Maria Minerva

Estonian native Maria Minerva, born Maria Juur in Tallinn in 1988, filtered raw yet hazy disco through conceptual post-punk sensibilities and quickly earned a place among the most respected underground female electronic musicians of the late 2000s. She characterized her own work as “21st century folk music,” yet its reverberant, hypnagogic atmosphere prompted frequent comparisons to the output of Laurel Halo, LA Vampires, and Julia Holter. After completing studies in Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts and leaving behind her role as a music and art critic, she relocated to London in 2009. There she enrolled at Goldsmiths for an M.A. in aural and visual cultures while simultaneously aiming to establish herself as a recording artist; during the same period she interned at the magazine The Wire. Blending her visual-arts background with lo-fi electronics, she aligned herself with Amanda Brown’s Not Not Fun imprint and issued, in 2011, the album Cabaret Cixous—titled after the celebrated French writer and thinker Hélène Cixous—alongside the cassette-only Tallinn at Dawn and two 12-inch releases on the label’s 100% Silk subsidiary: the Noble Savage EP and Sacred & Profane Love. The next year brought both a joint project with LA Vampires titled The Integration and the solo album Will Happiness Find Me? Having settled in Brooklyn, she resurfaced in 2014 with Histrionic, widely regarded as one of her most cohesive and sharply realized collections.