NINA GARCIA
Born in 1990, Nina Garcia lives and works in Paris. Since 2015, Nina has been researching and creating around the electric guitar, positioned somewhere between improvised music and noise. Her setup is reduced to the bare minimum: a guitar, a pedal, an amp — tools with which she sculpts sound and dives into chaos to reveal the unheard. Her concerts draw audiences into an immersive sonic space where power and fragility intersect with contagious intensity. In just a few years, she has captured the attention of major international stages.
Her solo work focuses on gesture and on exploring the instrument — its resonances, its limits, its extensions, its impurities, its audible corners: working with or against it, containing it or letting it ring, supporting it or attacking it. A duo rather than a solo, it stuns with its mix of technical mastery and total freedom. A convergence of wildness and tenderness with her instrument; a tense corps-à-corps between two vibrating entities, producing a music and choreography of raw poetry.
Nina Garcia also performs with Arnaud Rivière in Autoreverse; in duo with Danish trombonist Maria Bertel; with percussionist Camille Émaille; and in the rock band mamiedaragon.
Since 2019, she has been a member of the improvisation ensemble Le Un. She has also performed with Sophie Agnel, Méryll Ampe, Stephen O’Malley, Leïla Bordreuil, Antoine Chessex, Fred Frith, among others. In 2019, she was selected for the SHAPE program. In 2020/2021, she was in residency at GRM for a commission for the Présences Électroniques festival. In 2023, she created De haut en bas, de bas en haut et latéralement, a piece for body, sound and sculpture with Anna Gaïotti, Jennifer Caubet, Romain Simon, Christophe Cardoen and Étienne Foyer.
Nina Garcia is also committed to teaching experimental music, leading workshops for art students and children. Since 2023, she has been developing concerts for children and families, presenting music that is adapted but not diluted — breaking down gestures, letting audiences try the guitar and its objects, explaining her approach and helping to demystify experimental music.
Bye Bye Bird
Following her 2018 self-titled Mariachi, released by French labels Doubtfull Sounds and No Lagos Musique, Nina Garcia is now embarking on the creation of a second opus, to be released on 21 February 2025 by Stephen O’Malley’s excellent label, Ideologic Organ, distributed by Shelter Press.
She has chosen to delve into the deeply personal side of creation, making room for intimacy and emotion. Her guiding principle is the study of micro-gestures, via a new hand-amplification device — a technique never before published. A far cry from her live performances, Bye Bye Bird presents music drawn from the depths of a rift. Pieces played in the palm of the hand, made up of appearances and disappearances, attempts at soothing, sound flows like inescapable groundswells, where the guitarist conjures echoes of lightness, three dance steps, and acceptable silences.
Bye Bye Bird shares unspeakable emotions with the audience, celebrating the insolent lightness of life while observing its disappearance at the same time. This album is a record of electric guitar alone, without effects, where — in addition to her usual vocabulary (feedback, saturation, beats, noise, dissonance) — Nina Garcia plays with buried melodies. She explores the most recent aspect of her research, a style she calls “ultra territorial”: with her electric guitar unplugged and a mini electromagnetic sensor in her hand, she plays and picks up sounds in an extremely narrow zone. This system enables her to develop a new relationship with gesture: that of proximity, detail, trembling, disappearance, and vibration. It’s a balancing act with sounds she constantly tries to catch while simultaneously letting them slip away. Through these eight tracks, Nina Garcia offers a varied, surprising, and rich record that sometimes takes us by the hand and sometimes propels us forward.
The album title is a reference to the song Bye Bye Bird by American harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II, written as a tribute to Charlie Parker in 1963. Although the music is completely different, it retains a resonance from this Bye Bye Bird of another century: a feeling that is probably timeless — the fragile, net-less approach of an instrument alone in the face of silence.
“Nina Garcia has been actively moving the art of noise guitar into surprising and intriguing new spaces. She has been at it for some time now, a bit of a secret weapon, all the while hiding in plain sight.
As I listen to her music and reflect on seeing her perform, it brings me to a realization 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, radical, and wholly engaged in the moment of its creative impulse.
With Bye Bye Bird, she delivers her most exalted and sublime collection of recordings for all adventurous hearts to hear. A fantastic album.”
— Thurston Moore, London, 2024
Nina Garcia also performs with Arnaud Rivière in Autoreverse; in duo with Danish trombonist Maria Bertel; with percussionist Camille Émaille; and in the rock band mamiedaragon.
Since 2019, she has been a member of the improvisation ensemble Le Un. She has also performed with Sophie Agnel, Méryll Ampe, Stephen O’Malley, Leïla Bordreuil, Antoine Chessex, Fred Frith, among others. In 2019, she was selected for the SHAPE program. In 2020/2021, she was in residency at GRM for a commission for the Présences Électroniques festival. In 2023, she created De haut en bas, de bas en haut et latéralement, a piece for body, sound and sculpture with Anna Gaïotti, Jennifer Caubet, Romain Simon, Christophe Cardoen and Étienne Foyer.
Nina Garcia is also committed to teaching experimental music, leading workshops for art students and children. Since 2023, she has been developing concerts for children and families, presenting music that is adapted but not diluted — breaking down gestures, letting audiences try the guitar and its objects, explaining her approach and helping to demystify experimental music.
Bye Bye Bird
Following her 2018 self-titled Mariachi, released by French labels Doubtfull Sounds and No Lagos Musique, Nina Garcia is now embarking on the creation of a second opus, to be released on 21 February 2025 by Stephen O’Malley’s excellent label, Ideologic Organ, distributed by Shelter Press.
She has chosen to delve into the deeply personal side of creation, making room for intimacy and emotion. Her guiding principle is the study of micro-gestures, via a new hand-amplification device — a technique never before published. A far cry from her live performances, Bye Bye Bird presents music drawn from the depths of a rift. Pieces played in the palm of the hand, made up of appearances and disappearances, attempts at soothing, sound flows like inescapable groundswells, where the guitarist conjures echoes of lightness, three dance steps, and acceptable silences.
Bye Bye Bird shares unspeakable emotions with the audience, celebrating the insolent lightness of life while observing its disappearance at the same time. This album is a record of electric guitar alone, without effects, where — in addition to her usual vocabulary (feedback, saturation, beats, noise, dissonance) — Nina Garcia plays with buried melodies. She explores the most recent aspect of her research, a style she calls “ultra territorial”: with her electric guitar unplugged and a mini electromagnetic sensor in her hand, she plays and picks up sounds in an extremely narrow zone. This system enables her to develop a new relationship with gesture: that of proximity, detail, trembling, disappearance, and vibration. It’s a balancing act with sounds she constantly tries to catch while simultaneously letting them slip away. Through these eight tracks, Nina Garcia offers a varied, surprising, and rich record that sometimes takes us by the hand and sometimes propels us forward.
The album title is a reference to the song Bye Bye Bird by American harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II, written as a tribute to Charlie Parker in 1963. Although the music is completely different, it retains a resonance from this Bye Bye Bird of another century: a feeling that is probably timeless — the fragile, net-less approach of an instrument alone in the face of silence.
“Nina Garcia has been actively moving the art of noise guitar into surprising and intriguing new spaces. She has been at it for some time now, a bit of a secret weapon, all the while hiding in plain sight.
As I listen to her music and reflect on seeing her perform, it brings me to a realization 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, radical, and wholly engaged in the moment of its creative impulse.
With Bye Bye Bird, she delivers her most exalted and sublime collection of recordings for all adventurous hearts to hear. A fantastic album.”
— Thurston Moore, London, 2024