Bye Bye Bird emerges after years of exploration—Nina Garcia in conversation

Transmission 162: Interview with Nina Garcia

Since 2015, Parisian musician Nina Garcia has been exploring and composing music centered around the electric guitar, which lies in the middle between noise and improvised music. Her minimal setup consists of a guitar, a pedal, and an amplifier, which she uses to manipulate sound and explore turmoil vibrance in order to highlight the unusual, this allows her to continually advance the distortion and vibrating guitar art form into unexpected and fascinating new fields. She performed in solo as Mariachi, in the band Mamiedaragon, in duo with trombonist Maria Bertel, and in trio with Qonicho B ! (Blanche Lafuente, Morgane Carnet). She has been a part of the improvisation group Le Un since 2019. Additionally, she has shared the stage alongside Fred Frith, Antoine Chessex, Leïla Bordreuil, Stephen O’Malley, Sophie Agnel, and Méryll Ampe. She was in residence at GRM in 2020–2021 as part of a commission for the Présences Électronique festival. In 2023, she collaborated with Anna Gaïotti, Jennifer Caubet, Romain Simon, Christophe Cardoen, and Étienne Foyer to produce De haut en bas, de bas en haut et latéralement, a sculpture, sound, and body work. 

Title: Bye Bye Bird
Artist: Nina Garcia
Release Date: 2025-02-21
Genres: Avant-garde, Experimental Music
Label: Ideologic Organ
Description: Nina Garcia discusses Bye Bye Bird, out February 2025 via Ideologic Organ, an album where noise, melody, and movement collide in raw guitar expression.

Nina Garcia concentrates her musical studies on the gesture and sound of the guitar, including its impurities, boundaries, expansions, and resonances. Her performances transport listeners to an intensive auditory dimension where communicative energy meets sensitivity and strength. Despite being handcrafted, her music is the combination of complete freedom and technical expertise that lead to intense and astounding pieces. With her instrument, she tightens a corps to corps between two lively spirits, music and choreography of unadulterated poetry, and converges between wilderness and tenderness. She has gained the interest of several worldwide stages in a short period of time. Now Nina Garcia has finally shown her style after ten years of conducting Mariachi events. With ‘Bye Bye Bird’,  her second solo album, but the first under her name, released by Ideologic Organ in February 2025 she  brings on stage melodious noise and rhythmic improvisation. It provides an honest depiction of an entity, a time, a deficiency, breath and an amazing atmosphere of freedom. 

She will join Murailles Music for her shows to share with the audience her  captivating  music that is a blend of chiaroscuro, melodies, and raw emotion. In addition, Nina Garcia teaches experimental music and conducts workshops for children (Le DOC, Saint-Germain d’Ectot, 2022 / Muse en Circuit 2024) or art students (EsadHar, Le Havre, 2017). Since 2023, she has been creating family-friendly events in which she performs music that has been modified but not clipped. Even though she has been in  numerous stages in Europe and North America she enjoys connecting with her audience and makes herself available to make accessible experimental music, explain her method, and let others try out the guitar and its accessories.

Can you tell us about your beginning? What motivated you to choose this career path? Was the electric guitar your first instrument’s choice?

I’ve always had the electric guitar in my head, so when I was able to start playing music as a child, the guitar was an obvious choice. I don’t play any other instrument and I’m still not tired of it, so it couldn’t have been such a bad choice! When I was a teenager I was in a number of fairly active bands, and we used to go out and play gigs on the weekends, mostly rock. I discovered experimental music later, living in Paris, when I was about 20. From that moment on, my ears and fingers began to drift until this music was the only one I played, and the one I listened to the most, especially live. When I say experimental music, I mean a wide variety of music: some with remnants of punk or jazz, some very minimal, some acoustic, some more extreme, it’s hard to get bored of it. So it’s a choice through practice, I’ve never thought about it, even less in terms of a career, but I quickly became passionate about this music and I dived into it completely.

Who are your greatest influences, both within and outside  music, and how do they influence your approach to sound?

My greatest influence is undoubtedly the concert experience, both as a musician and as a spectator. The tons of concerts I’ve been able to see, mostly in small venues and often in alternative locations, have forged a desire and a passion for this moment of sharing, this moment when everyone is moved by the same sound vibration. Whether it’s rock, experimental music, baroque or flamenco, I’m fascinated by ‘what passes’ from the musicians to the audience, and from the audience to the musician. It’s a mysterious thing. I think I’ve been influenced by a good number of artists and musicians, famous or not, professional or not, friends or not, who at one time or another have brought out something essential, something visceral, and have been able to transmit it directly. For me, this vibration (the sound) that passes through the body is magical.

As for musicians, I’ve been more influenced by people who aren’t guitarists. Their approach to sound, their ability to access sounds that seemed impossible to get with a guitar, created a sense of attention and frustration in me that led me to look for ways of accessing this kind of sound with my own instrument.

The experimental scene in Paris and France has undoubtedly been a major source of learning and influence. I’m thinking in particular of all the concerts I saw at Instants Chavirés: Sophie Agnel (piano), Arnaud Rivière (electronics), Olivier Benoit (guitar), Headwar (rock band). More recently I’ve been listening a lot to the English scene: Still House Plants, Gutter Snipe, Nape Necks….

During the day I listen to a lot of music, but rarely to experimental music. I think it has a huge influence on me too.

Do you find inspiration in other art forms, such as visual arts, books, or film, and how do these influences manifest in your music?

I think I’ve been quite influenced by the dance pieces I’ve seen, and I’m fascinated by observing movement and how it’s organised. I approach music and my guitar playing quite regularly through the question of movement (whether symbolic or physical). One of my greatest driving forces is sensation, and in that sense dance, which is an art that takes hold of the body, speaks to me enormously. Thinking in terms of gestural and spatial patterns, as well as intense bodily involvement, have also been important steps for me.

Your guitar work pushes the instrument beyond traditional boundaries. What inspires you to explore the electric guitar in unconventional ways?

This way of making sounds is very playful, it was first and foremost a game for me, which I enjoyed and developed. Then I discovered that it opened up a whole new range of possibilities for expression. I had the impression that I was entering a field that was much less codified than those I’d known until then. To be able to express complex feelings, unspeakable sensations, that would be received in a variety of ways, that was a liberation! I like works that are open and complex enough to allow each viewer to project their own imagination, thoughts and reflections onto them. Art is as much in the artist’s hand as in the audience’s imagination. This is not to say that anything can be done without meaning; it can only work if there is a clear direction, a path that can be followed. But what the meaning is, that’s up to each individual. The meaning I put into my pieces is very strong, but it’s entirely personal and subjective, and it’s not the only legitimate one.

The art of noise guitar as a genre challenges traditional notions of beauty and harmony. How do you define beauty in your music?

Beautiful music is music that touches my heart. I’m not concerned with questions of consonance or dissonance – these notions differ according to time and place, and are very relative standards. For me, they are tools for constructing music, but by no means rules to be followed. Beauty can be joyful, sad, melancholy, minimal or grandiose, it doesn’t matter. If the music moves, in the sense that it moves the audience and their feelings, then I think we’ve reached a form of beauty.

How do you approach merging improvisation with raw melodies, and what role does spontaneity play in your creative process? How do you achieve equilibrium between chaos and structure in your live performances?

Until now, my live shows have mainly been improvised, and improvisation has given me total freedom to play, as well as a thrill in the construction of the sets that I like. For this new LP and the lives that follow, I opted for composition. So I was able to construct specific pieces, with melodies but also my usual more noisy vocabulary. Each track has a particular direction, but I’ve constructed this set as a piece, with the tracks following on from each other and working together, with breaks and counterpoints. However, I always keep a margin of flexibility that lies between improvisation and interpretation, a way of playing the pieces, of moving away from them that allows me to be as accurate as possible in the moment depending on the sound, the atmosphere and my state of mind. But that’s a long way from free improvisation.

At the moment I’m really enjoying working on the same tracks, replaying them, perfecting them and developing them further. There’s very little chaos in my live shows, there can be a lot of noise, but I’m always in control. If I leave room for chance, for the resonances and reactions of the guitar without guiding it, it’s so that I can catch the sound on the fly again and mix it up, using this new data to give it shape.

From solo as Mariachi, now releasing your album under your own name, ‘Bye Bye Bird’. Can you share with us the creative process behind it?

Mariachi was an alias I took on at the start of my concerts in 2015, a bit to hide myself, a bit out of self-mockery, a bit as a tribute. Now, with this very personal and more emotional album, I want to sign by my name.

I spent a year working on this album. I’d just started exploring a new sound recording device (a mobile pick-up that I hold in my hand), when Stephen O’Malley (Ideologic Organ) offered me the chance to make a solo record. I then plunged into an 8-month research and creation phase. I had to set up and master this new equipment. And that led me into new musical territory, a different way of approaching sounds and managing time, a new fragility, a new relationship with my instrument and with gestures. The music that emerges is both in keeping with my work and completely new. I find it more emotional, more composed, perhaps more personal, but in any case it corresponds totally to what’s in my head and body at the moment.

I recorded and mixed the album with Etienne Foyer in the summer of 2024 at Nage Libre in Poitiers, and it was a wonderful experience. Etienne’s choices during the recording were decisive for the sound of the record; he did an enormous amount of work listening to the live sound and placing the microphones. By the end of the recording session and even before the mixing, the sound was already there!

How has your approach to music and noise evolved over time, and how do you see it heading in the coming years? Do you see your work as part of a dialogue about the boundaries of music and where do you see those boundaries expanding in the future?

After having been very much into noise and improvisation, I now allow myself to use more conventional methods (using melody, rhythm, playing pieces on stage), paradoxically I find it liberating! Allowing myself to go into these areas is pretty exciting, it’s surprisingly disconcerting for me. I’m not at all interested in being at the avant-garde, or in pushing back the boundaries of music or sound, whether in technical or artistic terms. I’m not a trailblazer for experimental music, I’m just trying, deeply and sincerely, to produce music that is as direct and personal as possible, and that with a bit of work can reach an audience. Shifting my own limits is already a fairly demanding programme!

I get the impression that there are more and more crossovers in experimental music, with hints of pop, rap and electronica mixed with electroacoustic or noisy music. I think it’s great, it avoids the sclerosis of a scene, the immobility of dogma. Experimentation is everywhere, and it’s certainly not exclusive to experimental music. In fact, I think that some of the most surprising music has recently come from musicians who don’t claim to be involved in experimental music at all. I’m thinking, for example, of Singeli, the Tanzanian style that has reached European ears in the last decade.

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.