“Let’s Have At It!”: Conversations with EDM Producers Kate Simko and DJ Denise

Abstract

This piece weaves together conversations with Kate Simko and DJ Denise to portray the two different, yet overlapping paths they have taken to establish themselves as electronic dance music (EDM) producers. Both women are pioneers in their own right. Simko is best known as Spectral Sounds’ “first lady of techno”. DJ Denise, who first gained popularity as a San Francisco Bay Area DJ, has since become a prolific producer and the founder of the label Mizomo Music, which specializes in various forms of house music. Relying on personal interviews with both producers, this essay describes their experiences in order to highlight their different approaches to music production and distribution. Additionally, it considers how the increased accessibility and user friendliness of digital music production/distribution has changed the conditions for both women and men in the EDM business. It is just after noon on a spring day when I arrive at the trendy cafe on Chicago’s North side where Kate Simko and I have agreed to meet.1 I am eager to learn about Simko’s EDM trajectory, particularly what has enabled her to succeed in an environment that most women continue to experience as impermeable. How does a woman move from expressing an interest in producing EDM to releasing tracks on an internationally recognized record label, and why aren’t there more of them doing so? After all, there are numerous female DJs dedicated to spinning EDM, yet tracks produced by women remain too few and far between. The gendered divisions within dance music culture mimic those found in other popular music genres such as punk and hip hop. In the 1980s, EDM in the US evolved from disco in cities such as Chicago and New York where it was strongly connected to local gay culture and ethnic minorities (Fikentscher 2000: 11); however, by the height of its popularity in the late 1990s it had been co-opted by an industry predominantly run and consumed by white, heterosexual men. Many of them became DJs and producers whom the dance music industry used as marketing tools (Reynolds 1999: 276). By this time DJing had become a competitive sport and producing an even more guarded art form. Simon Reynolds accounts for the “homosocial nature of techno” in the following explanation: tricks of the trade are passed down from mentors to male acolytes. DJ-ing and samplebased music also go hand in hand with an obsessive ‘trainspotter’ mentality: the amassing of huge collections of records, the accumulation of exhaustive and arcane information about labels, producers, and auteurs (Reynolds 1999: 274).