Culture A-List
Eve Maret’s Synthesizer Heart The electronic artist and Witching Hour performer gets comfortable with her own voice.
BY KENT WILLIAMS
E
ve Maret will be a featured performer at this year’s Witching Hour Festival, an exploration of the creative process and a celebration of new work produced by Little Village and the Englert Theatre. Full schedule and ticketing for this year’s Witching Hour will be available soon at witchinghourfestival.com. Nashville-based electronic musician Eve Maret has accomplished a lot in the five years since her debut album, Say So, was released. She takes inspiration from bands like Can, Neu and Silver Apples, and spins them together with the work of more recent pioneers like Autechre and Plaid. You can hear echoes of the past in Maret’s music, but she resists genre classification. She incorporates her voice—both singing and speaking—into her work in ways that smear the division between singing and synthesis, using autotune, vocoding, pitch shifting and sampling. In a phone interview in early September, Maret told me she’d grown up in St. Louis, with parents who were “big music fanatics.” “They took me to concerts and I just loved it,” she said. “I felt so engaged and my imagination was exploding every time I went.” In high school she enrolled in guitar, bass and drums lessons, before heading to college at Belmont University in Nashville. At Belmont she made a connection to drummer Chester Thompson, who played and recorded with Frank Zappa. “It was totally by chance I could take lessons with him, and it was just a total godsend. It was what kind of saved me at the time,” Maret said. “It was a rough time of my life, but to get to study drums with him and to really pursue music and be supported in that was really amazing.” Being exposed to German electronic music like Kraftwerk and Nue led Maret to find a strong identification with electronic music. “I decided to buy a synthesizer on a whim, without really knowing anything at all, off of Craigslist for $100 and it totally changed my life,” she said. “That synthesizer doesn’t work anymore, but I still keep it around as a memento because it’s so special to me at this point.” People who don’t listen to electronic music will encounter her music as a sweet, optimistic, beautiful mess, perhaps overwhelming at first listen. But there’s a method here, an expression of her artistic personality. Her technical skill with electronic synthesis imposes order while allowing 54 October 2021 LITTLEVILLAGEMAG.COM/LV299
for surprise and delight. When Maret’s father died, she felt a new “awareness,” she said, of the brevity of life and her place in it. She knew it was time to go all in on a career as a musician. “His passing was really difficult for me but also a gift in the sense that it affirmed my dreams,” Maret said. “From that point I’ve just been trying to make as much music as I can and explore who I am through sound and it’s been an amazing journey.” Since electronic music is mostly abstract, what does adding your voice and lyrics do for you? What’s motivating you there?
I’ve always been interested in the idea of pop music and the idea of music that is universally
Witching Hour Festival Various Venues, Iowa City, Friday and Saturday, Nov. 5 and 6, $15-25
accessible, that anyone can access it and experience it and feel what the music is conveying ... I’m really interested in creating songs that I hope can do that. Although I love spending time making really abstract, improvised, exploratory works, crafting songs is something I think is really difficult, and a really good yang to the yin of my improvised music practice. There are messages that I feel I need to express for myself and for others that generally have themes of empowerment and uplifting. There is definitely
