On Tuesday, February 7, non-profit Beats by Girlz (BBG) kicked off the second season of its flagship online video series BBG.tv. The vision for BBG.tv is to showcase women and gender-expansive people of color in the Beats by Girlz community, as well as to empower viewers by displaying how people like them are using music, production and technology to live and work.
For the second season, the program’s organizers wanted to create a series of videos to highlight producers and artists in NYC. They interviewed five female and gender-expansive producers on their experiences, challenges and inspirations in creating music, and each artist led two tutorials on techniques employed in their music making. The series, sponsored by Paramount, is being released on YouTube, with featured content on Instagram and TikTok.
The first episode features an interview with producer/composer JWords, covering how she got started in music tech, how her background influences her music, and what makes her so passionate about music production.
Episode 2 and 3 go further with JWords, covering the topics “How to Use the Teenage Engineering OP-1 for Live Performance” and “How to Use the Teenage Engineering TX-6 to Make a Beat,” respectively. These episodes can be viewed in this playlist, with future episodes being released one-by-one in the coming weeks.
The featured artists of BBG.tv’s second season:
- JWords (she/her) is a producer, composer and an Afro-Latina woman breaking boundaries in black electronic music
- Dani Murcia (she/they) is a songwriter, producer and educator, creating unique worlds through lush harmonies and haunting melodies
- Ushka (she/her) is a Sri Lankan-born, Thailand-raised activist cultural organizer and DJ based in Brooklyn
- Lamb (she/they) is a musician, composer, choreographer and director exploring Blackness as the break that might rupture our attachments to Worlds, territories, and Man.
- Rosana Cabán (she/her) is a Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based artist and producer. She uses sound, sculpture and performance as mediums to probe problematic binaries
Beats by Girlz is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization created to empower the next generation of women and gender-expansive individuals through music and technology. BBG is the promise of a future – one where traditionally marginalized gender identities are able to visualize and realize their full potential by providing access to tools, resources, education and community necessary to foster growth. The organization views music as the skeleton key that opens the door to technology parity and justice, not only in the music industry, but in all tech-related fields where women and gender minorities are underrepresented. Beats By Girlz currently has 34 active chapters in 15 countries around the world.
For more information on Beats by Girlz, visit https://www.beatsbygirlz.org/.
