grapefruits.online, English, 28 pages, 2019-2020, Germany

At last we are witnessing much needed attention paid to women composers in experimental and electronic music. The ground breaking work of pioneering and contemporary women artists is increasingly valorized, documented and presented to the public after being mostly relegated to the background. This is evidenced by several recent initiatives such as the acclaimed documentary “Sisters With Transistors, electronic music’s unsung heroines”. It is within this framework that we place Grapefruit, “A Fanzine on Female* Composers and Sound Artists”. The three issues produced so far focus on “Imaginary Sound”, “Performance” and “Instruments” and are structured similarly. In each issue, six female composers, past and present, are profiled by a different author using a variety of sources. The profile is both synthetic and exhaustive, limited to 3-4 pages, while the zines as a whole comprise a small archival effort, developed by a small community of women writers. The project seems to be about gathering and disseminating this knowledge, but also about promoting its prominence, in a journalistic effort to allow trustworthy and well-prepared information to emerge, spread, and remain. Produced on coloured paper, the zine has the value of being both a quick read and a vital reference, an example of what zines can continue to be today.