To put it mildly, Portland's music scene is full of talented women, so Hunter Skowron of Dazzleships Records had his pick when he started work on Raised By Women, a new compilation. Dazzleships, a vinyl-and-cassette label that has put out releases by artists including Kulululu and GLASYS, is planning on having the album available at record stores in town by mid-December.
So, how did Skowron narrow the album down to 11 tracks? "I chose the artists based on a few things—basically, I went with extremely hardworking female bands and musicians from Portland. I reached out to bands I had seen, heard or worked with in some way in the past," he says. The album features women and women-fronted acts like Cat Hoch, RILLA and Mini Blinds, who all "graciously donated their track[s]," some of them only recently released.
Not only is this album celebrating these talented, committed women, it's all for a great cause: 100 percent of proceeds will go to SE Portland's Raphael House, an organization dedicated to helping survivors of domestic violence by providing emergency and transitional housing, among myriad services. Keeping the album and its beneficiary local "was a big must for me," Skowron says, and Raphael House "repeatedly came up when researching organizations that would benefit from the release."
And Skowron isn't stopping with this one compilation, either: "I hope to have a release show organized for mid-December, and I'm looking to grow this event into an annual music fest, celebrating the amazingly talented women making music in our city."
