Each week we're posting interviews and stuff from our featured artists from Overlap. This week, Maria Minerva, star of Spectres of Spectacle, shoots on ghosts, midi and the underground with promoter, musician, artist "La Racaille" Jon Davies.
Maria was our first pick when we were putting together our Hauntology bill. Her work is obviously layered with influences and distortions of influence, so it's really interesting that Jon's got stuck in with regard to what these might be...
The interview was conducted on FB chat about a week ago. We've stuck in some links to the stuff they're talking about, so it's like BEING IN THEIR MINDS.
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Jon Davies
For the opening Overlap Festival we're covering the idea of Hauntology, and touching on the ideas of archiving, and then bits of Derrida I can't be bothered to read. What are your thoughts on Hauntology, why is it becoming the fashionable academic/journalistic topic?
Maria Juur
yeah derrida wrote the spectres of marx in 1994 or so? im not sure when did ppl start talking about hauntology in music, i think burial and the ghost box label were the big first names and then ppl like mark fisher aka k-punk (who is also my tutor at goldsmiths lol) started theorizing around these things both in music but also on a wider social level.
why? umm i personally think that maybe when the generation who grew up surrounded by all kinds of audiovisual media got the chance to buy gear cheaply and get involved in diy music making...they just started experimenting and all these influences got somehow warped in these experiments
i think it is very much related to the question technology and the availability of technology as well
Jon Davies
yeah, I think it's like, technology and physical space play a massive part in the evolution of hauntology
we're not financially invested in what we do as artists anymore, it's almost a leveling of the field, that music written in the bedroom can be as atmospheric as someone spending thousands on a studio
the technology's there to make music and get music, a few years ago you'd need lots of space to have 100s of albums at home, you've got months on your computer, it's like your own personal archive
Maria Juur
yeah. i don't know if it is a good or a bad thing. u know i just moved and my flatmate has a cs player, i listened to Tallinn At Dawn (Maria's debut record) for the first time and it made sense to me more than ever, like the physical release, i think my own tape doesnt really make much sense as mp3s
and the over-archiving just means that u dont pay attention anymore
Jon Davies
well, on the flipside it might mean we train ourselves to process music quicker?
Maria Juur
ok we r drifting away but i think it is just important to create a lil universe, i did it when i was doing my music, just on my own, very isolated. and the listener shd be able to do the same with the final product namely in order to protect him or herself from the overflow of information, im becoming more and more interested in self-defence and not archiving, if tht makes sense?
and i liked what michael gira said bout the PIAS building burning (http://thequietus.com/articles/06752-michael-gira-pias-statement) - that it doesnt matter, ppl are stealing music anyway. i think hauntology is very much about the past when things meant "more" or were more important
the desire to bring the "dear hiss" back, just create smth to hold on to and its amazing that vinyls and tapes have come back
Jon Davies
So in a way there are certain things in hauntology that don't matter to you, such as having the mass memory of all the records you've heard put in an archive, but more the physical side of things, the actual memory of putting on a tape, a vinyl?
Maria Juur
i think im starting to prefer the memory of everything ive ever heard to the possibility to always go back to it instantly, yeah:D
maybe it is more about archiving memories, not the "real things"
more about daydreams than the actual reality, and so on
Jon Davies
yeah! so i guess take this analogy: as opposed to taking photos of your friends at clubs, just being extra careful to store these memories in yr brain, not yr camera?
Maria Juur
yeah, I HATE this kind of shit
Jon Davies
it's almost like these days people actually want to remove themselves from experiences. do you consider your music something of day dreams?
Maria Juur
it is very dreamy, isnt it, but im not that spaced out in real life so it's more like daydreams of daydreams
Jon Davies
i say this cos i'm listening to Cabaret Cixous atm and i find myself humming bits of the record to myself throughout the day but not immediately realising it's you - i guess it cos in a way there's a weird eclecticism to it where sometimes i swear i'm hearing bits of this mortal coil, then bits of all saints, then europop
Maria Juur
thats very cool - thanks:D
but it is cabaret, right
Jon Davies
yeah, i love playing records with an arc
do you pay much attention to how eclectic your music making is? i know a lot of people are just like 'oh man i let it happen naturally', or is it a conscious move to include whatever you want?
Maria Juur
id say it is eclectic and it isnt, i use my voice a lot which gives the whole output some sorta coherence
i love stealing from different genres tho yeah, and i hate indie albums where every song is just a variation on the previous song. i have a massive problem with indie. i love dance music for the same reason tho, it is about functionality and production, always almost the same, yet so exciting
i listen to my own scene stuff less and less lately ive been listening to like dj diamond and machinedrum
Jon Davies
the new dj diamond record is amazing - my favourite footwork trak is the dj nate one where he samples evanescence?
Maria Juur
:D:D u see, no limits
i think the massive crossover is namely what makes the 2000s music exciting altho theres the disease called retromania and etc
Jon Davies
i think people are slowly coming round to the idea of no limits and eclecticism just being another thing - with indie they have very conservative views about authenticity, but these days, fuck it, it's all there on the internet, use it creatively
i think the retromania thing is both awful and amazing, it just depends on how you're taking it creatively
Maria Juur
yeah i just bought it actually, i got a kindle, cos im homeless i cant buy stuff
so now im all about the e-book
Jon Davies
i'm about 100 pages into that simon reynolds book and it's gotten me so angry about the music industry
about museumification, reunions and tribute bands
Maria Juur
oh yeah, the nostalgia industry
just selling ppl what they want, it is always harder to be open to the new i guess
Jon Davies
and it's just you know, the institutionalised cultivation of what 'rock' is, that there are forces out there actively trying to restrain art
that's true to an extent, about the shock of the new, but we've kind hit a point in history where the institutions are no longer 'we can't accept this noise!' into 'there's nothing left for you to discover, so don't try'
but then we get stuff like Oneohtrix Point Never, that on the surface is so invested in 80s synth music, but the more you hear it, the more you work out his influences, the more you realise this is so new
Maria Juur
oh yeah i think he is pretty genius, i remember i was talking shit bout the ford and lopatin album when it came out but then after a week i realized i like it a lot, and amazing that he can get so pop
Jon Davies
that ford and lopatin record is crazy - it's definitely that kinda pop experiment thing going on, some tracks i really don't feel, but ‘too much midi' just shows he knows how to craft nostalgia
we hit on institutions: how much did studying at goldsmiths influence the work you do?
Maria Juur
:D
Jon Davies
there's that sample on Spiral that talks about the tyranny of institutions, so shoot on that
Maria Juur
a lot but mostly in the most mundane sense cos i was recording a lot of music and started to release while i was in the middle of it so i felt guilty about making music all the time lol
yeah the spiral sample, by avital ronell, i think it was very witty, especially coming from someone deeply invested in the academia, ronell is cool cos she entered the academia coming from performance art
so she actually knows that there is life outside academia
i got involved in the "performing arts" and it made me wanna leave academia as soon as possible ha
Jon Davies
i think it does become very hard to realise that once you're in, it slowly and quietly sets up walls on what you should believe. I remember being taken back by what I was taught about the music industry, my lecturer saying there aren't ways around the whole Paul Hirsch Gatekeeper models - tastemakers such as journalists, pr people, record label CEOs basically deciding what becomes big and cool, and that even supposedly diy grassroots stuff has this system set up
and i was thinking 'have you not heard of the internet, of bandcamp?' people put stuff out now and can be conceivably heard by everyone (who has the internet) in the world
Maria Juur
i think it is true tho?
yeah but i had been on myspace since late 2009 but eventually made it to altered zones after i signed with nnf- it makes a difference cos ppl have channels where they get their info from, 99% could not be bothered to dig themselves, i only know a few music freaks who do that
Jon Davies
i suppose there are these systems of trust already set up, but it felt very exclusive for someone to say there is only one route, i think if you make good enough art someone will dig you up, although that is with a bit of hard work on the part of the artist
but that's no different to i suppose making friends, it's not necessarily playing the game as it was sold to me, rather finding your own niches and working within certain ecologies
Maria Juur
yeah, i still deeply believe in the underground, i loved having like 287 fans on facebook this was when i felt the coolest
Jon Davies
are there particular advantages to being underground than mainstream, or maybe where you are now?
Maria Juur
im still super-underground lol id be delusional if i thought smth else but u know, the economy is oriented towards growth...we'll see
Jon Davies
it's strange that i don't see you particularly as underground, i was talking about this with a friend that we become so particularly invested in our scene that if we see someone play to 50 people we think they're getting big
Maria Juur
know what u mean but it is strange, it is the internet, ive played 6 shows in my life, all in tallinn, my first one in lndon in a week and u think im getting big lol
Jon Davies
With your academic/artistic background, how much do you consider your music as artistic practice? There's still a notion that if you don't write music with scores or even western classical influence, there's little intellectual value, but the use of your production, and explicit context in your music (spoken word samples of Ariel Pink, R Stevie Moore, Avital Ronnell, Gia Carangi) and postmodern self-reflexivity suggests totally the opposite, despite it superficially coming across as pop
Maria Juur
that's a nice compliment and yeah, i wouldn't have it any other way. there r others - i like how hype williams has the stalker series on youtube. ppl might not get it or think ur full of shit but at the same time it is pretentious in a good way, cos there is so much random indie, i cannot stand musicians without a vision even if at the end of the day it is about the music, if that makes sense
Jon Davies
so there's a certain direction in the music? i think my take on your music being intellectual is that it seems that you're well studied in genres, you understand how to use them and subvert the idioms, your music is both kinda part of the current trend but distinctly different when you engage in it, and it has a certain willfulness to be weird, whilst essentially having melodies that are so reminiscent of pop, and i think that's due to your awareness to the ability to be schizophrenic in art
Maria Juur
yeah, wow!
Maria Juur
im givin my cabaret an A for effort, i cannot listen to it but i think it is first and foremost a funny record
i think in english u say tongue-in-cheek??
Jon Davies
definitely! i do really feel that self-awareness about it, cos it does have songs with beats, great melodies, sensuality, femininity, but it feels like it's knowingly awkward to let these things happen, so then you have slightly cheesy lyrics, beats which aren't full on, melodies in the background
Maria Juur
lyrics are kinda secondary for me tho, i think the only lyrics that carry meaning are the ones for spiral, and ruff trade is pretty smart altho ppl think it is just banal, but otherwise yeah im most concerned with sound and melody
Jon Davies
what's the story behind ruff trade?
Maria Juur
i cant remember how it came about but it was one of the first tracks i produced after moving to london. ok i dont wanna reveal all but i had been thinking about the materialistic side of human relationships. i was once in love but we could not afford it cos either of us had any money nor a place of our own and it was impossible to meet up so we dropped it lol
and then there is this line that goes back to freud - beyond the pleasure principle im invincible, the economy of desire. and then i say this circulation of goods put me in the mood, so talkin in terms of economy
and the chorus is about intense sex which is actually an anthem for love cos every human being wants that but is sometimes soo afraid to admit, and when a girl is singing smth like fuck me hard it shd be a bit like WTF but i just did it, whatever
Jon Davies
i think when you look at it like that it's rare you get those kinda things highlighted, intensity of physical love, especially in indie music scene
Maria Juur
and yet it is so common in rnb, why is it normal in mainstream and not in the underground - no idea
this is a major influence
Jon Davies
do you think that it's cos that the underground tries to set an example of purity? or are they just out of touch?
Maria Juur
well mainstream wants to sell thru sex, which is, u know, obvious, but when it comes to the empowerment of women then yeah, i dont know what purity is, sounds ridiculous, everything human is nice
i dunno really, i love moodymann, cajmere and like jamie principle and all this shit
indie for me is just u know, cos i cant produce i ended up in that unsexy scene lol
Jon Davies
that's probably why people interviewing you are so fascinated by the sexual side of your music, it's just so hard to find the equivalent to slo-jams in the underground/'alternative music' without it sounding so clunky. have you heard that kooks song 'do you wanna'?
Maria Juur
nope
Jon Davies
i felt physically sick hearing this the first time, it's the perfect anthem of awkward horny boys
Maria Juur
i think it comes down to my rnb and house influences and to the fact that i like to make fun of these things.
i was just talking to sm about it, i think i stole my "agenda" from r stevie moore and gary wilson who always sing about not getting any sex, bout women running away from them, i like to take this position of a loser woman at the same time altho im pretty blunt.
Maria Juur
hey how u gonne edit this, will it be like q and a interview? id love it to be like a conversation
Jon Davies
i like the conversation more, definitely, cos i'm not really asking you questions, just talking bollocks
i'll probably edit bits out which are just chit-chat, but most of it hits the nail on the head
Maria Juur
good
is there anything else i gotta go:D
Jon Davies
yeah that's cool, i need to shoot soon...
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Maria is performing at Mercy's Spectres of Spectacle show at Static Gallery on 29th September.
Jon Davies is working with Mercy on programming this show, and we're
also developing new work in partnership with him and Samizdat, including
a unique setting of Dustin Wong's Infinite Love for guitar orchestra on 11th November.