In She’s at the Controls: Sound Engineering, Production and Gender Ventriloquism in the 21st Century, Helen Reddington questions the scarcity of women music engineers and producers as people who have always had a significant presence in music production. Thus, the book’s title rebuts Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” by reframing control as its central concern. Reddington considers the implications of control on women sound engineers and studio producers’ varied practices by claiming that “[a]ny form of recording, whether through writing, drawing, film or sound, raises issues of power that are centered on who is doing the recording and the implications of the archive, whatever form that takes” (4). Yet, women’s exclusion from the profession is still underexamined. Reddington points out how much discourse on dance music fails to address “how it can be seen as liberating for people of different genders and sexual orientation to dance to music that is made by an overwhelming majority of male producers” (154). Reddington also questions what it would sound like if women were consistently at the controls, noting that “[i]f we substitute the word ‘controller’ for producer when we think about the ways pop music is created, the perspective changes considerably” (186).Another key theme in Reddington’s study is how women are often momentarily celebrated in a narrative of “overcoming” that belies reality. This phenomenon is illustrated in a male-authored Globe and Mail article titled “Why Hill Kourkoutis and Her Historic Juno Nomination Represent a Shift in the Male-Dominated Music Industry.”1 This title illustrates Reddington’s assertation that “[c]ultural commentators could be accused of trying to read significant social change into subcultures that show signs of only superficial acknowledgment of societal progress” (154). Compare this news item to Billboard’s coverage with another male-authored article titled “Hill Kourkoutis Becomes First Woman to Receive a Juno Awards Nomination for Recording Engineer of the Year” that frames Kourkoutis’s nomination as a “breakthrough [that] comes 23 years after Tina Shoemaker became the first female engineer to receive a Grammy nomination—and also a Grammy Award—for best engineered, album, non-classical.”2 But if Kourkoutis’s “breakthrough” followed Shoemaker’s “breakthrough” by two decades, is this 23-year gap worth celebrating or lamenting? As Reddington states:It is too easy to explore the idea of feminism and femininity without actually committing to a deeper engagement with societal change. The celebration of breakthroughs for women participants in a subculture without noting the underlying male structures, both business- and production-wise, does not give a true account of the control that men still have over access to the more empowering and active parts of subcultural engagement. It does not acknowledge their positions of historical and contemporary privilege (155).Reddington herself has had a multi-faceted music career. She started out in the 1970s playing bass in UK-based punk bands and pursued a variety of group and solo projects. She’s at the Controls builds on Reddington’s practical experience and research into “the concealed roles of women in music-making” (3), which she published in The Lost Women of Rock Music and later developed into Stories from the She Punks, a documentary she made with the Raincoats’ Gina Birch. She’s at the Controls was motivated by a 2009 conversation Reddington had with someone who claimed to be Great Britain’s only female sound engineer. Although Reddington knew this was not true because she knew of (only) one other British female sound engineer at the time, both this conversation and Reddington’s “frustration at the dropout rate of female students from studio training at the various universities” propelled her to interview other women sound engineers (2). She explains how she “was driven not only by curiosity but also a feeling that their experiences were unique, valuable, pioneering and, because of their often ‘backroom’ nature, had not been sufficiently documented in detail” (3).Foundational to Reddington’s study, the first full-length, scholarly monograph to focus on (mainly UK-based) women sound engineers and/or music producers, are the interviews she conducted with thirty-four women-identified practitioners who work in diverse genres, environments, and roles within the music industry. She centers their engrossing narratives as women who have built successful careers in the patriarchal enclaves of sound engineering and/or music production. Subjects include well-known studio engineers and producers such as Susan Rogers and Isobel Campbell. Reddington also engages underground figures such as Ms. Melody, a vanguard music producer in grime, funky house, and garage, and Laura B., who started out doing live sound for The Clash in the late 1970s. The interviews took place between 2009 and 2018, a period Reddington defines by female music practitioners’ heightened media visibility absent broader industrial change. As a result, Reddington reveals how many of her subjects achieved success within their fields through specialization, a strategy that she argues allows them to thwart the formation of “a woman producer stereotype” (9).The introduction provides a concise summary of the history of recording technology, highlighting changes in recording practices to provide a background for understanding the issues explored in the book’s subsequent chapters. Reddington also outlines the varying practices used by different engineers and producers to inform the reader’s comprehension of music production’s various roles and responsibilities. She foregrounds her study’s ethnographic elements by presenting a thematically arranged sample of her subjects’ narratives and then contextualizing their experiences. Interview participants mainly discussed their engagement with “sound, music and technology” chronologically, and Chapters 1 through 4 present these interviews in a way that allows for critical consideration of the different narratives (19). Indeed, the words of Reddington’s subjects comprise at least fifty percent of the text in the book’s first half, and her choice to organize her book in a sort of “reverse order” of the usual academic study pays off. By frontloading her subjects’ voices, she centers their perspectives and draws in readers with engrossing anecdotes about their gendered experiences as sound engineers and technicians.The book’s second half explores the “social, professional and creative contexts” of music production and engineering (95). Chapter 5 begins with an overview of feminist research on women’s contributions to mathematics and technology and Western societies’ perpetuation of the solitary male genius myth. Reddington outlines how “music technology, production and even methods of music consumption have been gendered as male” to contextualize “the significance and consequences of the historical and current exclusionary tactics” employed to repel women from masculine homosocial spaces (93). Often this exclusion manifests in diminishing women’s production work, a sexist pattern lamented by Björk and many of Reddington’s subjects.3In Chapter 6, Reddington explores the concept of “gender ventriloquism,” wherein “male producers use women artists as mouthpieces for their own versions of girlhood and womanhood” (7). She outlines the disturbing control that male gatekeepers exercise over popular music, often deliberately subjecting women’s voices to “pornografication” (153). Intriguingly, Reddington also explores “reverse ventriloquism,” wherein “equivalent acts of ventriloquism [that] may occur where a male vocalist is recorded by a female producer/engineer” (136). While she feels the number of well-established women engineers is too small to determine the prevalence of this type of ventriloquism, she describes how Isobel Campbell’s experiences came closest to “overt female/male ventriloquism,” as Campbell, who is Scottish, wrote and produced songs for American alt-rock singer Mark Lanegan by using her “obsession” with his emotive voice to evoke an authentic Americana feel in her production (136). Reddington then devotes a chapter to EDM, a genre in which women recently established relative authority, to explore the influence of the reputed increase of women’s power in the music industry at large. Finally, she contemplates music education’s utility as a tool for female empowerment by drawing from her own experiences as an educator to interrogate areas of improvement or stagnation from entrenched gendered practices.Reddington’s discussion of music production and engineering’s gendered professional environments adheres to a male/female gender binary and offers limited consideration for trans and non-binary talent beyond a nod to the venerable Wendy Carlos. Such restrictions, however, reflect Reddington’s small, qualitative sample size and non-cis male music producers and engineers’ marginal status. While Reddington’s subjects might reinforce women’s perceived isolation in an industry overrepresented by straight, white men, we can still look to the emergent, collective successes of nonbinary, trans, and BIPOC music producers and DJs. Reddington posits her work as a “speculative conversation,” and I believe future research can include speculative conversations of studio ventriloquism and control that incorporate trans producers, engineers, and voices. For example, what might scholars reveal about Kim Petras’s work with alleged abuser Dr. Luke, who produced and co-wrote her 2022 album Slutpop?More than a decade ago, Tara Rogers presented women music producers’ challenges to the patriarchal music industry with her groundbreaking book, Pink Noises. Today, Reddington provides a “snapshot of a current situation” (3) wherein this contested landscape, although evolving, is doing so at a slower rate than we might desire. Still, she concludes that long-lasting change is possible and driven by female artists who control their careers, which could lead to an increase in female artists choosing to work with female engineers. Thus, Reddington states that “[a] feeling of positive change continues in the younger generation of producers, and it is to be hoped that this is an effective and permanent change of ethos” (9). Indeed, a recent study from female:pressure revealed that representation of female-fronted music festival acts jumped from eighteen to twenty-seven percent in the past decade.4 In sum, She’s at the Controls is an engaging text and an essential contribution to a growing chorus dismantling the myth that women are somehow new to sound engineering and music production. Quite simply, Reddington demonstrates that we have always been “at the controls” and always will be.