“So who here hasn’t had a chance to set this up?”
The eight women standing around the plastic table set near the center of the cavernous concrete space that is Portland, Oregon’s S1 Gallery scan each other for a response. After a beat, a young lady dressed in a crisp pinstriped shirt timidly raises her hand. Her reticence in responding may have something to do with the person asking the question: Erika Anderson, the renowned electronic artist EMA, who is here to teach a class called Intro to Synthesis. But mostly it seems to be about what she’s been asked to set up.
On the table in front of her and her fellow students are two square metal boxes, packed stem to stern with eurorack modular synthesizers. It’s a colorful array of inputs, outputs, buttons, dials, and sliders. Even after nearly three hours of discussion and hands-on training, for the first time user, there’s still that sliver of concern that one wrong move could make the whole array explode. That’s why, after calmly plugging in the power cords and flipping the switches that brings the modules to blinking life, this student looks slightly relieved but mostly elated to have made it happen.
Now everyone starts taking turns plugging in patch cables, teasing out low rumbles, minimalist rhythms, and squealing sine waves out of the gear, with Anderson and co-instructor Alissa DeRubeis asking the occasional leading question but mostly letting their students take over.
“It’s like I’m not even here,” says Anderson, “which is perfect.”
The synthesis class is just one effort made by Women’s Beat League (WBL) to help female and nonbinary gender Portlanders learn the software, hardware, and other skills necessary to start DJing or making electronic music. The group is among a recent wave of like-minded organizations including San Francisco’s Women’s Audio Mission and the Yorkshire Sound Women Network in the U.K., the classes being held at New York’s Lower Eastside Girls Club, and DJ collectives like Discwoman, Sister, Apeiron Crew, and more. All aim to overcome the unfortunately sizable chasm that keeps many women from joining the male-heavy fray of beat matchers and beat makers.
It all began, remembers Daniela Karina Serna, when she and fellow WBL co-founder Alyssa Beers were discussing their fledgling DJ careers. “We were talking about the feelings that come up about asking people for help and realizing that we could take it upon ourselves to make a community for people like us.”
“I had never tried to DJ in my life and was super content to just be a spectator,” Beers says. “But when I thought about the excitement of learning in an environment where I didn’t feel uncomfortable asking questions, where I didn’t have to feel patronized and could make a bunch of mistakes, and verbally be, like, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing,’ that naturally allowed the process to happen for me. I try to say I’m a Women’s Beat League success story. I started out not knowing how to do any of this to now DJing shows and doing stuff on the radio.”
Since that initial conversation between Beers and Serna last summer, the Women’s Beat League has grown quickly. Musician Felisha Ledesma joined the group and gave them a home base in her gallery S1, opening it up for events and a variety of classes, including a History of Dance Music lecture taught by Chicago DJ Black Madonna and a four-part Ableton workshop overseen by Christina Broussard, the Portland artist who spins and performs as SciFiSol.
The trajectory that Beers took—from self-described novice to regularly DJing local clubs like Holocene, under the name Nishkosheh—is an inspiring one, and her description of it is telling. While plenty of budding DJs and producers have no problem downloading a copy of Ableton Live or buying CDJs and getting down to business, many women are reluctant to try and join what has been a male-dominated, and often unwelcoming, scene. Even someone as accomplished as Anderson says that when faced with modular synths for the first time (“squatting at Don Buchla’s house,” she says, referring to the pioneer who created the Buchla Series 100, one of the first commercially-available synthesizers, in the early ’60s), she couldn’t bring herself to ask about how they worked.
“I just thought it wasn’t for me,” she remembers. “People tried to get me to learn, but I was intimidated. So, it’s almost emotional for me to teach a class like this. One of the things I tried to do is break down the vocabulary and say, ‘You know what a synthesizer is and you actually know what these things are, you just don’t know what the words for them are.’”
Women’s Beat League co-founders Alyssa Beers and Felisha Ledesma at a recent class; photo by Sam Loper.
Another barrier that WBL endeavors to break down is in pure accessibility. The admission fees for their classes are suggested only, and no one is turned away for lack of funds. With the exhaustive efforts of DeRubeis, they are about to open up a Synth Library within the walls of S1. While you can’t physically check out and take home a Moog SubPhatty or Korg volca fm, the idea is to let folks spend a few hours in the room messing about, seeking inspiration, and, most importantly, sharing their skills.
“The opportunity to collaborate in that space is so great,” says Ledesma. “Who knows what will happen? The thought that someone who maybe doesn’t play out will start a new project with someone else, that’s what makes me all tingly inside.”
At a time when Electric Daisy Carnival can get away with booking just five female artists on a lineup of 87, and Scottish producer Nightwave has her Boiler Room appearance met with a flurry of sexist comments from viewers, safe spaces like Women’s Beat League feel more necessary than ever. And the work that they’re doing is already changing Portland. Their classes are almost always full and their events, like recent appearances by footwork producer Jlin and German DJ Lena Willikens, tend to be packed with bodies. Naturally, then, the crew is starting to think even bigger, with more classes (including mixed gender installments of their music theory and synthesis workshops) beyond the walls of S1.
“I’d like to take Women’s Beat League on the road,” DeRubeis says. “There are DIY spaces like this all over the U.S. that are a second away from this sort of thing happening. We want to be able to let them know, you can do it.”
