It is difficult to parse Minerva’s lyrics since they melt in the mix and fuse into whole plastic with the music, thereby eliminating any mind/body problem. Cabaret Cixous is a transcendent listening experience.
Maria Minerva has the potential to be one of the most entertaining and relevant artists of the very near future. Instead of commodifying ideas already dealt with and absorbed decades ago, she creates her own concepts and disseminates them in tractates figuratively bedazzled with chintzy Swarovski crystals.
A Master’s student of Aural and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College in London, Maria Minerva has set up house somewhere between Caberet Voltaire and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Born Maria Juur in Tallinn, Estonia, more than twenty years ago, Maria Minerva, in Juur’s own words, “is myself as my own little sister, born out of need to do whatever.”
“Whatever,” that default reply of her generation to any question too taxing, is an embrace of her own desire and understanding of the beauty of very, very lo-fi home recording equipment, a Dada stance not unreminiscent of New York’s early eighties no wave, a dancing queen’s smooth rhythms and a wry sense of humour. The album title is a nod in the direction of Hélène Cixous, the French philosopher who exhorted women to communicate with their bodies, not about their bodies.
It is difficult to parse Minerva’s lyrics since they melt in the mix and fuse into whole plastic with the music, thereby eliminating any mind/body problem. Cabaret Cixous is a transcendent listening experience. Though unambiguously feminine, Minerva is a badass with the drum machine and though gauzy, her melodies are layered with detail – like a J.M.W. Turner London landscape. And I just can’t get the lilting, perfume puff chorus of “Luvcool” out of my head.
Cabaret Cixous is available on Not Not Fun.
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