New Adventures In Lo-fi

Maria Minerva is nursing a cup of tea in her London flat when our call is put through. She talks quietly with an eastern European inflection, moving quickly from thought to thought and strange observation like a tightrope walker, with no idea of how long the rope is, or where it leads, before she takes the first step.

If music has a time and a place, then Minerva's music sounds like the quiet hours well past midnight, holed up in your flat. There's something in the lo-fi delicacy and the particular intimacy of it that captures the isolation of playing with music while the world sleeps. Last year's Tallinn At Dawn, titled after the town in Estonia she grew up in, goes part way to show this.

“I think it's domestic nocturnal music,” she says. “This is why it's weird to be performing music for excited drunk audiences at various venues around the world. I enjoy it, and it's a wonderful way to make a living and do what you love, but the initial idea behind the music is being alone in your own private surroundings and feeling familiar and estranged at the same time.

“I've been struggling with how to do the live set. I saw this interview with Grimes where she said the reason that she changed her music — she was making low down ambient depressed music and now she's making this new wave-y super hyped up beats — she said the reason she changed her music was that she played so many shows where she felt like she was killing the vibe. Other people are bummed out because it's a shit show, but you get bummed out because everyone is bummed out. Even though you're like, 'but this is how the music sounds when you listen to it on the record, but for some reason it isn't working in the live surroundings at all'.”

Minerva is learning how to deal with that contrast without bringing everyone into her flat well after midnight. “I think my first tour in Europe was pretty awful for me because I realised things had to change and I was also finding my stage presence. Once you get into it, it seems like the easiest thing for people who are on stage to be on stage, but to overcome the gap of your normal self and your stage self, or being able to switch back and forth, I think it's not easy. It's very energy-consuming. It's not an easy way of being.”

Minerva's on LA-based label Not Not Fun, a brand that is encouraging to say the least. When Minerva contacted them, they told her to send over everything she had and they would see what they wanted to release. They decided to release everything and so 2011 saw four releases from Maria Minerva including the attention grabbing Cabaret Cixous and Tallinn At Dawn. This year there are only two releases scheduled.

Her father is known as one of Estonia's leading music journalists and this, along with her own background in art history studies, influences how she approaches criticism.

“I've written music reviews and I've got into fights with people whose album I didn't like,” she admits with a laugh, “and I've been on the other side of it. Having been on that other side you know how it works. Sometimes the people who get the assignment to review your album or your concert, they don't give a shit about you. There are loads of random factors and people's tastes vary. There are some heavy lo-fi music fans who love everything that comes out of the scene who send you emails and messages and buy everything you release and love everything you do. That's very nice, but when it comes to the wider industry, it's a small industry, there are always discrepancies between people's perceptions. So I was a bit sad in the beginning when I got a bad review or something but now I'm weirdly indifferent. In the sense I enjoy reading criticism because at least I get something out of it. Every day is a learning experience.”

The gap she has between her stage name and the day-to-day life of herself, masters student Maria Juur, gives her further viewing distance to the music.

“I think it was more of the same entity when I started out but now, as horrible as it sounds, it's becoming more of a...” she pauses, reconsidering her words. “I wouldn't call it a job, but if you travel and get money then it's a job, so let's call it a job,” she laughs, then continues. “You realise that it's more than just the stuff in your bedroom and you also draw a limit of what you give out to the world. You can still be honest and sincere but sometimes you just forget about music stuff for a while or you have one day when you do something else. Like right now I'm more of a student. I'm writing my masters dissertation. The minute I've finished the stupid dissertation I fly to Australia and it's music 24/7 for a month.”

The recent months of hours in the library are a stark contrast to the life of a globe-touring musician. As with most things to do with Minerva, it's not the obvious things about a tour to the other side of the world that excites her most.

“I'm really excited about the crazy long flight because it seems so surreal,” she says, “and all the things I want to do on the plane before I pass out and step out of the plane on the other side of the world. You can think about it a different way. You can think that it's just going to be horrible but at the same time you think about the surreal side of it and it's really cool.”

This tour sees her take a new touring companion with her, extending her usual live set-up of sampler and keys.

“I'm taking a huge technology leap,” she reveals. “It's like an audio dock for an iPad. I'm going to rely on myself and keys and my iPad.”

Initially she got the new addition to read books, since she moves flat so often in London, and that's just when she's in the one city for some time. In her research for e-book tablets she found more uses for it, surely to affect how she spends the time well past midnight.

“I'm super excited about the iPad,” she says. “I just got it in the mail yesterday and I'm sort of mesmerised by it because you can get all these programs for iPad that are as good as the programs on a computer and it's crazy. The main thing for me, it sounds funny, but I just want to be lightweight because even though you're touring the world most of the time it's just one lady and a suitcase. It's all about economising.”