To Venus & Back

When you’re a singer frustrated by gender inequality in the music industry, what do you do? Creating an all-female musical and creative collaboration is a good start – which is exactly what Georgia Nott, one half of New Zealand duo Broods, decided to do. With The Venus Project, Nott has released an album of evocative and provocative indie pop, and she’s keen to speak plainly about the personal convictions that produced it.

Georgia Nott is not happy. Like many women around the world, she is pissed off at gender inequality, at a society that routinely victimises women and at a music industry that regularly ignores them. Unlike many, though, she decided to do something about it. “You’ve got all these women in the mainstream pop world who are all preaching equality, and it’s awesome,” Nott explains, with a hint of caution. “But every time I’m on tour, every time I go to a venue, every time I go to a studio, there’s a real and considerable lack of women. So I decided that my way of being a feminist and supporting this general equality movement was to make an album that celebrated women.”

And so The Venus Project was born. Headed by Nott, it’s a collective of creative women who released the album The Venus Project Volume 1 on International Women’s Day this year. From the musicians to the producers, from the engineers to the graphic designers, The Venus Project is an all-female venture, and Nott hopes that, bit by bit, it will help usher in a new period of female empowerment in the music industry. And despite a long gestation period, it has arrived at exactly the right time.

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