Summer Nights. Cinema and Music Under the Stars

Sisters with Transistors

5PM-9PM

Performances by Merganzer and Annie Socoria

9PM-midnight

Co-presented with Debaser

Lisa Rovner, 82 minutes, United Kingdom, 2020. In English

Sisters with Transistors is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. Theremins, synthesizers and feedback machines abound in this glorious ode to the women who helped shape not just electronic music but the contemporary soundscape as we know it.

Avant-garde composer Laurie Anderson’s narration accompanies fascinating archival footage to trace the history of the technological experimentation of sound, the deconstruction of its parts and the manipulation into something altogether other. While traversing a range of musical approaches and personalities, from academia to outsider art and television commercials, we meet Clara Rockmore, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, Delia Derbyshire and Eliane Radigue, fascinating and enigmatic musical geniuses, and their peculiar way of hearing the world.