This week we have a very special "music" edition of TechnoGirlTalk. Our panelists were all women composer/musicians, and we had a lot of fun mixing in talk and music into the podcast. We got the idea because our theme music is one of the most commented-upon aspects of this podcast.

One of our panelists this week is composer Beth Custer and that theme music is by her band Eighty Mile Beach. (Full disclosure, I've been advising Beth on her social media strategy.) Beth is a well-known figure in the San Francisco music scene. She's one of the few women band leaders in jazz. We caught up with her while she was in residency at Montalvo Arts Center. Her recent film score for comedic Georgian silent film "My Grandmother" won an Aaron Copland award, and she took it on tour across Europe. You can hear the Beth Custer Ensemble's newest release Roam on CD, and at the Noe Valley Ministry as part of their music series May 8.

As it turns out, there's plenty of techiness among musicians these days. As another panelist, Agnes Szelag explained, music can be "programmed" using an open source composition environment and programming language, "SuperCollider." Agnes is also a tinkerer. For example, she put the strings for a Japanese koto on a Chinese instrument known as a guzheng. Agnes has a collaboration called myrmyr with another woman musician, Marielle Jakobsons.They'll be performing live March 11 at Bluesix in San Francisco.

We also caught up with Ellyot, a Tel Aviv-based composer, DJ and rock star. Her music is in two recent independent documentaries: "Pizza in Auschwitz" and "Gay Days," about the gay community in Israel in the 1980s, a film in which she also appears. Her band Pollyanna Frank was called the "hope of Israeli rock" after its first performance in a Tel Aviv club.

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