Women, non-binary, and transgender artists are not only active as composers and musicians in electronic music. As curators, concert organizers, and blog activists they are also constantly developing new projects, initiatives, and concepts and ultimately contribute significantly to the great diversity of the current music scene. For this panel, several artists participating in this year’s festival as well as researchers and organizers have been invited to discuss current feminist ideas, strategies, and experiences in the field of progressive pop and the contemporary avant-garde. The objective is to provide a cross-genre platform for displaying the scenes’ diversity and strengthening networks between participants on national and international levels.

Florencia Curci is a sound artist and curator based in Buenos Aires. Her work focuses on noise and rhythms as relative concepts that can configure perception, communication, and subjectivity. In her installations, sound pieces, and performances she proposes alliances with technological, animal, and environmental beings to explore collective sonorities. Her musical career began in 2009 playing drums in the experimental noise trio COSO (Argentina). Since 2017 she has been the director of CASo (Centro de Arte Sonoro) in Argentina.

Tatiana Heuman works in the fields of sound, movement, and media arts. Her current interests are constructing and maintaining spaces for the exchange of narratives and rituals that favor presence and care. From this perspective, she actively develops workshops that combine Deep Listening, sound creation, dream sharing, and somatics. Her musical career began playing trumpet and drums with the free improvisation band Ricarda Cometa around 2009. In 2014 Tatiana Heuman started her solo electronic music project. She lives and works in Berlin.

Lenka Kočišová aka Akkamiau is a sound artist and composer. She plays live on semi-modular synths, from experimental jams to techno sets, releasing on the label DETUND. In 2022, she obtained funding and art directed the a/v movement performance »VOLTAGE 2.0«, and consequently released the soundtrack as the album »Xiao« in 2024. She runs »Impromptu Impulses«, a radio show on Freie Radios Berlin 88.4 FM that is focused on improvisation.

Katharina Ott-Alavi is a musician, freelance event manager, project manager, and initiator of the FLINTA music collective GRRRL-NOISY and musicBwomen*, among others. She plays guitar and sings in the band 24/7 DIVA HEAVEN and works as a freelance writer. She lives in Brandenburg.

Eugenia Seriakov is a visual anthropologist and radio host, and DJs under the name Cate Hops. With an academic background in visual and media anthropology, her ideas revolve around the concept of space as a social practice. Musically, she embeds herself in the Berlin bass scene and fuses ambient, early roots reggae and futuristic sound patterns from all areas. With the ongoing project »Sound System Culture: On the Radical Roots of Rave«, she initiates events in which the audience is actively involved. As a researcher, Eugenia Seriakov also gives lectures.

Lola Tseytlin is a passionate sound engineer. During the last decade she dedicated her life to empower and educate other FLINTA* to change together the male-dominated sound industry. Lola Tseytlin is a founding member of Soundsysters, a FLINTA* sound collective which is active since 2013. Soundsysters give workshops about setting-up PAs, DJing and recording. During the last decade there were hundreds of workshops throughout the world with the main focus on technology empowerment and feminist teaching methods.

* German abbreviation that stands for »Frauen, Lesben, Intergeschlechtliche, nichtbinäre, trans und agender Personen«, meaning women/females, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people.

Stellan Veloce is a Sardinian multi-instrumentalist and composer. Their music focuses on timbral research, iteration, and modulations of sound densities. Their background in traditional Sardinian music provides an important subliminal inspiration in their work. In addition to performing live, they compose music for ensembles and for dance performances. Since 2018, they have collaborated regularly with Sheena McGrandles and Neo Hülcker. They occasionally work in the pop music sphere, most recently with pop icon Peaches. They live in Berlin.

As early as the 1960s, Pauline Oliveros placed listening at the center of composition. »Deep Listening« and »Sonic Meditations«, developed by Oliveros, are practices of communal listening and music-making whose political implications have become particularly evident in light of today’s societal regression. These practices challenge the male-coded cult of genius as well as the entrenched structures of high culture and academic music – structures that continue to contribute to the marginalization of women in music today. At the same time, Oliveros’ concepts rank among the key avant-garde ideas that continue to resonate with a wide public. Related to this thematic field are explorations of the posthuman, of nature and its sounds, and the processes of falling asleep to music, experiences that guide us toward stillness and a return to a kind of natural state. The interdisciplinary research project Lullabyte, which investigates such processes, was at the center of the festival’s first two days. Chilean electronic artist Darla Quintana works with extraterrestrial sounds, incorporating audio recordings from outer space realized by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Observatory into her rhythmically complex compositions. Annika Tudeer and Yiran Zhao explain the artistic strategies employed by the ensemble OBLIVIA to transform the current moment – when the impacts of human-induced climate change are becoming tangibly real – into a »Big Bang of Reality«.

Music is not only a time-based art, but also a physical and performative one. Classical instrumental music demands discipline and precise control over the body’s physical processes. But with the advent of electronic sound production, a fundamentally new situation has emerged – one that profoundly shifts the relationship to the body. Electronic sounds offer musicians a new freedom of movement and expression. At the same time, their performances open up new real and imaginary musical spaces for the audience, transforming how we hear and how we see. The focus of this last panel is on the new possibilities enabled by technological advancements – both in the use of traditional and electronic instruments, and in the development of specific musical and physical actions and forms of expression.