Review: ‘Sisters with Transistors’

It’s a cool fall night in New York and I am alone in a long white room. There are benefits to always being worried about timing: I’m often the first one at the concert and finding a spot where my toes touch the stage gives me, at five-foot six, a rare chance at a clear view. Other people trickle in until the room is half full and with them arrives a tall, thin woman draped in colorful clothes; she climbs up the stage and positions herself in front of a keyboard and a set of pedals. I don’t know her name — it’s not even on my ticket — she is not who I am here to see, after all. But at a concert I am part of a crowd; I have to be warmed up.

She starts to play and at first from her speakers emerge lilted, bird-like tones. They are charming; I can practically see them floating ceiling-ward into panels of colored light, dancing on the room’s angled walls. Slowly, very slowly, the music builds, the deepest tones gaining strength in their vibrations until the whole room is brimming with a sonorous and delicate hum. People around me start to sit — maybe they’re taking it all in, maybe they’re just bored — and in the front of the room I become a standing island in an ocean of sound. The artist turns knobs, the tones crescendo to a bone-rattle, their reverberations so strong I feel as if they’re synchronizing my heartbeat, and the room lifts.

At this moment I am confronted with the original conception of electronic music: a new way of listening, decoupled from traditional melody and rhythm to play with the capacity of sound to elicit new experiences. But like all innovations, the genre needed innovators: enter the heroines of early electronic music, the subjects of Lisa Rovner’s 2020 documentary Sisters with Transistors. I write each of their names here with the utmost reverence: Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Suzanne Ciani, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Wendy Carlos, and Laurie Spiegel. Narrated by the “Superman” herself Laurie Anderson, Sisters with Transistors presents each of these figures not only as pioneering engineers and glass-ceiling breakers, but as sculptors, using technology and revolutionary visions of the future to create a new kind of music. The film is a celebration of these women and the creative process at large, emphasizing the physical nature of music-making in an accelerating age.

The film’s structure is pretty standard for a documentary: each artist is presented in turn, chronologically, along with their origins as musicians, their key works, and their innovations. Crucially, however, each artist is given a spotlight sequence that I like to call “The Demonstration”: strapped to her machine, she is filmed as she writes a piece or illustrates a certain musical concept. These are the first instances in the film that emphasize process; filmed unobtrusively and without commentary save their own, the artists are left to their creative impulses to teach — or more often, astonish — the viewer through the power of electronic sound. In one such sequence, Delia Derbyshire demonstrates the various shapes of sound waves with an oscilloscope and then records several sounds on tape loops. Feeding the tape into desk-sized machines, she changes their speed and synchronicity to create, right in front of our eyes, a plucky little melody. Her foot taps softly in close-up. Reflecting an art form fed on experimentation, these kinds of sequences are essential viewing, allowing the observer to watch as the creative gears turn and the process unfolds, the result a piece of music woven seemingly from nowhere. 

Derbyshire’s tape cutting also reminds the viewer of just how physical the task of composition can be. Not unlike film editing, her process involves using simple tools — scissors, reels, her hands — to create something as intangible as sound through touch. We see this when Daphne Oram uses paint on film to sketch waves, later processed by a computer into tone in a form of graphical composition she lovingly calls “Oramics.” But nowhere is this more apparent than when Clara Rockmore plays the theremin. Both trembling hands outstretched like Edith Piaf, she contorts her fingers to play the most touching lament of a melody using nothing but air. It’s shocking to watch, the camera zooming in on her right hand clutching the invisible strings, as if she were holding sound itself tightly in her grasp. 

With their emphasis on physicality, the “Demonstration” sequences present electronic music as both tactile and malleable, the work of composition not unlike a sculptor molding a body out of clay (it’s not for nothing that Suzanne Ciani calls the synthesizer “sensual”). On an intellectual level, this valorizes the genre, brushing aside conceptions of electronic music as soulless or corporate and emphasizing the artist behind the synthesizer, hands busily at work. On an emotional level, however, this contributes to an element of conjuring: the alien music performed by these women takes shape without a single conventional instrument in sight, breathing reality into Daphne Oram’s futurist vision in which musicians compose “directly in sound.” In this way, electronic music is both technological and somewhat alchemical, the mysterious soundtrack of human progress.

Sisters with Transistors contributes to this mystical feeling through its sound editing. Frequently a musician will mention a type of sound in an interview — say, Éliane Radigue describing the low grumble of airplane engines near her home growing up — and the sound will appear, as if spoken into existence. Now before you say, “Well, duh, Tyler, this is a film about music, of course you’ll want to hear the sounds the musicians mention,” remember the nature of electronic music as context: the genre is inspired by those in-between sounds of daily life, sounds like airplane hums otherwise classified as noise but transformed by the art of composition into pieces capable of emotional response. As the artist conjures music from this noise, so the film conjures music from the artists’ memory of it; the film’s form mimics its subject.

The most striking instance of this is in Maryanne Amacher’s “ear sounds”: tones created by the listener’s ear in the presence of two other dissonant tones, the listener creating the music just by virtue of listening. Try it for yourself by watching the film: when Amacher’s two tones are played, more complex tertiary ones emerge and you as the viewer make music with her. Composer Holly Herndon — a personal hero of mine — brings us back to that notion of tactility: through Amacher’s ear sounds, she says, “you can actually play with the physicality of the listener.” This is the kind of inventiveness the film celebrates, valorizing electronic music through its elevation and artistic manipulation of those sounds rejected or never even considered in traditional forms of composition. 

Andrei Tarkovsky wrote about filmmaking as “sculpting in time”: I’d like to think that sort of metaphor applies to electronic music as portrayed in Sisters with Transistors. By emphasizing both the compositional process and the physical nature of music-making, the film lauds the women of early electronic music as sculptors in sound. Sure enough, one interviewer describes Éliane Radigue’s work to her as “working with time”; her last work, she responds, is 75 minutes long and could be no shorter. It is by celebrating all the strange wonder and craftsmanship of electronic music that the film accomplishes its stated goal as a feminist work: shedding powerful light on the “unsung heroines” of music history. This is no work of representational signaling — “and don’t call them ‘lady’ composers,” writes Pauline Oliveros — but an offering to some of the most inventive, persistent, and resourceful creative minds of the last century. For the nights we get to spend pulsing to a club kick drum or basking in the awe of an ocean of reverberations, for the new ways we feel and experience the sounds of our world, we owe these masters a debt of gratitude.