Compiled by In the Key, this directory is designed to help you discover new music from female, trans and non-binary electronic music producers. Organised alphabetically and by genre, the details provided are taken from the artists’ public profiles – ItK is impartial and is not endorsing, or affiliated with anyone listed here. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so please feel free to suggest producers we may have missed, and please help us keep the Directory current by letting us know of any broken links, or incorrect information.
Arya
Arya performed her first production work in the psychedelic genre 10 years ago. She graduated from the Faculty of Communication with the thesis “Music as a Means of Communication and the Production of Female Images in Popular Music” in the light of Fetishistic and Pornographic examples. In 2019, she had her first live performance at Zorlu PSM %100 Studio. Later, she performed in various electronic music venues in Istanbul. She enjoys developing herself in music production, witnessing people liberating by dancing during her performance, seeing music as a means of communication, and the effect that this adds to her musical accumulation. Her performances feature Acid House, Acid and Electronic genres.
Electric Indigo
Producer based in Vienna, Austria.
Electric Indigo, DJ, composer, musician, has performed in 45 countries across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. She represents an intelligent and distinguished interpretation of techno and electronic music. Her DJ-sets are characterized by a wide variety with a clarity of vision and a depth that comes from a deep understanding of the music and the art of DJing. As a composer and musician, she creates music for concert spaces and clubs, and occasionally for stage plays and short films. In her compositions and live performances, she emphasizes the spatial placement and precise structures of subtly elaborated sounds, often generated with granular synthesis. Her new album “Ferrum” was released on Editions Mego in March 2020. The Republic of Austria awarded Electric Indigo the Kunstpreis Musik 2020.
FAUZIA
Producer based in the UK.
Laurel Halo
Producer based in Berlin, Germany.
Electronic producer from Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. She also released more rhythm-focused music under the alias King Felix.
Lucy
Producer based in Berlin, Germany.
Lucy is the nom de techno of Italian-born and Berlin-based Luca Mortellaro, one of the genre’s most exciting and ambitious DJ/producers.
Machine Woman
Producer based in Manchester, UK.
Russian born Anastasia Vtorova is a sound artist and image maker often collaborates her practice with other artists Her works inspired by late night listening of down beat minimal electronica music along with melancholic world wide cinema.
Marie Davidson
Producer based in Montreal, Canada.
Nkisi
Producer based in the UK.
Nkisi is the pseudonym of Melika Ngombe Kolongo, whose activities as a producer, live musician, DJ and curator are channels for an on-going investigation into invisible forces, using sound. Musically, this manifests in a captivating cross talk of African rhythms, uncompromising European hard dance tropes, foreboding synth melodies and a relentless, galvanising energy, as harnessed for her increasingly kinetic live performances. Nkisi co-founded NON WORLDWIDE, a collective of African and African diaspora musicians and honed her sonically marauding DJ style at London’s mythical Endless parties and through a monthly NTS residency.
Nkisi uses her sonic research to cross over genre and discipline, many of these sonic manifestations can be found in her sound installations and collaborative projects as ‘Initiation’, a radical and visceral interrogation of the AV show format in collaboration with visual artist Charlie Hope and ‘Sènsa’, a performance work developed alongside Paul Maheke & Ariel Ashbel Efraim.
REZZ
Canadian producer and DJ from Niagara Falls, Ontario.
Rose Bonica
Producer based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Rose Bonica is a live electronic act, music producer and visual artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Rose’s production style is complex, self taught and unpredictable. The layering of her sounds can feel like anything from astral projection, a warm sunny picnic with friends on the side of a lake to a hard core torture technique. Unexpected sounds illustrate the authenticity of Rose’s private production process that happens in her studio overlooking the ocean in the small coastal town of Hout Bay in South Africa where she has lived her whole life. Her work is a reflection of her perspective on everything from love and pain to the joys of domestic cats or the experience of navigating a world in crisis.
TYGAPAW
Producer based in New York, USA.
TYGAPAW (Dion McKenzie) is a Multi-Disciplined producer and DJ based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
upsammy
Producer based in the Netherlands
https://linktr.ee/thessa.upsammy
Dutch DJ and producer Thessa Torsing, better known as upsammy, makes dreamy, abstract dance tracks that fluidly switch between styles such as electro, techno, and IDM. The Amsterdam-based artist emerged during the late 2010s and earned acclaim for her adventurous DJ sets, which span a wide range of BPMs, and her gliding, spacious productions inspired by nature and science fiction. Following several sought-after EPs, she released her full-length debut, Zoom, in 2020.
Zoë Mc Pherson
Producer based in Germany.
Zoë Mc Pherson is a Berlin based multimedia artist, performer, researcher, sound designer, spatial sound shaper, DJ, curator and founder of SFX label & AV platform.
Described as a “vanguard” by British publication Mixmag and “fearless” by Hyponik, Berlin-based Zoë Mc Pherson is a French-Irish multimedia artist whose practice absorbs elements of performance, sound design, installation art and DJing. Their breathless third album “Pitch Blender” is a tight set of cybernetic dancefloor experiments that flicker between the rave and the art space, and arrives courtesy of SFX, the boundary-pushing A/V-focused label Mc Pherson runs with their long-time collaborator Alessandra Leone.
Since the release of their immersive 2018 debut album “String Figures” and its acclaimed 2020 follow-up “States of Fugue”, Mc Pherson has performed across the world, appearing at Berlin’s CTM Festival, Nyege Nyege in Jinja, Uganda, Freerotation in the UK, Meakusma in Belgium, Madrid’s LEV, Amsterdam’s FIBER festival, Elevate Festival in Graz and Malmö’s Inkonst. They’ve presented spatial sound installations at Berlin’s world-famous MONOM (the world’s first 4DSOUND system), Silent Green amongst others, and work alongside bULt, in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, to invite musicians to perform and hold workshops at a brand new queer-owned club.
A seasoned collaborator, Mc Pherson maintains an ongoing project with renowned French sound artist Jessica Ekomane. The two performed a special project at Berghain’s Halle broadcast by ARTE TV, and their first recording was released on Ostgut Ton’s “Fünfzehn + 1” compilation. On the other end of their creative spectrum, Carbon 96 finds Mc Pherson teaming up with US techno producer and DJ Ciarra Black, and the duo’s effervescent debut “Carbonated” was released on Peder Mannerfelt Produktion earlier this year. Their most recent project however is 3OK, a frenetic project that was conceptualized in Uganda and matches Mc Pherson’s sci-fi sonics with singeli pioneer Jay Mitta’s breakneck beats and Malian veteran DJ Diaki’s unmistakable soundsystem energy.