***BACK IN STOCK!!! Tallinn’s top leftfield pop export breaks her half-decade solo hiatus with a choice collection of daydream discotheque classics: Soft Power. Recorded between Hollywood and Calabasas over the last few years, and co-produced by Dzang studio pro Adam Gunther, the album is pure Minerva: high and low, heady and hedonistic, deadpan diva designs for neon nights and mirage dance floors. She starts off seductive (“hey pretty baby it’s been a while / haven’t seen your lovely face for a long time”), then sways through an array of bedroom bangers and crushed crystalline ballads, crooning and swooning, autobiographical electronica spanning Detroit to New York, London to L.A. Songs of intimacy and illusion, impatience and introspection, of cutting loose and being cut off, left wanting more: “Taste this love till the morning sun.” Mastered by Matt Tammariello.
MC $7.75
09/18/2020
MP3 $7.92
09/18/2020
FLAC $8.99
09/18/2020
Estonian expat Maria Minerva may have found her footing in the cultural battlefield of Brooklyn but her recent music continues to confound easy assimilation, crawling further into the crevices between karaoke fantasy, hall-of-mirrors pop, and meta-dancefloor mind games. Histrionic begins bluntly ("Sometimes beauty and brains are not enough"), ushering in a bewitching 11-song cycle about ivory towers, underground spirit, galactically challenged romances, predators vs prey, seeing the soul, and the ennui of identity amidst the metropolitan maze: "Tables are turned / bridges are burned / you fooled me once / but then you fooled me twice." Shades of woozy trap, London bass music, Eastern European cassette kiosks, 90's diva house, phaser ballads, and ambient rave commingle and align, tracing a nuanced self-portrait of her inner ecosystem of loves and labors lost. A stimulating surf across the brainwaves of one of our favorite artists (and people) at the threshold of an intriguing new pipeline of inspiration. Black vinyl LPs mastered by Dietrich Schoenemann, in constructivist sleeves designed by Antonio Trecel Diaz.
LP $13.00
05/20/2014
CD $12.00
04/29/2014
MP3 $9.90
04/29/2014
FLAC $11.99
04/29/2014
Fresh again, 100% Silk’s favorite dunce-dance diva Maria Minerva tries on a new wardrobe with her Bless EP. Busting out with sweet ’n’ swingy single “Black Magick,” Minerva caters her classic la-la lyrics about an occult / joke-cult romance over a new waif, Schneider-esque pop-Rock Lobsta beat. “Space 4 U” slips echo-drone vocal monologues over a LaFace-style R&B booty bumper, while “Symbol of My Pleasure” sneers with a “Walk This Way” funk lick, both reminding fans of Minerva’s naughty / playful creep-creativities. Rounding out the EP are “Soul Searchin”—a sleazy, down-tuned, junk-jungle comatose doser—and Lady Blacktronika’s “Black Magick” garage trippin’ remix—a layer cake of luscious tush-pushin’ and an ode to another sassy Lady, Miss Kier herself. Confidence is key, and this is Minerva struttin’, on and off key, through her newest collection of Wand Songs.
12" $12.00
04/02/2013
MP3 $4.95
04/02/2013
Last November, Maria Minerva accepted the invitation of a close friend to flee the grey brainwash of yet another East London winter for a temporary retreat amid the seaside serenities of Lisbon. The life oasis of the experience freed her up to hibernate with lyrics, loops, echo pedals and emotions, and she holed up at an empty exhibition space nearby to craft the eleven mercurial mysteries that comprise her brave sophomore color wheel, Will Happiness Find Me? An impressively individualist mix-tape channeling the 360º spectrum of Minerva’s diverse obsessions, Will Happiness Find Me? connects the avant-pop dots between future-shock pirate radio singles, hermetic tone studies, late-night wanderlust lullabies, tape-faded club dee-lights, sampladelic vocal exploratoriums, private-press art pranks and even ambient hip-hop melancholia. Given that most contempo aesthetic arcs ebb from the raw and odd to the polished and accessible, it’s rad and uplifting to hear Minerva swimming so soulfully the other direction. “My heart is like a microphone / Just talk into it.” Never give up.
LP $13.00
08/28/2012
CD $13.00
08/28/2012
MP3 $9.90
08/28/2012
***Producer and chanteuse (and fashion icon and social satirist and heartbreaker) MARIA MINERVA is the groove-gift that keeps on shimmy-givin.’ Her forth effort this year—after the wildly weird, how-low-fi-can-you-cry ‘Tallinn At Dawn,’ the boy-you-turn-me upside down disco EP ‘Noble Savage,’ AND the salty sweet gauze-ahh strip tease ‘Cabaret Cixous’—comes just in time for Santa, baby. ‘Sacred and Profane Love’ wraps it up with a bow: drugged-out drag choruses, saucy pans, lines of echo-coke, head-trippy candy flips, layered bangs, crooked hooks, top forty flirting, pop weaseling, sand dune sparkle, dream reels. With a wily wink Minerva serves allusions to the other gay nineties, reminding one of a ‘Post’-era Bjork or a Sampladelic Lady Miss Kier or a Deeper and Deeper Madonna. Sensual in every sense of the word. Maria Minerva just turned it up, so you better bring your M game. Spiced with special guest remix-er ITAL’s flamboyant he-gives-me-fever flavor on ‘Luv So Strong.’
12" $14.00
11/15/2011
MP3 $5.94
11/15/2011
"Over the course of a 12", cassette, and a stream of ace youtube vids, Maria Minerva has emerged as one of the most interesting artistes to come into leftfield-pop focus over the last 12 months. 'Cabaret Cixous' is her debut album, a coruscating water-bed of mottled '90s dance-pop memes writhing under blankets of slyly sexy new age synths while her dreamy vocals whisper and croon seductively suggestive lyrics. It's not quite aural soft porn, but there's an inescapably lascivious element to her music which definitely has its appeal and marks her out with more teeth and enigmatic confidence than, say, Nite Jewel, with whom she's often compared. Musically, her references span deep House to the Euro-pop she absorbed growing up living in Tallinn, Estonia, but all bleached with that straight-to-tape aesthetic so loved by NNF and Jim Ferraro et al, while lyrically and conceptually the album's title invokes French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous and her songwriting is both visceral and solipsistically dreamy. It's a richly satisfying and highly recommended listen."--Boomkat
LP $14.00
02/07/2012
CD $12.25
08/09/2011
MP3 $9.90
08/01/2011
Get used to this name. Maria Minerva swept down out of the clouds to our digital doorstep with several albums worth of her breathtaking bedroom fantasia silk-pop and we were smitten. The Estonian-born, London-residing synth-songstress traverses too much terrain to box her into one basic style grid and Tallinn At Dawn, her NNF debut, offers 10 points of proof. There’s lovesick alien dancehall anthems (“Strange Things Are Happening In My Room,” “10 Little Rock Chix Listening to Neu!”), 90s-ized satin-sheets dream ballads (“California Scheming,” “Unchain My Heart”), lo-fi Young Marble Giants-y instrumentals (“Stairs To Nowhere,” “Tallinn At Dawn,”), all tied together with beautiful eroticized waterfalls of Maria’s deeply-delayed vocals. There’s shades of warped Cocteau Twins cassettes, early Nite Jewel, and obscure Tokyo art-pop side projects but Minerva’s vibe is ultimately too homegrown and hermetic for simple aesthetic comparisons and that’s a huge reason (among many) why we love it so. Scope her 100% Silk 12” for another prize piece in the MM puzzle.
MP3 $9.90
04/05/2011
***The debut release by this Estonian bliss songstress. In the vein of Nite Jewel but more abstract and expressionistic. Full-length Not Not Fun LP is already in the works. Edition of 400.
12" $10.50
03/01/2011
MP3 $3.96
03/08/2011