The debut solo album of French noise guitarist Nina Garcia by her real name (and not by her formerly known title as Mariachi for the past decade) comes with enthusiastic praise by fellow guitarist Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth fame): «As I listen to her music and ruminate upon seeing her perform it brings me to a realization that I have with very few musicians: the ego inherent in making art can be transcended through a purity of direct action. At least that’s the feeling I have when experiencing Nina’s music which comes across as serious and radical and wholly engaged in the moment of its creative impulse».
Moore is absolutely right and the eight pieces – or variations – of Bye Bye Bird highlight Garcia’s unorthodox and combative, exploratory approach to the electric guitar, sometimes unplugged, and with a simple setup of only one pedal, an amp, and an electromagnetic pickup she employs in her right hand to battle with the guitar. The album was recorded during Jazz à Poitiers / Nage Libre in Poitiers, France, and released by the IIdeologic Organ label of fellow guitarist, Stephen O’Malley (of Sunn O))).
Garcia, who has played with O’Malley, Sophie Agnel, Fred Frith, and Leila Bordreuil’s Feedback Ensemble, and in duets with Danish trombonist Maria Bertel and French percussionist Camille Émaille, offers on Bye Bye Bird a unique blend of rough and noisy, immediate yet outer melodic territories, and is not shy of exposing her raw emotions.
French experimental electroacoustic musician Arnaud Rivière, who wrote the liner notes, calls Garcia’s music «an experiment in freedom, where the peaks answer the abysses, and the power of movement and the emotion of sound serves as her compass». She uses feedback, rhythm, and loose structure in highly personal ways and takes her noise guitar into intriguing new spaces. Garcia transforms the guitar into a distorted, abstract, and even explosive, alien machine, or a vibrant and evocative sonic entity whose harmonic bursts hint at better days to come. Most likely you would like to listen to Bye Bye Bird on repeat to explore deeply Garcia’s most exalted and sublime sound.
Eyal Hareuveni
Nina Garcia (guitar)
