A few random thoughts about the fascinating Women Take Back The Noise 3 cd compilation which has generated a lot of underground (and overground) publicity. It’s a strictly limited edition of 1000 and has (as I write) sold 630 – as the You Tube film shows, 30 bucks gets you a funky pack and your own noisemaker.

I haven’t bought a copy myself – opting instead for the cheapskate option of downloading the mp3 samples of some of the 47 women who have contributed!

What interests me though is the question as to how female noise differs from their masculine counterparts. The women interviewed, as with those involved in the London based HerNoise project, always manage to dodge giving a straight answer to this question preferring to focus on the buzz they get from the collaborative process.

This sharing/caring angle implicitly – and to my mind accurately – suggests that the male equivalent would be more competitive & centred on building egos. It’s hard to see a group of men being arsed to spend so much time on the packaging!

One of the issues here is that if you start thinking about how music and sound art made by women differs from that of men it’s hard to do so without resorting to sociological clichès about women being more intuitive/sensitive while men struggle to get in touch with their feelings and find release only through aggression. Ultimately this takes you into a dead end because it implies that women are not good at harsh noise and men are no good at the organic touchy-feelly stuff.

The value of these female-only collectives is not in creating a dogmatic feminist ghetto but in breaking the sugar’n’spice image of women and highlighting this as a question of human creativity free of gender sterotypes.

More power to their elbows!