Tara Rodgers / Analog Tara is a multi-instrumentalist composer, sound engineer, and historian of music technology, originally from upstate New York and now based in the Washington, DC, area.
“Her sonic nexus is layered, complex, and performative; her music is an engagement with rhythmic disruption, meditation, fluidity, mindfulness, and healing… In the predominantly patriarchal world of electronic music… Rodgers’ processes and practices seek to honor the “traditions” she expands by carrying her listeners along through deeply felt, deeply connected sonic energy that embodies joy, transcendence, and positivity.” — M. Silverman, The Routledge Companion to Creativities in Music Education, 2022
“Tara Rodgers’s revelatory work on the young women of the 1950s who wrote to the RCA synthesizer company to learn more about its technology suggests untapped archives that can expand our knowledge of women’s popular music cultures.” — M. Haddon and B. Klein, Popular Music & Society, 2024
NEW & RECENT:
Announcing Zero Crossings: a new monthly newsletter. I’m writing on creative process and sharing studio work in progress, with an interest in describing music technology in ways that are tender and speculative. Read and subscribe on Substack
A roundup of Analog Tara short-form, home-studio performance videos: #studiotime #practicing
Jomox Studies: an album of solos on the Jomox XBase 09 drum machine
Keynote (virtual) with Jonathan Sterne for Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Musical Media, Harvard University, May 11-13, 2023.
‘We Cross Examine with Old Sonic DNA’: King Britt and Tara Rodgers in conversation on Blacktronika, music technology and pedagogy, in Organised Sound 27:1 (2022)
Hear music by Analog Tara in One Institute’s Periodically Queer podcast on magazines, newsletters, and LGBTQ+ community building.
Analog Tara – Fundamentals EP
“You don’t need to know much about techno for Fundamentals to register as something special… A beautifully austere, four-track exercise in quality control and rigorous decision… it is assertive work, bold in the precision and subtlety it takes to mix such signals with thrill and grace and restraint.” — NPR Music
“Top to bottom, this is well-crafted dance music — the kind that makes the floor feel sturdier beneath your feet while still allowing your head to get all-the-way loose.” — The Washington Post
Wammie Award nominee and FACT Magazine Best of 2018
Dimensions EP
“Full of warm, soulful techno with a distinctly human touch… feels both perfectly functional and still otherworldly.” — Resident Advisor
“Rodgers has become renowned for producing quality dance music, and her latest EP is no exception… funkadelic house at its languidly louche best.” — The Playground
Synthetic Fields
“Excellent electronic music… extremely accessible and a very satisfying listen. Contains everything from pleasing harmonic drone to melodic pop-tune material, all delivered with intelligence, charm, and great clarity of intent. Analog Tara exhibits great restraint in her choice of sounds and a real economy in their arrangement and delivery. Lovely item all round.” — The Sound Projector
Sketches with Piano + Analog Noise
“Rodgers’ approach varies widely from release to release… sketches features sinuous, jazz-inflected improvisations on grand piano, augmented with layers of buzzing, skittering analog electronics.” — Bandcamp Daily
Tara Rodgers – Pink Noises
“A modern mainstay of feminist electronic music discourse.” — NPR Music
“[Pink Noises] was and is an absolutely singular undertaking which has staked a claim to changing the ways in which we think about electronic music.” — Cycling ’74
“One of the most fascinating writers on the topic of gender and electronic music history… Pink Noises is a must for any electronic musician.” — LANDR
“[Pink Noises] challenges us to listen differently, and more musically, to the electronic musics these women have made.” — International Alliance for Women in Music
“Feminist and queer musicology in the U.S. has [an] established presence… and Rodgers is one of its most interesting voices.” — The Wire