again retro tech that fuelled the avant-garde sonic experiments of female music pioneers in the ’50s, ’60, and ’70s. She frames their experiments as acts of women’s liberation—claiming new sonic territory, finding a distinct new voice, and literally wielding energy. As one subject asserts, “Technology is a tremendous liberator. It blows up power structures.”
Laurie Anderson—who else?—narrates the stories of musical mavericks like Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel. What comes through is how groundbreaking these women were—not just in the way they invented new forms, but the way they broke into a field dominated by men. You’ll love watching Britain’s Daphne Oram, prim in her ’50s dresses and horn-rimmed glasses, ripping it up on hulking tape-loop decks, or feeding squiggly line drawings into an “Oramics machine” the size of a bureau—an invention that converted art into electro-sound.
Many of the women here talk about the urge to find new media to express their voice—a form with a “more open set of dynamics”. Counterintuitively, these electro-rebels seize on technology as a sensual form, manipulating energy with their touch. Explains theramin virtuoso Clara Rockmore: “You can’t play air with hammers; you have to play with butterfly wings.”
Rovner amps all of this up with a dreamlike style that fits the material, blending closeups of mid-last-century tech—blips on screens, mad tangles of wires, fingers on synthesizer keys, and coffee-table-sized transistors—with a frenetic mashup of black-and-white footage illustrating the sights and sounds that inspire the composers here: London air raids, the Boston port, San Francisco streets.
That visual feel offsets some of the more intellectual insights. These women are brilliant, many of them academics who revel in the world of autoacoustic emissions and the emergent third pitch.
But the music they make is still mind-blowing to any listener, some of it eerily sci-fi, other pieces clearly laying the paving stones for the ambient, IDM, and trance sounds of today.
How badass are these women? One clip shows Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore protectively thrusting his fingers in his ears while an elderly Maryanne Amacher blows out the speakers.
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