‘70s compilation of female electronic music composers reissued on vinyl
A rare and influential compilation of female electronic music composers is being issued on vinyl for the first time in almost 50 years via Milan label Blume. You can listen the album it below.
First released in 1977 on Thomas Buckner’s 1750 Arch imprint, ‘New Music For Electronic and Recorded Media’ features seminal artists such as Laurie Anderson, Pauline Oliveros, Johanna Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Laurie Spiegel and Megan Roberts.
The original liner notes described the compilation as showcasing “an exciting, wide-open, free-wheeling approach to the medium of electronic music”, describing a new era in which composers are “no longer obsessively concerned with the agonizing, expressionistic, and purely ‘electronic’ (synthesized) sound formulas… Today we have composers willing to mix media and sonic materials in thoroughly inventive ways.”
For the reissue, one of three projects marking Blume’s 10 anniversary, music journalists and writers Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey have provided fresh sleeve notes, describing the album as “an astounding document of the landscape of experimental music toward the end of the 1970s”. They go on to explain the release is “the first collection of experimental music entirely dedicated to female composers, a number of whom were grossly under celebrated at the time, but have since gone on to be regarded as among the most important composers of their generation.”
Earlier this year, Laurie Anderson was honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 Grammys.
Earlier this year, electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire was honoured with a building named after her at Coventry University. Derbyshire was the subject of a documentary drama film titled Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes, which aired on BBC Four in 2021. The film featured original recordings by Derbyshire on the soundtrack, which was created by Cosey Fanni Tutti and released in digital and vinyl formats back in 2022.
