Nina Garcia

Born in 1990, she lives and works in Paris.

Since 2015, Nina Garcia has been researching and creating around the electric guitar, halfway between improvised music and noise. Her set-up is reduced to a minimum: a guitar, a pedal, and an amp with which she sculpts sound and delves into chaos to bring out the unheard-of. 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.

Nina Garcia presents a new work with a magnifying glass where the guitar is amplified by 1-inch zones. A fist linked to a micro-microphone, « ultra-territorial » music and total dependence of the sound on the slightest movement. What emerges from this new research is a tenfold increase in tension, forced silences, aborted feedback, and manufactured loops that are always trying to move forward. Her music is increasingly handmade, but always with a high intensity. In this new set we find her classical Mariachi folklore: threaded rods, saturated wedding and funeral noises, assertive rhythms and breaks, and a privileged link with the amp as a playing partner.

A duo rather than a solo, it stuns with its blend of technical mastery and total freedom. Nina converges between wildness and tenderness with her instrument, a tense corps à corps between two vibrant souls, music and choreography of raw poetry.

After a decade of performing concerts under the Mariachi guise, Nina Garcia has finally unveiled her unique approach in ‘Bye Bye Bird‘, her first album under her name, released by Ideologic Organ. With no pretence or demonstration, the album is a captivating blend of chiaroscuro, melodies, and raw emotion.

Nina Garcia also plays with Arnaud Rivière in Autoreverse, in a 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, and Fred Frith.

In 2020/2021, she was in residency at GRM for a commission for the Présences Électronique 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 also teaches experimental music, leading workshops for art students (EsadHar, Le Havre, 2017) or children (Le DOC, Saint-Germain d’Ectot, 2022 / Muse en Circuit 2024). Since 2023, she has been developing concerts for children and families, where she presents adapted but not cropped music. She makes herself available to break down gestures, let people try out the guitar and its objects, explain her approach, and desacralize experimental music.

→ Member of Shape+ 2019