Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. With a collection of new and broken needles that she calls “pencils of sound” and a selection of records, she harnesses the electro-acoustic sounds of vinyl and needle.
Chavez made her New York City debut in a duet with Thurston Moore, collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide as part of the 2007 Wien Modern Festival, and recently shared a stage with Pauline Oliveros and Lydia Lunch during Vienna’s Phonofemme Festival 2009.
Having also performed at such internationally acclaimed venues as STEIM (Amsterdam) and the Kitchen (NYC), she was named an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room in 2006 and awarded a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Grant by New York’s Roulette Intermedium in 2008. In June and July, 2008, she was selected to be part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for a series of performances in and around Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses sculptures at DIA: Beacon.
Chavez recently completed the score for a short film by video artist David Gacs and performing artist Matthew Day entitled “Through my Geography,” which can be viewed on her MySpace page.
This September, she will perform at San Francisco’s Electronic Music Festival, for T.I.T.O., a turntable festival in October in Berlin, and in Gdansk and Krakow, Poland. Fellow sound artist and writer Tara Rodgers will include an interview with Chavez in Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, to be published by Duke University Press in 2009/10.
Beyond the realm of sound, in 2006 Chavez co-founded Houndstooth:Fine Vintage for Men, a boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that specializes in men’s vintage clothing and accessories. The store’s visionary, she spearheads buying, merchandising, private styling, and services geared to the fashion, movie, and music industries. As Houndstooth also hosts sound artists from around the globe, Chavez has curated numerous performances as well as both permanent and temporary installations of visual art.