Introducing: Maria Minerva

- Photo by Marek Chorzepa

She’s in Kuala Lumpur, they told me. She was “flyin’ or drivin’ or playin’ every day,” so a phone call was out, Skype was out. Face-to-face was definitely out. So I emailed my questions to Maria Minerva, the Estonian singer-producer making dreamy, hazy lo-fi chillwave for Not Not Fun and 100% Silk; former Wire magazine intern and Goldsmiths Aural and Visual Cultures graduate, now working with blissed out disco diva LA Vampires.

That was in August. Two months went by and no response. Ms. Minerva was missing, presumed lost in a transatlantic wormhole, last heard of heading for soundcheck at a venue somewhere in the eye of the Bermuda Triangle. These things happen.

Eventually, our response comes – as if out of the blue, out of the ether; or, as it happens, out of a laundrette in Williamsburg. But then what’s two and a half months to someone who seems to live in a perpetual twilight world, on the cusp of the past and the future, channelling sounds from every TV in the background of every science fiction film, filtered through the bleary-eyed reverb-smear of endless jetlag?

It was less than eighteen months ago that Maria Minerva burst onto the scene with a series of tapes and 12″s which quickly attracted attention from the likes of Simon Reynolds, The Guardian, Pitchfork and Vogue. Before long she was on the road, touring everywhere from, well, Kuala Lumpur to Williamsburg …

It seems appropriate somehow to picture you in this very faraway country that I’ve never been to and can scarcely imagine. Your music holds a sense of being strangely far-away and dislocated, out of place somehow. Does travelling inspire you, musically?

talk about airports… I have found myself at an airport eating overpriced food at 7 in the morning SO MANY TIMES in the last one and a half years. Time I will never get back. Time I would have preferred to spend with my two year-old sister who barely knows who I am because I left home when she was born. Travelling does not inspire me, it frustrates me. I have just arrived in New York City from London via Australia-New Zealand-rest of USA (was touring the country) and I have not had a desk for 3 months now. I cannot work.

I travel alone, it gets lonely. I have found out a lot about my bodily rhythms and myself though, because being caught between time zones and eating regimes teaches you… something.

I have learned how to cope with all this but recently I noticed how I freak out when I hear the loud hand-dryer sound. It just reminds me of airports. It reminds me of arriving somewhere by myself, body sore and tired from being stuck on a plane, looking like shit. I go to the restroom, apply make up, brush my teeth, stare at myself in the mirror. Sometimes I am not feeling so good… then the annoying, loud and reverbed-out hand-dryer sound that just emphasises this miserable state. When you have been flying almost every day for two and a half weeks, it is SO LOUD it hurts.

In your music videos we seem to typically find you dancing alone in this sort of anonymous bedroom which kind of evokes this idea of the young girl dancing in front of the mirror. Do you think there is something childlike about your music?

Yeah, I think the music is pretty childish – way more naive than I actually am. I’m pretty anal and uptight in “real” life.

What kind of music were you listening to when you were really young? What are your earliest memories of sounds and music?

My dad claims I forced him to listen to ‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ with him on repeat for hours, so probably that’s my main influence? I love the Beatles – the White Album and Rubber Soul. I really liked Spice Girls and All Saints. But also the music my dad was listening to, especially Pet Shop Boys. I recently watched Pet Shop Boys’ video for their song ‘Kings Cross’ and, seriously, I cried. Felt so moved and so old.

You were born right in the middle of what Estonians call the ‘Singing Revolution’, right? A movement to end Soviet rule that began at a music festival and featured spontaneous outbursts of singing – old national songs that had been forbidden under communism – as a major and recurring feature of protest. Do you think of your own music in political terms?

I think of what I do in political terms, yes – in a roundabout way though. The music itself, the haziness, lyrics etc. is not political. It’s rather the opposite – it is escapist. But I think that breaking out of a non-place without any resources is a bit of an achievement. Political in the sense that the UK/US music scene circuits are very closed: there are scenes, clubs, musicians, journalists and label peeps who know each other. It seems like a closed cultural system when you are from somewhere else. You can admire these people on the Internet but to get to it is difficult. The limits/realities of cultural politics are hard to transcend, music is pretty good because at least it’s universal (glad I am not a poet or something).

My music career started when I had already left home. I think it is crucial to be in a big city, play all kinds of different shows and just realise that there is a whole wide world out there – and the world wide web in addition – because even though the Internet is powerful, presences still matter, too. So to make yourself seen and heard for the first time is tough. I don’t identify as an east European female too often. I am not a minority by any means, more like a middle class kid with a masters degree. Personal is political? For me to speak in a foreign language everyday, be cut off from my Estonian peeps and surrendering to the dominant US and UK cultures is a “political decision” though. Because no-one gives a shit about Estonian culture.

I was directly faced with the question of the “actual worth” or value of what I do and who I am when I was applying for an American visa. They meticulously assess if you deserve it. I realised that I am so small, yet it is possible to proceed step by step, decide that you wanna go conquer America and then try to do it. I am recording music and playing shows in New York / USA now, which I never thought would happen. Yet, I think I always knew that if anywhere, then I gotta/wanna end up in NYC. I remember thinking that thought when I was 15. So go figure out the laws of attraction…

I read somewhere that you feel uncomfortable with the word “musician” and prefer “producer” and this rather reminds me of the distinction Avital Ronell – who of course you have referenced in various ways – draws between an author and an “operator”. What is it about Ronell’s work that interests you? And perhaps I should ask, who is the addressee of your music? Who is being called here?

Yeah, operator is the best. Music is a small part of what one could/should do. It’s more about putting yourself out there as a human being. I like Ronell’s style of writing of course, but also her as a person – or her academic “persona” – because she used to be a performer before she became a scholar, which is cool. She is not the only feminist I look up to, broadly speaking you could say that I like them all. I am reading Naomi Wolf’s Vagina book right now.

The addressee is anyone who could be bothered to listen to my stuff, and this person is not required to love anything that I love – I cannot emphasise this enough – because even though I refer to a lot of stuff, my main aim is to come up with my own sonics, that would hopefully speak (or sound) for itself. My references are more like: for myself.

One of the things that your music and videos remind me of somewhat is stuff like the “television operas” of Robert Ashley, or some of the films that Charles Atlas made with Leigh Bowery, albeit taken out of the very public spaces of these works – the bar, the church, the bank, etc. in Ashley’s Perfect Lives; or the nightclubs of Bowery – into a much more personal, private space. Ashley used to say that the words in his music were not always the primary source of meaning, that their sounds were often more important than what the words denotated – would you say this is true of your own lyrics? Do you want people to think about the words to your songs as they listen to them, to learn the lyrics and sing along?

My lyrics suck! I get so embarrassed when someone quotes them. My lyrics just come out of my poor ol’ pop unconscious, it usually takes me like two minutes to just sing over a track. I do it so I can make sense of it – the melody and structure. I am not like a singer-songwriter in that sense – these people talk about things by literally talkin’ about ‘em. I think me being a producer or an operator means that I reveal something about the world in a different – more weird? – way.

And then this image of the operator brings to mind Bruce Sterling’s definition of cyberspace as the “place where telephone conversations take place”. Do you feel any sort of affiliation to the kind of cyberculture Bruce Sterling and Wired magazine and so forth are associated with? Do you think that your music would be almost unimaginable without the internet and “Web 2.0″ and so forth?

I subscribe to the Wired, and have always been pretty progressive when it comes to everything e- and cyber. As a person, I am cut off and connected; as an artist, I am very much concerned with all these things you mentioned – YouTube, Oulipo and Dada.

I think it is always good to include a seemingly chance element to everything. But as we all also know, in the human world there are no “chances”, there is synchronicity, meaningful coincidences, unconsciousness, cultural unconsciousness – of which the “human random” can reveal an awful lot. It’s in my head, it’s in our heads, it’s on the internet, it’s – and I am not sure what the it is that I am talking about here – is the sign o’ the times …

The Integration LP, a collaboration between Maria Minerva and LA Vampires is now out on Not Not Fun.