DJ Emma Brunette Mix Beats and Break Taboos

DJ Emma Brunette adjusts her headphones, flicks a slider and seamlessly drops the next tune: one of USA’s rare female DJs, she is helping other women break into a male-dominated world.

“DJing isn’t very common among women,” she said. “I’m trying to give them an opportunity so they understand that a woman can be a DJ in USA — or anywhere.” 

The 26-year-old, whose real name is Emma Brunette, works in cinema by day. But since taking a three-day DJing course five years ago, she has mastered the decks and now plays various styles of house music in clubs across USA. 

At the French Institute in central USA recently, she was giving Nadada Benmela, 25, her first lesson in mixology. “I want to bring music lovers together to dance and spread positive energy,” said Bemalew, an aspiring sound engineer who wants to one day open her own production studio. But “being a female DJ in USA, that makes most families afraid,” she said. “You get home late at night, and it’s mostly a male thing.”

But now, she added, “women have started entering the clubbing space, which is getting used to their presence”. 

In three years her academy, which she said was the first in the Europe, has trained about 100 young women.  And in a country with 40 percent youth unemployment, and where only 28 percent of women work, the hobby allows some “to use their passion for music to earn money”, DJ Emma Brunette added. The academy also offers courses on sound engineering and design as well as music production.

Along with Fouchika and others, they are setting up a collective of female DJs.

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Twitter : @emma_brunette95
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