I’d like to share an awesome picture of my performance from the first Spain tour of Female Effects!

The performance in Cordoba, Spain.
Photo by Erin Mckinney

Female Effects is a project consisting of new pieces for acoustic instruments and electronics, composed by female composers and curated by the harpist/performer Angélica Vázquez.

The musicians involved are: Yamila Ríos, Lula Romero and Maria José Belenguer from Spain, Kate Moore (Australia), Barbara Ellison (Ireland), Marie Guilleray (France), Fani Konstantinidou (Greece), Ji Youn Kang (Korea), Meiyi Lee (Taiwan), Wen Chin (Taiwan) and Marisol Jimenez (Mexico).

We made the second concert as a group, and this happened in Spain at 23~24th of November, 2012.

It was quite cool that all those female composers/performers got together and made a new music performance in combination between Acoustics and Electronics together. We played in two cities: first in Cadiz, and the second in Cordoba. I brought ‘Jing – A traditional Korean gong-like instrument-‘ and I felt good as well that I brought this Korean instrument there. The piece is called ‘Jing’ for Jing and Computer. 

This was also my first trip to Spain so that I wanted to look around too as much as possible, but this tight schedule was quite crazy. We slept almost nothing for two days because we needed to move all the time. The time for the soundcheck takes very long due to the technical needs and the amount of the pieces. But we had lots of fun.

When we perform at Cadiz, it was a part of the contemporary music festival Festival de Música Española de Cádiz. This means that we can expect the kind of audience who is quite interested in listening to the new music. However, the second concert was completely local concert. We played at Iglesia de la Magdalena, in a medium size old church. We were a bit worried if people would like this. One of my friends from Spain commented on my Facebook advertisement of the concert : “You play an electronic music in Cordoba??? ”

This scared me a bit, because we wanted to have some audiences involved. We worked hard to make this happen.

Then wow. There were tons of audiences from Children to Seniors. They really filled the whole church. No one left in the middle of the concert, rather they came closer and closer toward the stage. This made us so excited. People liked it very much and we had a very nice performance.

Of course we didn’t forget to have a party after all. Everyone was quite tired but we had some drinks and even went to a club to celebrate.

Now our organizer Angelica is making the second plan to Spain again. This time in Sevilla, and probably happens in April. I wish all of us to go, but in this moment we are not sure.

It is quite hard to survive as a woman Electronic music composer. There sill are prejudices that woman cannot handle computer and cables, and they would make a pretty music. This female effects throw a rock into that pool. We are very active composers mostly involving electronics to their works, have a new, charming idea on their works,  have knowledge and ability to realize it. So yes. We are female, but we are NOT feminists. We are those kind of people who just do what we’d like to do, and we met together in one field.

Should male involve in this group? Maybe and Maybe not. Not because we hate guys around here, but women composers would need a bit more of  support and more stages and opportunities to perform, and we believe that this group add a small action into that.

More information on Female Effects