THE RISE OF GIRL POWER - GLASGOW'S MUSIC MAKING

The music industry, while seen from the outside to be dominated by female pop stars, has a rough history of neglecting women and girls further down. Music production, DJing, and performance in some instruments like guitar and drums often sees them sidelined.

Girls and non-binary people who do manage to establish themselves as respected artists in these fields often face sexist taunts or simply a lack of bookings. Slowly but surely, this is starting to change in Glasgow.

Girls will likely be discouraged from certain paths early on while they are still in school. Nursing will be favoured over engineering, violin favoured over bass guitar. This is where Girls Rock Glasgow come in. This non-profit organisation runs a week-long rock’n’roll summer school for girls and non-binary kids aged 8-16. The group say the project is focused on “promoting positivity, confidence and community” and that they “aim to be as inclusionary and intersectional as possible, and encourage participants of all backgrounds to take part.”

Rock’n’Roll Summer School for Girls Glasgow is volunteer-run and provides its pupils with food and the freedom to jam all week long. Glasgow’s own producer and DJ Nightwave has previously taken part as an instructor running a DJ workshop. Girls Rock Glasgow have been up and running since 2015, but are currently running a campaign on GoFundMe in order to raise money for food, equipment, and basic expenses for the operation.

For young women looking to get involved in electronic music, there is Producer Girls and Intersessions. Producer Girls was started up in February 2016 by London’s own E.M.M.A. along with producers Dexplicit, Ikonika, and P Jam. The workshops coach young women through production software FL Studio.

Intersessions began in Canada as the brainchild of producer, DJ, and performer Chippy Nonstop. It was a series of production and DJ workshops mostly exclusive to North America, but ventured into Mexico, and most recently landed in Glasgow as a joint operation last Saturday with Producer Girls. The workshop was a hit, and saw young women thriving alongside one another. An afterparty at SWG3 with a girl-powered line-up followed the same evening headlined by Chippy Nonstop.

Funding and publicity in these kinds of projects is still lacking, but interest is picking up. As more influential women working in male-dominated fields around Glasgow see the massive interest generated by these events, one can only hope they will create their own DIY seminars.