The overlooked history is not a complaint. It is a fact. The complaint is that no one has made the effort to correct it until very recently.
Delia Derbyshire, uncredited architect
Delia Derbyshire was a staff composer at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop starting in 1960, at a time when women were not permitted to work as engineers in the studio. Her official job title was “assistant,” but her work was primary. She composed the electronic theme for Doctor Who in 1963 using purely electronic means, cutting tape and generating oscillations, years before synthesizers became standard instruments. The theme is one of the most recognizable electronic compositions in history, and for most of that history, Derbyshire’s name was not credited.
Suzanne Ciani and the Buchla
Suzanne Ciani was a student of John Cage’s and a master of the Buchla synthesizer. In the 1970s, Ciani performed extensive work with the Buchla and recorded Buchla Concerts 1975, demonstrating capabilities of the instrument that had never been publicly heard before. When people discuss the synthesizer as an instrument that changed electronic music, they mention Robert Moog before they mention Suzanne Ciani, even though Ciani’s contributions to synthesizer design and performance were substantial.
Wendy Carlos goes platinum
Wendy Carlos released Switched-On Bach in 1968, a groundbreaking album of Bach compositions performed on a Moog synthesizer. The album was commercially successful and introduced millions of people to electronic music. Carlos’s work was technically revolutionary: the compositions had to be meticulously sequenced because real-time performance on a Moog synthesizer was not reliable enough for classical precision. The album became canonical. Carlos became a footnote.
The current landscape of electronic music contains significant representation by women at the experimental and underground levels. Actress, Shackleton, Surgeon dominate certain underground categories in which women are underrepresented as a proportion of the broader category. But the correction is now visible in programming: promoters, labels and radio stations across the underground are booking and reissuing the women this history overlooked, and audiences have followed without complaint. The contemporary landscape is more representative than any previous era, and the historical record is increasingly documented.
The correction is underway
The correction is no longer theoretical, and you can hear it from any booth. The lineups I play on now would have been unimaginable when I started: not because anyone is filling a quota, but because the pipeline finally unclogged. In Korea specifically, the most internationally visible electronic artists of the last decade, Peggy Gou, Yaeji, the Salamanda duo, are women, and nobody here finds that remarkable anymore, which is what progress actually sounds like. See the current Korean roster for how normal it has become.
The historical work matters for the same reason the Derbyshire story stings: credit deferred for sixty years is not credit, it is an apology. The least this site can do is spell the names right the first time.
Written from Seoul, by someone who has been in the booth for more than 25 years. More on the site, or book a DJ.
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