Thurstay, July 7 2005, 20:00

Re-Punk Electronic Music!

sound-lecture and performance

by Christiane Erharter (Austria/Norway)

For some time it was predominantly women, who with decidedly performative approaches have provided the most interesting stimuli in electronic music simultaneously deconstructing gender clichés. Nearly all of these projects have 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!”

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.

The installation “Re-Punk Electronic Music!” by Sonja Eismann and Christiane Erharter contextualized the activities of individual artists and showed the continuity existing between contemporary work and that of the late 1970s/early 1980s. By means of music, album covers, drawings, texts and videos, an archive of female strategies of representation in music, information and entertainment was fused together.

Erharter will present the sound-lecture, that accompanied the installation and also music and interviews by the artists, which were the part of the the installation.

The installation “Re-Punk Electronic Music!” was developed for the hub Sonic Scapes at the 3rd Berlin biennial for contemporary art in Berlin (Germany), February-April 2004. Modified versions of the installation were shown at the Ladyfest in Vienna (Austria) in June 2004; at the festival VAE8 - Octavo Festival Internacional De Video/Arte/Electrónica in Lima (Peru) in October 2004; at the festival Überdreht Spin doctoring, Politik, Medien in Bremen (Germany) in March 2005.