Slow Women - A Celebration of Female Music Talent

The playlist is also available on Apple Music, Deezer, Soundcloud, Tidal and Youtube.

Womens Day is a good moment to reflect on, highlight and celebrate some of the female artists that have enriched The Slow Music Movement with their talent, creativity and presence over the last year. I've looked back over the year's music recommendations and radio show playlists and added my favourite track from all the artists involved to the playlist. If you like what you hear then I urge you to take a dive into the artists' catalogues.

I'd love to be able to sit here and type that female artists represent 50% of my daily recommendations and radio show tracks but sadly it's nowhere near that figure and, without doing the exact sums, I'd say it is around the 15% mark. This is quite a shocking statistic and not one that I'm happy about.

I've given some thought to why this is and I think that one of the main contributing factors is the fact that I support quite a lot of ambient/chilled/instrumental electronic music which is certainly still not an area where women seem to be well represented. I'd love to hear some thoughts on why this is? I imagine that women, often being saner creatures than men, are less inclined to spend lots of time shacked up and isolated in studios/bedrooms messing about with electronic equipment, cables, software patches and plugins. A bit like vinyl collecting studio work seems to be a peculiarly male past time or obsession. Please feel free to shoot down this overly salient, quickly conceived hypothesis and suggest your own. I'm all ears.

Certainly a large amount of the female artists represented in the playlists, I'd say around 75%, seem to be vocalists or players of more traditional musical instruments which might, from this sample, suggest that women do lean towards more traditional musical paths. Of course it could also be my personal affection for the female voice? Subjectivity, and I hope not bias or discrimination, is undoubtedly a factor.

I've also only included only female led acts in the list, which partly I hope provides some mitigating circumstances(!) to my poor female representation figures, but there are also obviously lots (still not 50%) of unsung female band members in other acts that TSMM has supported. Can you hear me squirming whilst trying to wriggle off the hook I seem to have impaled myself on?

There is certainly much food for thought and a long way to go for sexual equality in all aspects of life and all parts of the world and Women's Day is an important reminder of the work still to be done. For now though I'd suggest you get your ears around a whole heap of amazing music from some of the best female musical talent around.

The playlist is also available on Apple Music, Deezer, Soundcloud, Tidal and Youtube.