The Owl of Minerva Takes Flight: Maria Minerva talks Airports, Internets & Avital Ronell

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. My editor is sending panicked follow-up emails. Hello? Is anyone there? Ms. Minerva is 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 always strikes me as 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 am 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.

Read the full interview at The Line of Best Fit

11/15/12 at 10:06am