I am so pleased to count myself among the fantastic group of folks helping to curate and organize the second annual Fringe Film Fest in East London. From 12th - 15th April the neighborhood will be buzzing with a programme of screenings, parties and happenings highlighting some of the best in spunky queer cinema.

I’m especially excited about the event that Sandra Le and I are curating together with Jessica Gysel from Girls Like Us magazine featuring a shorts programme, talk and discussion as part of a (free!) Saturday afternoon lez hang-out at XOYO Gallery, details below.

Here my personal day-by-day highlights, for full programme and booking information visit http://fringefilmfest.com/

FRIDAY 13 APRIL

Film: Riot Acts - a gorgeous documentary directed by Madsen Minax about “flaunting gender deviance in musical performance” followed by a discussion with the London Trans Filmmakers Group

SATURDAY, 14 APRIL

Film: Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984-1992 - Dagmar Schultz’s documentary pulls together interviews and archival material highlighting Audre Lorde’s profound influence on the Afro-German movement

Shorts: Girls Like Us presents Generations Like Us - a series of short films highlighting queer “generations like us” from various eras and ages, hosted by Girls Like Us magazine and featuring a chat with actress Lisa Gornick and a talk by photograper Holly Falconer

Film: The Gang Girls Trilogy - Katrina Del Mar’s follows the antics of New York City wildchilds up to no good… Roll with it!

SUNDAY, 15 APRIL

Film: Community Action Centre - A.K. Burns & A.L. Steiner present a sociosexual queer porn-romance-liberation film and will be on hand (via Skype) afterwards to deconstruct it all with the audience

Just over a year ago my friend Andrea Thal - facilitator of the artist-led space Les Complices* in Zurich - was invited to curate the official Swiss off-site project at the 54th Venice Biennale 2011. The concept Andrea brought together - under the banner Chewing the Scenery - was a community of people working within film, music, theatre and theory to contemplate and play with post-colonial and queer discourses on identity and temporality. As she pieced together the exhibition I was thrilled to be invited to join this collective of misfits to help devise a live music programme as one-third of the MOTHER team led by Dafne Boggeri and Noga Inbar.

Although I cannot possibly communicate all the sounds, sights and sensations of the many warm wonderful days I spent in and around the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove on the Venetian lagooon, here at least is a peek behind the scenes and below a mixtape of what it might have sounded like along with some of my personal musings. For full details of the project please visit the Chewing the Scenery website.

“No Future / No Past”

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s film “No Future / No Past” played continuously on a screen dominating the space. An imagined punk archive between 1976 - 2031. No punk future, no punk past. Calling on Vivienne Dick, The X, Darby Crash, Poly Styrene, Joey Ramone and Alice Bag. Ridiculous. Dsytopian. Ginger smashes the guitar to bits. More on Pauline and Renate’s work can be found on their website.

MOTHER presents…

MOTHER’s contributions were the most ephemeral. We invited first Mary Ocher from Berlin to join us in June. Then in September came Vera November from London, Maya Dunietz from Tel Aviv and Alona Rodeh from Tel Aviv. Together they brought moments that lingered and temporary collaborations that sparkled. Completely unpredictable. So typical. Find out more about MOTHER. .

The Publication

Then there is this bit with the longest timeline, started before the exhibition doors opened and completed only after the end of it all. Edited by Anna Frei and Georg Rutishauser and the only remnant left now. A constant reworking of the themes - contemplative chewing and regurgitation within a single publication in three separate editions. Available from the publisher edition fink.

The Soundtrack
The last and mostly totally unrelated part of the whole thing - a love letter in sound based on memories of moments now passed. It sounded like this, I think. It’s all a bit queer. Wish you had been there.
Beth Anderson - Country Time
Cold Dogs In The Courtyard - Video Is Not Art
Club Tango - Get The Picture
Judy Nylon & Crucial - Live In A Lift
Klack Klack - 1919
Kate Fagan - I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool
Covergirl - Paris Burns
LiLiPUT - Do You Mind My Dream
Rhythm King And Her Friends - Frankie
MEN - Who Am I to Feel So Free
Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire
Mary Ocher - Address Yourself
Austra - Beat And The Pulse
Planningtorock - Living It Out
tUnE-yArDs - My Country
Trash Kit - Cadets
This Beat is Lezbotronik - This Beat is Lezbotronik
No Bra - Munchausen
Inflatable Boy Clams - I’m Sorry

DOWNLOAD: Chewing the Scenery mix.mp3
Tracklisting

While I am a punk girl at heart I have soft spot for all things italo disco, especially when there’s a bit of outer space in the mix…

I happened upon The Ann Steel album recently and was delighted by its futuristic pseudo-robotic sound and aesthetic. Masterminded by Italian electronic composer, Roberto Cacciapaglia, the persona Ann Steel was created when Robert met an American model-to-be shortly after her arrival in Italy, dressed her in a red jumpsuit, wrote her some fantastically nonsensical songs and produced an album with her in the late 70s. Unfortunately, Ann’s career never took off and she soon faded into obscurity. The album itself however, initially only available in a limited run, was reissued on vinyl in late October 2011 by Half Machine Records. Buy your copy here or download a digital copy below.

Also, for your listening pleasure is a mix of some of my favorite outer spacey disco dance tunes. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: The Ann Steel Album.mp3

DOWNLOAD: Spacer Woman mix.mp3

SPACER WOMAN MIX TRACKLIST
Boney M. - Nightflight To Venus
Venus Gang - Love To Fly
Herman’s Rocket - Space Woman
Sheila B. Devotion - Spacer
Space - Magic Fly
Charlie - Spacer Woman
Ann Steel - My Time
La Bionda - I Wanna Be Your Lover
Dee D. Jackson - Automatic Lover
Video Kids - Woodpeckers From Space
Andreas Dorau und die Marinas - Fred vom Jupiter
Spizz Energi - Where’s Captain Kirk
The Space Lady - Major Tom
ESG - UFO

I am pleased to have been a small part of the Making Waves fanzine, contributing my recent interview with Marlene, Klaudia and Astrid of LiLiPUT. This first issue also features interviews with Jeri Cain Rossi, Debsey Wykes from Dolly Mixture, James Hoare, All Girl Summer Fun Band, Verónica Ortuño, Stef Petticoat, Chalk Circle, Alice Bag and more.

The fanzine is the result of a year long transatlantic collaboration initiated by Camille Lan in Paris and Mary Regalado in Los Angeles. The aim of the project is to explore the intersections of punk, feminism and womanhood by getting a group of contributors together that share a common enthusiasm for music and featuring women that make the songs we love.

You can download a PDF of the issue below, but of course the only way to truly experience this zine is in print form, so order your copy via Lulu here! Follow the progress of the project on tumblr as it continues: http://mwzine.tumblr.com.

DOWNLOAD: Making Waves issue 1 (PDF)

DOWNLOAD: Making Waves issue 1 mixtape (MP3)

tracklist:
01. Jeri Rossi - I Left My Heart But I Don’t Know Where
02. Dolly Mixture - Shonay Shonay
03. All Girl Summer Fun Band - Charm Bracelet
04. Finally Punk - Environmentality
05. Ludus - Too Hot To Handle
06. The Petticoats - I’m Free
07. Chalk Circle - Easy Escapes
08. LiLiPUT - In A Mess
09. The Bags - Violent Girl
10. Devil’s Dykes - Fruitless

The third and final dot of the Mother Festival ephemeral triangle will now be drawn… The traveling wowmen’s music spectacle takes over Berlin on the 22 and 23 September 2011 with a stellar line-up of female bands and DJs.
Here’s all you need to know, plus an exclusive Mother Mixtape below to get your heart and ears ready…

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Thursday, 22 September
HBC / Karl-Liebknecht-Str 9 / 10178 Berlin
Agathe Max (Lyon)
Sonja Cvitkovic with Michaela Meise and Kritkrom (Berlin)
Penelope Edmund (London)
Roxymore (Paris/Berlin)
La Chatte (Paris)
DJ S/HE (Milan)

Friday, 23 September
CHEZ JACKI / An Der Schilling Brücke / 10243 Berlin
Kool Thing (Berlin)
Maria & The Mirrors (London)
Molly Nilsson (Berlin)
Cassexxe Vibrato (Tel Aviv)
Anna Otto (Berlin)
plus performance by Barokthegreat and DJ sets from Pauline Boudry (Berlin), Pippi Langstrumpf (Milan) and Mary Velo (Berlin)

DOWNLOAD: Mother Berlin Mix.mp3
Tracklist:
Kool Thing - The Sign (Chance in the Dark Mix)
Molly Nilsson - Never O’Clock
La Chatte - Apache
Penelope Edmund - This is Romance
Cassexxe Vibrato - Dark Seduction
Maria & The Mirrors - Travel Sex
Kool Thing - Line Drive
La Chatte - Jacques (Hypo Extended remix)
Molly Nilsson - Europa
Agatha Max - Black Needle
Sonja Cvitkovic & Kritzkom - German Playback
Anna Otto - Forest

Summer has sprung! So here are some brilliant and delightful girlpunk sounds for all your holiday and party needs - featuring two of my all time favorite blogs and a lovingly done compendium of early punk tracks.

Gunilla Mixtapes is a regularly updated blog featuring 30 minute mixes of (mostly) 80s female fronted punk. Here’s a sample of what awaits…visit the blog to download all the current episodes.
DOWNLOAD: Gunilla 1 mixtape
01. Deutscher Kaiser - Halli Galli Tanzt Für Sie
02. A-Gen-53 – Stalingrad
03. Die Egozentrischen 2 – Parallelverschiebung
04. Househunters – Dorsal Fin
05. Silver Abuse – Plastic Rows
06. Plastix – Konsumier Mich
07. The Liggers – Pretty Girl
08. NON baNd – Duncan Dancin’
09. I.U.D. – Charm
10. Jungle Nausea – Uniform
11. Silver Abuse – Cuban Homo Farm
12. Good Samaritans – Dotted Line

The TV Dinner Mixtapes are another series of well selected girlpunk mixes incorporating bands from the last four decades. Download the first episode here and then visit the website to access the other 20+ mixes!

DOWNLOAD: TV Dinner 1: Consuming New Frontiers
01. As Mercenarias- Trashland
02. Bags- TV Dinner
03. Clothilde- La Queue Du Chat
04. DNA- Taking Kid To School
05. Thee Headcoatees- Wildman
06. Neo Boys- Time Keeps Time
07. Chantal Goya- C’est Bien Bernard
08 Mika Miko- Blues Not Speed
09. JFA- Baja
10. Suburban Lawns- Pioneers
11. Grass Widow- Uncertain Memory
12. Clothilde- Je T’ai Voulu Et Je T’ai Bien Eu

If that doesn’t satisfy your yearning for prime punk sounds, download the digitized version of the 12 CD-R set A Reference of Female Fronted Punk 1977 - 1989. The compilation was personally put together by a guy named Vince in a limited run and digitized for the benefit of us all by Kängnäve blog.

Earlier this month saw the launch of the Women’s Liberation Music Archive, a small corner of webspace focusing on “feminist music-making in the UK and Ireland from 1970 - 1990.” The project, an initiative of Deborah Withers and Frankie Green, is actively and openly seeking contributions, corrections and all forms of support to make the website a fun and useful tool.

The bands featured in the archive represent the ideals of second wave feminism with a “sisterhood is powerful” attitude and leanings towards jazzy/folk/rock sounds. After a bit of digging I’ve come up with a few of my personal highlights from the collection, have a listen here and then visit the site and have a trawl yourself!

“Didn’t Affect Me” by The Fabulous Dirt Sisters

“Self Defense” by Ova

As an added bonus I offer you here a digitized version of  the “Making Waves” compilation put out by Girlfriend Records in 1981, featuring twelve women’s bands from the UK. Here’s to you,  sisters in song!

DOWNLOAD: Making Waves compilation (.rar file/35MB)

The symposium Wissenschaft, Künste + Alles Andere (Science, Arts + Everything Else) took place over three days from Friday, 9 November 1990 – Sunday, 11 November 1990 at the Museum für Gestaltung in Basel, Switzerland. The event brought together over 100 women, from across German speaking countries and around the world, to discuss current affairs in the areas of art, politics, literature, activism, philosophy and more.

The symposium manifesto offered “contradiction, commonality, different working and communication methods, concentration, information, opinions, arguments and enjoyment: talking, seeing, listening, moving thorough spaces, thinking – an experiment from which new insights can develop.”

The invited participants included, among many others:
Kathy Acker, late American writer
Valie Export, Austrian artist and filmmaker
Helga Fanderl, German filmmaker
Gisele Freund, late German/French photographer
Diamanda Galas, American performer
Natalia Ginzburg, late Italian writer
Almudena Grandes Spanish writer
Guerrilla Girls, American art activist group
Zaha M. Hadid, Iraqi architect
Friederike Mayröcker, Austrian poet
Luisa Muraro, Italian philosopher
Pauline Oliveros, American musician
Peggy Parnass, German writer
Pipilotti Rist, Swiss artist and filmmaker
Marianne Schuller, German professor and writer
Alice Shalvi, German educationalist
Silvia Staub-Bernasconi, Swiss human rights activist
Marcia Tucker, late American curator
Zhang Xin Xin, Chinese writer

Kathy Acker, photo by Ute Schendel
_______________

In the lead up to the 20th anniversary of the symposium, Monika Dillier and Dagmar Reichert, themselves participants in the event, began digitising over 40 hours of video filmed during the three days. With the exhibition Chambres d’Echo in November 2010, Les Complices* Gallery in Zurich, Switzerland exhibited outtakes from the footage and hosted a series of events around the themes of the archive. Journal d’Echo, a publication of new written works inspired by the symposium and produced during the exhibition, was published in March 2011 by edition fink.

There are plans to make the videos openly available over time, but until then have a look at the programme and imagine what arguments and enjoyments might well have taken place… Here also is an early work from Pipilotti Rist, courtesy of the amazing UbuWeb.

DOWNLOAD: Wissenschaft, Künste + Alles Andere programme (PDF)

VIEW: Pipilotti Rist - Entlastungen, Pipilottis Fehler from 1988 (courtesy UbuWeb):

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image from “Born in Flames” publication by Kaisa Lassinaro

From early February 2011 until end March 2011, London’s The Showroom gallery is host to the exhibition “Reproductive Labour” centering around the films, videos, politics and discussions that make up Cinenova – a volunteer-run, charitable organisation dedicated to preserving and distributing the work of women/feminist film and video makers. Visitors are  invited to step into the archives and interact with its contents whether viewing a film or browsing the paper catalogs, posters and publications.

The exhibition ends on a particularly high note on Sunday, 26 March with a screening of Lizzie Borden’s 1983 mockumentary feminist fantasy film Born in Flames, along with the launch of an illustrated comic book style script of the film produced by Finnish graphic designer Kaisa Lassinaro. The project is still in progress and the production of a full version of the comic book is in need of support, so pre-order your copy or make a donation.

Another international female film archive of note is  Bildwechsel which was started in Hamburg in 1979 and has since grown to include satellite groups  in Glasgow, Basel, Nurnberg, Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest. Have a look at this charming video telling the story of Bildwechsel in pictures and narrated by Durbahn, one of the founders.

image from “Born in Flames” publication by Kaisa Lassinaro

Mary Ocher is a Berlin based singer with roots in Tel Aviv and Moscow. She headed up the band Mary and the Baby Cheeses for several years but is now venturing out on her own again with a set of simple, poetic punk/folk anthems.
Her 2008 limited release lp “War Songs” is being re-released on Haute Areal Records on 11 March 2011 and is available here as CD or download.

I caught up with Mary recently and here’s what she had to say for herself…

JW: What is one of your favorite sounds and what does it mean to you?
MO: the sound of my phone receiving a long awaited text message. yup.

JW: Tell me about one of your most cherished records and why it is so important to you.
MO: That’s a tough one! I might go with Lou Reed’s “Transformer” which I first discovered in high school - then it had some brilliant tunes and great lyrics and a very interesting presentation/story telling and that’s all it was for me.
But I’ve been listening to the Velvet Underground for a while and I’ve recently rediscovered something in Reed’s fascination with an outsider’s persona in his solo work. I’ve read his biography and listened to most of his other albums but none dealt specifically with this theme, only the notion of romanticized violence popped
up here and there. Of course, having already been a fan of David Bowie and his glam-era guitarist Mick Ronson, their participation in the record was a bonus along with the playful cabaret style.

Since I moved to Berlin and most of my friends here are trannies and divas of all kinds, genders and preferences, the album changed into yet something even more personal and the sadness behind the make-up was not just another vague expression. New York of the 70s has become an everyday scenario for me.

JW: Who is a woman that has inspired you in your life, musically or otherwise?
Oh, I can’t think of just one.  I guess it’d have to be a Frankenstein creation made of bits of Buffy Sainte-Marie, a young Patti Smith, Nina Hagen, Odetta, Peggy Lee, Nico, Marlene Dietrich, Eartha Kitt, Diamanda Galas, Grace Jones, Dusty Springfield, Lydia Lunch and recently Betty Davis (the foxy 70’s funk singer). Maybe also a little of Sylvia Plath, though i think that today she seems much less impressing to me than she used to.