Nina Garcia
Works with the electric guitar, halfway between improvised music and noise. Her setup is reduced to a minimum: a guitar, a pedal, an amplifier, with which she shapes sounds and plunges into chaos to produce the inaudible.About
Her concerts draw audiences into an immersive sonic space where power and fragility intersect with communicative intensity. In just a few years, she has attracted the attention of numerous international stages.
Her solo work focuses on gesture and research into the instrument, its resonances, its limits, its extensions, its impurities, its audible corners: working with or against it, containing it or letting it sound, supporting it or assault it.
A duo rather than a solo, it stuns with its blend of technical mastery and total freedom. A convergence of wildness and tenderness with her instrument, a tense corps à corps between two vibrant souls for a music and choreography of raw poetry. Nina Garcia also plays with Arnaud Rivière in Autoreverse; in duo with Danish trombonist Maria Bertel; in duo 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 ...
In 2019 she has been selected to be part of 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 involved in teaching experimental music, leading workshops for art students or for children. Since 2023, she has been developing concerts for children and families, where she presents music that is adapted but not cropped, and makes herself available to break down gestures, let people try out the guitar and its objects, explain her approach and desacralize experimental music.
Programme Text
“I play experimental music, merging noise, abstract sounds, bones melodies, and visceral emotions with a raw guitar”: one couldn’t put Nina Garcia’s approach more succinctly than she herself. Active in Parisian improv circles for years, the musician cultivates a daring approach to guitar playing, pursuing bold deconstruction over ostentatious virtuosity. Through repetition and feedback, fragmented motifs and controlled instability blossom into intense soundscapes that strike a chord that’s both idiosyncratic and intimate.