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The book Pink Noises emerged from the website <pinknoises.com>, which was conceived in 2001 by Tara Rodgers, a scholar, composer and musician with a background in electronic dance music production. Rodgers decided to create <pinknoises.com> after observing the distinct lack of women active in the field of electronic music. On the website she states that she wanted to promote the work of women artists, create a resource on production methods that is more accessible to women and girls than many others, and provide an online space where issues of music and gender could be discussed.
As an expansion of the website, the book enables Rodgers both to include more substantial interviews with the 24 women DJs, electronic musicians, and sound artists she has met through her research, and to further elaborate her thinking about electronic music from a feminist perspective. The book is structured into chapters under headings such as 'Time and memory' and 'Languages, machines, embodiment', each containing four artists' interviews. Given the wide-ranging, intimate nature of the interviews, these broad categories seem, at first, something of an incongruent formality. But on further acquaintance it becomes clear that they do provide a useful way to highlight interconnected experiences within a diverse field.
Overall, the interviews offer rich, multi-generational accounts of lives spent creating in the field of electronic music. Rodgers continually directs her discussion towards issues such as the use of language - for example, highlighting the metaphorical militaristic terminology that could be said to compound...