More Gender Amplified Performers and Speakers

To prepare for the Gender Amplified Music Festival (this Saturday!), we are featuring a few of the event’s accomplished performers and speakers in an effort to get the word out about the advice, influence, and inspiration they have to offer young women interested in music production. In our last round of introductions (read the first three posts here, here, and here), we wish to highlight the diverse talents of three such music performers and producers.

Michele Darling is a sound designer, recording engineer, electronic musician, and educator in the field of music production. Her company Audio FX Lab is an online royalty-free sound effects library which provides audio content to sound designers worldwide. Michele composes and designs audio environments with composer Terry Golob under the name Aerostatic, and she is the founder and music producer of Girls Like Bass, a funk/house/electro performance collective based in NYC. Formerly an Associate Professor of Audio at Long Island University Brooklyn, Michele is currently the Director of Education at Dubspot. Michele will lead the workshop “Music Production and Composition for Moving Image in Children’s Media” at the festival.

Invincible, an emcee, activist, and music producer based in Detroit, is an artist dedicated to progressive social change. As a co-founder of EMERGENCE Media, they released their debut album ShapeShifters (2008), and produced accompanying videos that explore the topics of women in hip-hop and displacement and gentrification in Detroit. For the past decade Invincible has worked with Detroit Summer, a multi-racial, inter-generational collective in Detroit that facilitates youth leadership, creativity and collective action to change communities. They were also the co-coordinator and co-founder of the Detroit Future Youth network which supports social justice and media-based youth projects throughout the city. Invincible is currently working on Complex Movements, an interactive, multimedia, installation-based hip-hop collective exploring the relationship between complex sciences and social justice movements. Invincible will speak about their experiences during the panel discussion “Producing Music and Media, Producing Culture: Gender Justice and the Artist/Producer Relationship in Hip-Hop.” Follow Invincible on twitter @invincibleDET, and check out their music video “Sledgehammer,” here:

Maureen Mahon is an associate professor in the Department of Music at New York University. A cultural anthropologist, she teaches courses on the history of rock and roll, music and the construction of race, fieldwork methods, and African American women and music. She is the author of Right To Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race, an inquiry into the ways African American rock musicians in the 1990s used music and activism to challenge prevailing ideas about black music and identity. Her articles on African-American cultural studies have appeared in academic venues such as American Ethnologist, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, as well as online at EbonyJet.com and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum website. She has received a 2013-14 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her work on her research on the contribution of African American women such as Big Mama Thornton, the Shirelles, Tina Turner, Darlene Love, Betty Davis, and Labelle to rock. Her book on the subject, Beyond Brown Sugar: Voices of African American Women in Rock and Roll, 1953-1984, is under contract with Duke University Press. Maureen will join the discussion for the “Virginia C. Gildersleeve Panel: Exploring the Impact of Women in Music Production.”