In She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century, Helen Reddington questions the scarcity of women music engineers and producers as people who have always had a significant presence in music production. Thus, the book’s title rebuts Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” by reframing control as its central concern. Reddington considers the implications of control on women sound engineers and studio producers’ varied practices by claiming that “[a]ny form of recording, whether through writing, drawing, film or sound, raises issues of power that are centered on who is doing the recording and the implications of the archive, whatever form that takes” (4). Yet, women’s exclusion from the profession is still underexamined. Reddington points out how much discourse on dance music fails to address “how it can be seen as liberating for people of different genders and sexual orientation to dance to music...
Review: She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century, by Helen Reddington
Dr. Maren Hancock (she/her) is a Lecturer in Popular Music at the School of Performing Arts, University of Wolverhampton. A critically acclaimed professional DJ and musician for over two decades, Maren’s interests include marginalized communities in popular music cultures and music industry entrepreneurship. She has published several academic and popular articles on DJ culture, and her book Lady Lazarus: Confronting Lydia Lunch was selected for the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum and Library in Cleveland, OH. Currently, she is co-editing the first collection on Canadian DJ culture with Dr. Charity Marsh, We Can Dance If We Want To: Canadian DJ Culture Turns Up, and completing a scholarly monograph focusing on the voices of gender marginalized DJs in Canada, Stereotypes: Canadian Women DJs Sound Off.
Maren Hancock; Review: She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century, by Helen Reddington. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 September 2022; 34 (3): 155–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2022.34.3.155
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