Feminine Hi-Fi are amongst the recipients of Ballantine’s True Music Fund – a project supporting grassroots music organisations and collectives. The Brazilian sound system collective was formed in 2016 to create empowering, safer and more accessible spaces for women, particularly those active within their local reggae and sound system culture.
Since starting up, Feminine Hi-Fi has held three editions of their Feminine Hi-Fi Festival, dedicated to dub and sound system culture. The most recent event happened in October, with a 100 percent female line-up and was supported by the True Music Fund.
In addition to Feminine Hi-Fi, the Ballantine’s True Music Fund 2023 is also supporting nine other organisations and collectives. Other recipients of the funding include Barcelona’s Jokkoo Collective, Femmes & Thems who are creating safer spaces for the POC queer community in Cape Town, Spain’s El Bloque and Ugandan collective Anti-Mass. Find out more about the True Music Fund here.
We caught up with Feminine Hi-Fi to find out a bit more about the project and what else they have planned with the support of the funding.
Crack: Tell us a little about the guiding ambitions of Feminine Hi-Fi
Feminine Hi-Fi is a project that was born out of our own need to find welcoming places where we could play our records, sing and perform. However, this need was (and still is) the need of many, many women around the world, so our ambition is to continue working to help expand these spaces in our surroundings and ourselves to open up this space for women other than ourselves, as we do at our festival and at events where we invite other artists. We want a scene that celebrates diversity and that pays women honestly for their artistic work.
What projects have you produced with support from the True Music Fund?
With the support of the True Music Fund, we held last October’s edition of our Feminine Hi-Fi Festival. With the support of the fund, we held our biggest and boldest edition yet, featuring an international artist from the sound system culture and several powerful female local artists, as well as a great team working with us. We were able to take our event to the next level with the help of True Music Fund by Ballantine’s.
Could you expand on that?
The True Music Fund was very important in a financial sense. It’s not an easy task to be an independent project and raise financial resources in Brazil; support for cultural projects, especially independent ones, is still very limited and very difficult. Therefore, to be able to hold an edition of our festival as we had always dreamed of, bringing an international artist and several excellent national artists, welcoming an audience of more than 2,500 people for free, and doing all this with great excellence, everything was possible because of True Music Fund.
What do you hope to achieve with your events?
The main objectives of our events are to support our community of female artists in Brazilian sound system culture, and also to show that it is possible to hold events with gender equality. It’s not uncommon for events and parties, not just in reggae or sound system culture, to have a majority of men on stage. In addition, we want to provide safe events where everyone can have fun, at all ages, from children to the elderly, with respect for others and with music as the main theme.
