Electric Indigo: Keeping Up the Female (DJ) Pressure

"Along with all my female DJ colleagues we've always got these comments like 'It's so great that you're playing in this male dominated business, why are they're so few female DJs-' My answer would always be, 'Yes there are more male DJs, but there's quite a lot of women too'. So I started a list and Female Pressure, the website, is really a technological answer to that question. It's meant to represent the fact that there are lots of female DJs, producers and visual artists within the field of electronic music."

With almost 500 female DJs signed up to her online database, Electric Indigo's original vision has prospered expanded and grown, putting her at the centre of an ever-growing network of female talent. Hailing from Austria and having DJed since 1989 she's become more than aware of the true potential dance culture has for changing people's perceptions.

"Electronic music has a tribal networking culture and that makes nationalism obsolete," she told Skrufff's Jonty Adderley this week.

"The common perception is that young people don't care at all about politics but I don't think that's true. Certainly, they're often frustrated by political parties and governments but it's not that they're unpolitical."

The principal reason for the chat, was her new mix CD Electric Indigo- the New Electro, which is out now on Swiss label Human (a division of UWE). Featuring cuts from her long time friend David Caretta, Mount Sims and Jeff Mills amongst others, the mix is a collection of techno and electro, though she's at pains to distance herself from the electroclash term.

"I find the whole hype really stupid," she says.

"It seems to be more about how you dress than the music."

Skrufff (Jonty Adderley): You've called your album the New Electro, how symbolic is the title-

Electric Indigo: "The title wasn't actually my idea, the label guys who initiated the project called it that as a working title, more as graphic layout thing for the name of the newspaper in the artwork. It was meant to look like the New York Times. It's more of a joke than a reference to the music."

Skrufff: Did you select the tracks to reflect one of your typical DJ sets-

Electric Indigo: "Yes, that's right. Though the main idea was to do a project with my friends from Leitmotif Records so I tried to include lots of their tracks, which is not that close to what I play as a DJ. But I wanted to give people an idea what the label is about. For the rest, I picked out favourite tunes and tried to give it a contemporary feel."

Skrufff: You seem to have lots of French connections despite being based in Vienna, are you spending much time in France generally-

Electric Indigo: "At the moment, yes, and I used to play there a lot in the early 90s then I stopped being invited in the latter half of the decade. But now I'm back there a lot, it seems to move in phases. I have lots of good friends there, especially in Paris."

Skrufff: Austria is often linked to Germany, is Germany a big part of your musical life-

Electric Indigo: "Absolutely, I lived in Berlin between 1993 and 96 and my socialisation within the techno scene definitely happened in Germany during that period. I worked at the Hardwax Records shop there and it's an institution in the techno scene internationally. I'm still very strongly bound to the German techno scene."

Skrufff: The CD artwork has an article on it which talks about bringing together the essences of German and French electronic music, what do you see are the differences between German and French music-

Electric Indigo: "It's more about the vibes in the scene and the people rather than the music, there's not many differences nationwide between music. It's more about a tribal thing, in terms of what people relate to. Take people like The Hacker or David Caretta, they release a lot of music on German labels like Gigolo so you can't really call that French or German. It's more ab Tags