The women who shaped the genres

Electronic music fans might be familiar with the origin stories behind Chicago house, Detroit techno, and drum & bass. Key artists, collectives and figures come to mind, and they all have one thing in common: their gender.

What about the women who shaped these scenes? Too often they’re left out of the narrative.

With March marking Women’s History Month, there’s no better time to celebrate women’s social and historical contributions. We’re going to look at some of the key figures who impacted major electronic music genres, and how their contribution continues to inspire the scene today. From Ellen Allien’s BPitch club nights in Berlin, to Big Ang’s bassline bangers in Sheffield, UK, and MC Chickaboo physically wrestling the mic off the men as the world’s first female jungle MC.

With each story, we explore the genre itself, its socio-political context, and the fertile ground that helped it bloom. In a world where DJs, venues, promoters, and producers regularly worry about the future of the underground, this is a reminder of the resilience of electronic music and its ability to thrive in the margins.

Crucially, we’ll highlight the women who helped build the communities, challenge gatekeeping, and expand the possibilities of club music, often without the recognition afforded to their male counterparts. Thanks to their innovation and influence, their impact continues to ripple through dance floors, studios, and scenes around the world.

The year is 1990 and there’s a hole in the Berlin Wall. Quite a few, actually. Ellen Allien is 21 years old, and she watches open-mouthed as the block of concrete that’s defined much of her life crumbles before her eyes. Punks smash it with hammers. Kids clamber on top of it, yelling in triumph. Ellen cannot believe it. Her city is unifying.

Ellen isn’t yet a respected global DJ. She hasn’t founded BPitch Control (now known as BPitch), the seminal label that’s come to influence the sound of global underground music. She is not yet ranking in DJ Mag’s Alternative Top 100 DJs, nor throwing club nights at Berghain. But she is standing on the precipice of something great; a world beyond her imagination.

Over the coming months, Ellen walks down streets she’s never seen before. At night, bass reverberates out of former power plants, warehouses, and electrical substations. Anti-fascist slogans appear on walls and after midnight, young people dressed in black silently file into bunkers where they dance to a relentless, meditative beat until dawn.

Soon, artists like Carl Cox, Laurent Garnier and The Prodigy will make their way into these makeshift nightclubs. Ellen’s favourite is called E-Werk. Its multiple rooms showcase different DJs and styles, an experience that shapes her future in music.

Ellen Allien was one of the dancers, but soon graduates to DJ, playing rich, deep, techno sets at Tresor and E-Werk. Her love for these clubs extends way beyond music. This is where she gets to connect with the side of the city she was separated from all these years. These people aren’t just dancers, they’re neighbours.

In the late ‘90s, when the German government sold E-Werk and other venues to developers, Ellen was devastated—so she took matters into her own hands.

“I decided to do my own events,” she says. “We threw the first BPitch events in warehouses, with video art, our own light displays and sound systems.”

Ellen’s close-knit crowd and community soon started handing her demo tapes while she DJ’d.

“The tapes were from all the kids who went to E-Werk and Tresor, the same people I partied with over all those years,” Ellen says. “They were making the kind of music we were dancing to, but putting their own twist on it. And I knew it was very important to open a label because this is our sound and it needs its own space.”

That’s how BPitch, a label that continues to shape the sound of European techno, began. Ellen’s own 2001 debut album, Stadtkindt, was conceptually tied to Berlin itself. It reflected the city’s post-Wall urban landscape, with industrial textures and minimalist arrangement. The album showed Berlin’s identity as a hub of forward-thinking electronic music, stretching techno beyond what it was previously known for. BPitch released electronic music that was emotionally resonant, atmospheric, layered, and experimental, blending IDM, ambient, and glitch elements with straight-up techno.

In 2003, Berlinette harnessed the ideas from Stadtkind for maximum club impact, appearing on Pitchfork’s “Top 50 Albums of 2003” list. It pushed Berlin techno into international club circuits, most notably with “Engel der Nacht,” which became a kind of case study for people looking at techno as an artform.

And this was only the beginning. BPitch helped pave the way for a more musically eclectic future, releasing material from Apparat, Modeselektor, Pantha du Prince, T.Raumschmiere, DJ Koze, and Paul Kalkbrenner. These releases spanned electro, minimal, house, indie dance and IDM, connected by an energetic thread rather than a genre. It was an evolutionary leap, and the label continues to showcase music that stretches well beyond 4/4 techno.

Bassline emerged from Sheffield’s early-2000s scene, and specifically a club called Niche. Here, DJs took speed garage, organ house, and UK garage and emphasized the drums, chopped up the vocals, and banged the bass front-centre. A winning formula, judging by the way the club always erupted.

Big Ang helped create this carnage, and she’s still known as the Queen of Bassline today.

Born and raised in Sheffield, Big Ang was there in 1997 when Niche opened its doors, and she was already making her own productions when bassline emerged.

“Certain clubs and venues built reputations for playing good music at a time where it was better than the commercial music,” Ang says. “Clubs were dark but the music was what bought people together and DJs were very competitive as well.”

This competition led to healthy one-upmanship. Who could make the filthiest bassline? Who brought on the sickest MC? Who has that remix no one else does? How can we take this music scene to the next level?

Big Ang became a staple DJ in the Niche-era Sheffield bassline scene, where it was common practice for local MCs to jump on the mic.

All this came at a time of social and political shifts in Yorkshire. High unemployment driven by the deindustrialization of northern towns and cities left working-class communities feeling economically sidelined.

When bassine evolved in the early 2000s, Sheffield city centre was being redeveloped, but the suburbs were still struggling. Yorkshire towns were undergoing racial tension, with Islamophobia, anti-immigration, and far-right unrest growing. But nightclubs and pirate radio stations were multi-ethnic, providing an integrated place for everybody. 

Ang says her influences came from rave, jungle, house, organ and piano house, speed garage and UKG. “I wanted an old-school feel, able to cross over to a current audience, but still create music which hopefully would stand the test of time and not be disposable,” Ang says.

Her 2002 track “Catch The Light” sampled vocals from “The Queen of Clubland” Martha Wash over the warbliest of basslines and donkiest of kicks. In fact, the entire Episode 4 EP distilled the bassline sound so well it became a reference for new artists trying to push the genre forwards.

In 2004, Big Ang made history by cracking the charts. Her track feat. Siobhan, “It’s Over For Now,” became a defining anthem of 2000s club culture and a rite of passage for a generation of Northern clubbers. It hit #29 in the UK Top 40 in 2004, and became Ang’s biggest hit, cementing her status as a UK dance icon. 

Perhaps Ang’s biggest contribution is her consistency. Even after bassline slipped from the mainstream, Big Ang remained committed to the sound. She continued to DJ, produce, and nurture the music through underground sets, white labels, mixtapes, and local events. That commitment kept the sound alive and made sure the style survived right through to its 2010s resurgence popularised by S-Dog, Bad Boy Chiller Crew, Darkzy, Holy Goof, and Skepsis.

With all that history behind her, how does Ang see her role in the bassline scene now?

“Hopefully to inspire and support people,” she says. “And also to make more bangers.”

MC Chickaboo didn’t really connect with the acid house dominating dance floors back in 1990. She was in her late teens and neck-deep in sound system culture in her hometown of Birmingham, UK. 

“Kids in the area started asking me about rave music and I said I wasn’t into all the bleeping,” Chickaboo says. “But I started playing some rave music and the kids would jump around and go nuts.”

Sitting between 120 and 150 BPM, rave was a byproduct of acid house, and spawned from the illegal warehouse raves and free parties of Manchester, London, Sheffield, and Leeds.

Soon, the BPMs began to increase. Producers began to sample elements from funk and hip-hop, and a more intense, driving sound emerged from Chickaboo’s soundsystem. It was called breakbeat hardcore, characterized by frenetic drums, chipmunk vocals and euphoric piano melodies, and the moment she heard it Chickaboo felt compelled to grab the mic.

MC Chickaboo made history as the first female jungle MC. The genre was male dominated, and getting on the mic was often a power struggle, so the petite Chickaboo had to be creative.

“It would get physical,” Chickaboo says. “But I’m quite brave, so I’d get in there, grab it and then be so good they’d be too intimidated to take it back.”

She soon became known for her sky-high energy, whip-sharp vocals, and fiery material, and when Chickaboo met DJ G.E. Real at a club in Birmingham, he wanted her on board. “He asked if I would MC for him, so we went and did a gig and it just went crazy,” she remembers. They became an unstoppable team, with G.E. Real mixing on three decks while Chickaboo wowed crowds with her improvised vocals.

The pair played at some of the UK’s biggest raves including Fantasia, Dreamscape, and Jungle Fever, but in 1996, just as their careers were taking off, G.E. Real became unwell and passed away a few months later.

Knocked sideways, Chickaboo took time out before moving to London, where she MC’d for jungle’s biggest players, including Bryan Gee, Aphrodite, DJ Zinc, and Shy FX.

Her fluid, commanding delivery became integral to the sound, although she managed to successfully branch out into the then-popular breaks sound, hitting the UK Top 40 in 2002 with “Shifter,” her collaboration with Timo Maas, and appearing on Rennie Pilgrem’s “Celeb” in 2003, and Blim & Rennie Pilgrem’s “2 Freaks” in 2004. Her wheelhouse now spans house, hip-hop, soul, and D&B as well as jungle, and she’s worked alongside legends like DJ Craze and Soul II Soul. 

Chickaboo remains a driving force in the genre. She is an organiser and mentor with the EQ50 collective, a resident MC for nights like Unorthodox and Rupture, and performs at global festivals from Firmly Rooted Soundsystem to Glastonbury.

Although Chickaboo has experienced chart success, she’s never chased it. Her legacy lies in her role shaping the tone of jungle, all while kicking down doors for those most marginalised and ensuring they remain open.

When Lenore decided to launch drum & bass night Elements in her corner of Boston, Massachusetts, she really wasn’t expecting it to become what might be the longest-running weekly club night in the US.

Born and raised in Connecticut, Lenore’s first encounter with electronic music came through the queer underground in Hartford. She went to college in Boston, where she fell in love with ‘90s house, which in 1995 motivated her to start DJing.

“I discovered drum & bass accidentally in a record store,” Lenore says. “I liked the artwork and the names of the tracks —I didn’t even know what genre it was.”

From there, Lenore immersed herself in drum & bass history, devouring early releases from labels like Metalheadz before throwing herself into New England’s underground scene.

But her favourite club night was Jungle Roots, run by Al Fougy. “I saw some great artists there like Ed Rush and DJ Trace, and Fougy also brought names like Goldie, SS, L Double and LTJ Bukem,” Lenore says.

When she graduated college in 1998, she noticed a lull in local D&B club nights. “At that point I had been DJing drum & bass and had crates and crates of records,” she says. “Drum & bass was always relegated to the side room, so I asked the owner of The Phoenix Landing if I could throw my own club night there and surprisingly he said yes.”

Two days after her birthday in January 1999, Lenore launched the first Elements rave with her co-founder, Crook. “I had to learn what to do with bookings and logistics on the fly,” she says. “Back then, we flyered, so I would sometimes set my alarm at 1 AM and go out and promote.”

Early bookings included Dom & Roland, DJ Storm, Breakage, and Total Science. Initially Elements was supposed to fill a temporary gap, but demand kept growing, and today it’s one of the most successful club nights in the US.

“The sound system and the room shape is one factor,” Lenore says. “The acoustics work really well with drum & bass because there’s a lot of wood so you can really hear the intricacies and the percussion. D&B producers are some of the best engineers on the planet and the room caters to that.”

Boston’s transient college population and the absence of a dress code also help maintain a steady flow of attendees. “Some people just walked in and haven’t missed a week since,” she says. “There’s a high turnover of people but it’s cool how the culture has stayed the same. The crowd is educated musically.”

Elements still runs every Thursday in the same 150-capacity venue. “A lot of people say it’s their therapy, their church and their chosen family,” Lenore says. “And there’s never been a question of whether I want to continue, because the impetus is coming from the community.”

The year is 1991 and Artful Dodger’s tiny dance floor is packed. Clubbers move as one entity to DJ Heather’s selections, an eclectic mix of hip-hop, jazz, house, soul and R&B. No one knows what’s coming next, but they trust her implicitly as she leads them through a sonic experience they never want to end.

Luckily for them, they can enjoy Heather’s residency in the tiny back room of this Bucktown bar in the Northside of Chicago every Saturday night for five hours, and they keep coming back. Surprisingly, Heather is new to this; she only recently started DJing, but she’s quickly honing her craft. Heather isn’t so focused on technical mixing, instead building sets on selection and sequencing.

In the early 1990s, Chicago house was in an exciting transitional phase. The first wave, defined by pioneers like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy, had already set the blueprint, but the scene was evolving. Acid house had peaked, and deeper, jazzier, more eclectic strains were emerging, blending house with hip-hop, disco, and soul. Heather was part of the second wave of DJs coming out of the city, and helped surge it forward. 

Born in Brooklyn, Heather moved to Chicago aged 7, and came of age at the same time as house music.

“Looking back, my experience of those early days of the scene was a hybrid of music genres,” remembers Heather. “New wave, industrial, disco, rock were played alongside those now house classic tracks. Nothing felt off limits.”

Heather says radio was instrumental in Chicago at the time and operated parallel to clubs and loft parties. “WBMX, WNUR and WZRD pushed new music and helped curate what we heard in those spaces and vice versa,” Heather remembers. “Everything felt new and exciting. [It was] really great to witness new styles blossoming in real time.”

As Heather’s career expanded way beyond Illinois’s borders, she joined forces with DJ Collette to form Superjane, the US’s first all-female DJ collective. They went on to tour the world and continue to do so individually today. Heather’s legacy is rooted in sets and residencies at Smartbar, Heavy Weight Session, Sorted, Blackcherry, and Lake Effect, with mixes and compilations on Afterhours, Om Records, fabric, and Nordic Trax, and releases on Heather’s own Blackcherry Recordings and Apollo Music Group.

“My role in the global house community feels like it’s always progressing,” Heather says. “I started DJing in 1990 but I don’t just play music from that era. I’ve always enjoyed challenging myself by learning new techniques, having new experiences and not being afraid to take chances.”

Text: Alice Austin