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Creative Loafing Atlanta

Experimenting with needles
Maria Chavez lets her turntables do the talking

BY CHAD RADFORD

"Patti Smith really freaked me out!" exclaims 23-year-old experimental turntablist Maria Chavez. "When I was 13 or 14 years old, I bought the album Horses, and listened to it over and over again. I had never heard anything like it before and it changed the way I thought. It made me realize that poetry doesn't always have to rhyme."

On the surface, Chavez's abstract rumble and Smith's passionate songwriting don't have a lot in common. But Smith's distinct and unconventional flare made an impression on Chavez's teenage mind that would have lasting effects. Some 10 years later, she has adopted her own approach to music by way of equally distinctive methods. Since August 2002, she has focused her attention on the electro-acoustic sound possibilities that could be created by using only a turntable stylus and vinyl recordings.

The results are striking. Unlike most DJs, Chavez has made an art of breaking, bending and otherwise manipulating the LPs and needles with which she spins her experimental web of sound. Though her earliest flirtations with performing live were as a club DJ in Houston, her true calling came from the higher plane of thinking involved in improvised music.

While working on a degree in music business at the University of Houston, Chavez was shopping around for an internship when she came across the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. After attending a concert the foundation was sponsoring, she met the foundation's Houston director, Dave Dove. In Dove she found more than an internship; she found a musical mentor.

"He invited me to attend a performance by an improvised music ensemble and I though he meant for me to come and watch, but he wanted me to participate," Chavez says. "Later he told me that I should consider improvising with instruments I'm familiar with, but I hadn't played anything for years. All I had were my turntables and he told me to bring them. Later, we worked together as a duo and I had a perfect, out-of-body experience. The way I moved the needle around the record was so instinctual. I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life."

Since then, Chavez has moved in an increasingly abstract direction, churning out mammoth drones, chance rhythms and brooding, post-industrial soundscapes that evoke everyone from Christian Marclay to Otomo Yoshide to Coil. The results culminate with her self-released Selected Works 2002-2003 debut, and have landed her gigs with improvisational and experimental music figures such as Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, composer Pauline Oliveros and Jack Rose of Pelt.

As she plunged deeper into the concepts and social settings surrounding improvisational music, spinning records in dance clubs became a thing of the past. "The change in social situations from playing records for a bunch of drunken people so they can buy more drinks and the club will get more money, to performing with heart in front of an audience who actually sits and listens to you was an incredible change," Chavez says. "I had to say goodbye to being a club DJ."

Chavez also has collaborated with Christina Carter of Charlambides in an improvisational duo, Weird Cookie, and has worked with a spate of visual artists performing what she calls "personal description" pieces, where she interprets works of abstract art through turntablism.

For her upcoming shows in Athens and Atlanta, Chavez will be collaborating with Athens-based video artist Paul Thomas. Thomas will present a video montage he created for the event -- with Chavez seeing it for the first time as she interprets it in front of an audience. It sounds like a daunting task, but one for which she's as prepared as possible. "I don't want to know too much about what Paul has put together for the show," she adds. "The less I know, the more spontaneous it will be."

chad.radford@creativeloafing.com

01.29.04

Flagpole Athens The Needle And The Damage Done

Paul Thomas and Maria Chavez Craft Record-Breaking Art

Sitting at The Huddle House, alternating between quick bites of his cheese omelet and slow drags from a cigar while pondering the current state of Athens' experimental music scene, Paul Thomas looks pleased. For two decades Thomas has remained a seminal fixture in Athens' underground music and arts communities, his contributions culminating with his Washington St. performance space-gallery-book store-coffee shop, PAUL THOMAS The X-Ray Café. Since 2001 the space has hosted dozens of local and national off-beat artists and musicians who operate outside the confines of traditional pop music. Everyone from avant-garde guitarists like Alan Licht and Davey Williams to computer music duo Tog to various members of the Elephant 6 collective have all made appearances there. And with such a diverse roster acts making their presence known at the tiny space, X-Ray Café has become Athens' home to obscure and experimental music and art. Now, nestled amongst the clatter of plates, crying babies and greasy, late-night Huddle House air, Thomas casually mentions his lack of preparation for two upcoming back-to-back performances at the X-Ray Café and at the Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery in Atlanta with Houston, TX-based experimental MARIA CHAVEZ (photo by Carlos Pozo) turntablist Maria Chavez. "Improvised music by it's very definition is supposed to be made on the spot," admits Thomas. And just as effortlessly as he pulls off his Reagan-era new wave haircut matched with a thuggish "Team Snoop Dogg" winter coat, Thomas gives the impression that he knows what he's doing. The lack of preparation is by no means a reflection of the excitement with which he anticipates their collaborations. And judging by the level of enthusiasm with which he addresses the grasp Chavez has on improvised music and approach to her craft, he's more than prepared. Thomas first met Chavez, a 23-year-old Lima, Peru, transplant, in October of 2003 when she performed at the X-Ray while touring with two electro-folk/ drone luminaries, former Pelt frontman Jack Rose and Christina Carter of Charalambides. Though her first forays into performing live music were spinning records as a house music DJ, her tastes took a turn for the abstract after crossing paths with David Dove, the director of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in Houston. It was Dove who pushed her to begin improvising with her turntables, and Chavez has since dedicated herself to exploring the electro-acoustic sounds that could be generated by only vinyl and needle. However, her set-up encompasses much more than just the average stylus and a few dusty records. Over the last few years, Chavez has bent, broken and otherwise mutilated both needles and LPs to churn out an unearthly rumble. "I have a collection of different needles that have all been broken during a performance," Chavez explains from her home in Houston. "They've all been broken in different ways: some of them can still catch sound and some only feel vibrations, or the metal part of the needle is so worn down that it can't grab the ridges of the vinyl. I've also mutilated records: some I've taken a hack saw and cut up four different records and melded them back together with super glue. When you put it on a turntable it's very uneven, because none of the pieces are broken exactly. Some I can bounce the needle like it's a bongo drum and some just scrape across the surface. People always ask me if I'm using a chaos pad or anything, but I just like to focus on the needle and the vinyl," she continues. "It's all focused on my mixer and how I can bring it out to the audience." The results are a heady and abstract flood of quivering and massive improvised pieces that reverberate with unintentional rhythms and avant-garde emptiness. Evoking the work of like-minded artists like Christian Marclay, Otomo Yoshide and Martin Tétreault, Chavez's self-released debut, Selected Works: 2002-2003 - available almost exclusively at her live performances - skulks to life with bold, dreamlike murkiness. For her upcoming shows in Athens and Atlanta, Chavez is making the weekend trip to collaborate with Thomas for a set of what she calls "personal description" pieces. "I consider my needles to be my pencils of sound," says Chavez. "They're very distinct and every time I see a piece of art that's really abstract, filled with lots of squiggles and big bursts of color I can hear what it sounds like in my head. My goal, pretty much, is to be able to describe abstract art of all kinds through turntables." After their first meeting in October, Chavez and Thomas began exchanging ideas via email, which gave rise to a sound and visual collaboration where Thomas would create a video montage that Chavez would see for the first time while "personally describing" it in front of an audience. In addition to the video montage he'll be presenting, Thomas will serve as an audio collaborator as well. "We started talking about working together when she was here back in October, and since then we've shot some ideas back and forth," reveals Thomas, sounding more organized than he would let on earlier. "I've been listening to a lot of the sounds she's making and going through my archive to find sounds that I think will be good to improvise around what she does. I'll feed it all into a sampler that I can play live. I'm mostly going to try to match seven or eight really good, simple sounds that will work well to use to improvise around the stuff she's doing." Pushing back the carcass of his half-eaten omelet, and reveling in the last of his cigar, Thomas looks as if he's most enamored with the simplicity of his vices. And much like his collaborations with Chavez, it's this simplicity that forces him forward. "I'm only working with a handful of sounds because it pushes me to be a better artist," he declares. "It's just more of a challenge." Chad Radford WHO: Paul Thomas, Maria Chavez, Marshall Marrotte WHERE: X-Ray Café WHEN: Saturday, January 31 HOW MUCH: $5