Khaela Maricich and Melissa Dyne of former Olympia electro-pop group the Blow (they’re now based in Brooklyn, NY) have launched an online archive called WOMANPRODUCER. The focus is on female producers who’ve largely been overlooked or under-acknowledged by mainstream media and the general public. Its mission resembles that of a Seattle-based archive that went live in 2015 called Many Many Women, an index of female and non-binary composers, improvisers, and sonic artists that currently has nearly 1,200 entries. (Full disclosure: it’s overseen by my partner, Megan Mitchell). WOMANPRODUCER also hosts live events geared toward uniting “producers and technologists from across genres and eras.”
From the project’s website:
The impetus to create WOMANPRODUCER came to us a couple of years ago when we started learning how many of the early pioneers of sound recording and production were women. It seemed strange to us that despite this historical fact, for some reason we had grown up with the sense that “music producer” meant something that didn’t look like us.
MTV News recorded a podcast with Maricich and Dyne in which they explore WOMANPRODUCER in more depth, discuss their musical influences, and rail against traditional biases against and the erasure of female producers.
