Since 2015, Nina Garcia has been conducting research and creative work centered around the electric guitar, somewhere between improvised music and noise. Her setup is minimal: a guitar, a pedal, and an amp, with which she sculpts sound and explores chaos to bring forth the unheard. She released her first solo album, Bye Bye Bird, on Ideologic Organ.
Her set-up is reduced to a minimum: a guitar, a pedal, and an amp with which she sculpts sound and delves into chaos to bring out the unheard-of. Her concerts draw audiences into an immersive sonic space where power and fragility intersect with communicative intensity. In just a few years, she has attracted the attention of numerous international stages.
Nina Garcia presents a new work with a magnifying glass where the guitar is amplified by 1-inch zones. A fist linked to a micro-microphone, « ultra-territorial » music and total dependence of the sound on the slightest movement. What emerges from this new research is a tenfold increase in tension, forced silences, aborted feedback, and manufactured loops that are always trying to move forward. Her music is increasingly handmade, but always with a high intensity. In this new set we find her classical Mariachi folklore: threaded rods, saturated wedding and funeral noises, assertive rhythms and breaks, and a privileged link with the amp as a playing partner.
A duo rather than a solo, it stuns with its blend of technical mastery and total freedom. Nina converges between wildness and tenderness with her instrument, a tense corps à corps between two vibrant souls, music and choreography of raw poetry.
After a decade of performing concerts under the Mariachi guise, Nina Garcia has finally unveiled her unique approach in ‘Bye Bye Bird‘, her first album under her name, released by Ideologic Organ. With no pretence or demonstration, the album is a captivating blend of chiaroscuro, melodies, and raw emotion.
1. duisbourg
2. berlin
3. leipzig
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
The greatest inspiration for me is the feelings I experience and observe in everyday life, and the sensations I experience when listening to certain types of music.
I don’t draw inspiration from any one artist in particular, but I listen to a lot of music, especially live, so it’s certain that they have a big influence on me, even if I can’t say exactly where it is. What my comparses do makes me think about my own practice, of course.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I started playing guitar at a very young age, and from my teens onwards I had several bands performing live. After a few years break, when I was about 24 in 2015, I started playing music in public again. In the meantime I had discovered experimental music and it was in this direction that I started again and have been playing ever since.
Practicing music has been part of my life for a very long time and I’m not quite sure why, but I have to admit that it’s essential for me.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Difficile ! Je ne donnerai pas mes disque de toujours, mais plutôt ceux du moment :
– Jim O’Rourke – Bad Timings
– Jessica Ekomane – Manifolds
– Moondog – H’art Songs
– Géométries – Nebuloasa
– Lucas de Clerk – The telescopic Aulos from Atlas
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
Music (and currywurst)
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
Home! (Quite missing it while writing this answer from an other train)
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
Noise.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
Manifolds, Jessica Ekomane
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
I’ve recently been making music for purposes other than concerts, producing a soundtrack for an animated film. I really enjoy composing for others and sharing artistic discussions. I’d be very happy to collaborate with a dance company, I love dance and I think it’s an exciting job to make music for a dance piece.
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
That’s a difficult question, I’ve seen a lot of extraordinary concerts. So I’ll try not to think too much and just say my first thought: Aaron Dilloway’s concert at the Audible Festival (organised by Instants Chavirés in Bagnolet in 2016), was stunning. Everything was perfect: the sound, the music, the commitment and the performance.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Not at all, I hate technology and/because I’m very bad at it. I try to spend as little time as possible on these issues, what interests me is thinking about the music, the emotions, and the gestures. So I prefer to have a stable setup, and spend a lot of time practising and researching on the instrument, trying out new things, new cheap tools, new gestures and finding my way with this situation.
Do you have siblings and how do they feel about your music/art?
they seem ok!
