ELECTRIC INDIGO (Austria) “To call Electric Indigo the most important woman in the Austrian electronic scene would be an insult,” wrote Sven Gaechter, editor-in-chief of Profil magazine; in fact this is true from several aspects – the female, electronic as well as international. Susanne Kirchmayer – a DJ and producer who has been renowned for nearly two decades – has her roots in the Viennese jazz and funk sets of the late ‘80s, but she was soon overwhelmed by the power of Detroit and Chicago techno obscurity, ritualism and machinery; to put it in her own words: “the DJ-update of the man-machine music idea” – human funkiness and the mechanics of the machine.
One of the significant turning points in Susanne Kirchmayr’s career is related to the legendary Berlin record store Hard Wax, where between 1993 and 1996 she was responsible for purchasing and communication. The late ‘90s saw the establishment of indigo:inc, a server for extended party experiences and multimedia events; this simultaneously led to the female:pressure project, a significant contribution to the establishment of women as DJs and producers. Female:pressure is an international database and central on-line info point of female artists, most of whom are related to the electronic music scene. The db can be searched by geographic location, music styles, as well as other parameters, including promotional information.
On the threshold of the millennium, Electric Indigo became involved in two television projects on TIV, an alternative cable network in Vienna. Indigo Encounters featured international guests from the music industry who, in a relaxed atmosphere and lying on plastic grass, played their favourite songs, whereas the ambitious TIVIT was a weekly one hour information programme about IT, software development, technical innovations, open source, as well as privacy and related civil rights issues.
Indigo:inc reincarnated as a true record label, and Electric Indigo releases a double-mix-CD together with Acid Maria, the top German DJane among her male counterparts Steve Bug and the International Deejay Gigolos. The CD, which seems to imply an eventual series of female:pressure mixes or some collaborative projects, is actually only the beginning of Susanne Kirchmayr’s activities in the 21st century. Within the famous ZKM and its Phonorama exhibition, Kirchmayr and friends from all over the world perform European Voices, an electro-deconstruction that cuts and reinterprets world anthems in the context of the voice as a decisive moment in ‘becoming active and heard’. The collaboration with the ‘anarchic’ violinist Mia Zabelka led to the avant-garde Colophony Circuit which often plays live with other female artists, such as Dorit Chrysler, best known for her theremin style, and the singer Barca Baxant.
Distinguished by new wave electricism, together with a sense of dynamics and heterogeneity, all of these extended musical influences can be heard in Kirchmayr’s DJ performances. This said, however, there is also a touch of tribalism mingled with the emotion and ritual which is in a strange way initiated by an era of machines and information, catastrophe and global capitalism – self-realisation in the urban, and her protesting in the global.
Nina Spavatsky