Electro Ladyland

There's this thing in the scientific community known as the Dave-To-Girl Ratio, and it stems from the fact that the ratio between men named Dave and women involved in university computer science schools quite often exceeds 1:1. While things aren't quite so uneven in the world of electronic music, there's certainly a disparity in the primarily male-dominated genre, which is actually not that uncommon across all styles of music in Australia.

“I think in Australia in particular, women are under-represented in music,” Carley Dickenson explains. “Q Music did a survey and of all the bands in Queensland something like 20 percent of (members) are women. I get asked all the time in interviews, 'Who did all the production for you?' and I have to explain that, yes I am the vocalist but I actually made all of the music as well. It happens a lot, I mean, Sister Bliss is a key part of Faithless but who knows about her? She's not as mentioned as other people in the group I guess.”

Lady Electronica will see Dickenson join forces with Donna Hewitt, Rose Carousel (aka Heidi Millington) and Michelle Xen to create a night of electronic music, created by female producers. But there's a lot more people behind the scenes that have been involved to make the show happen. Acclaimed AV artist Wade Marynowski will be providing visuals for the performance, and there have been some big name mentors involved since the beginning of the project. Dickenson says it was down to good timing that they were able to enlist the help of Wally De Backer (better known as Gotye) and Quan Yeomans from Regurgitator to offer some guidance on the project. Both producers in their own right, they were happy to offer their assistance and share some knowledge. While it might seem unusual that the mentors are not female themselves, this is once again indicative of a shortage of women in experienced, similar roles in the business.
Taking things a step further, Dickenson has developed some interesting technology to help the live performance elevate above being just a person onstage with a laptop.

“We're all developing our own interfaces to use with the show,” she offers. “I've developed some hand controllers, which I'm using to do looping and stutter affects on my vocals live. It's about trying to take what I do in the studio and put that in the live context. It lets me do glitch-type effects and syncopated effects with the beats. Michelle Xen is actually a visual artist as well and in terms of that aspect she has developed a light suit with LEDs that becomes part of the performance. We're all producer/vocalists so it's about trying to reconcile that as a vocalist and keep control over the entire sound as a producer.”

Dickenson says that her own experiences working in groups have seen her delegated to the role of vocalist primarily, even though that might not be all she wants to be doing. In fact, she pretty much wants to do everything.

“I never really thought of myself as a vocalist,” she says. “I always considered myself a composer. Then I started working with the guys and I became the vocalist, and I felt like I'd given up control of all these parts of the sound. So I realised I really needed to build my own thing. I started thinking about how I could build all the sounds, up myself – actually I think I'm just a control freak!”

Anise will be playing the following shows:

Saturday 10 November - The Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane QLD