Chi-town popstress serves up soul food
Who?
The sounds of Chicago-based artist Ginamaya are self-produced and thoroughly DIY, but they could still give the most innovative and resource-heavy musicians a serious run for their money. Arriving last month, ‘Miss Moon’, her new four-track EP, has a sense of naive wonder to it, as she explores soul and electropop reference points with childlike whimsy, while describing her journey from “maiden to motherhood”.
Why Ginamaya?
“I see myself as a collage artist of sound,” says Ginamaya when describing ‘Miss Moon’s sonic vignettes which are formed by layers of vocals, samples and diverse musical cues. Previous EPs ‘Cloud Shoes’ and ‘Body West’ had a darker hue to them, but ‘Miss Moon’ steps into the light as a “spiritual and intellectual exercise against nihilism”. The music is optimistic and complex. Confident and fearlessly inventive. Take the title track, which opens with dense vocal harmonies that subside into seconds of post-industrial drone, giving way to warped tribal rhythms akin to ‘Blue Lines’-era Massive Attack (a motif ramped up on ‘Heavenly Mother’). The EP sits decidedly in between the accessible and the experimental. “I can’t help what I make when it comes down to it,” she says. “It keeps happening, and I want to keep allowing it to come through.”
Tell Us More…
‘Miss Moon’ was produced as Ginamaya watched her one-year-old daughter Ayla grow. This momentous occasion fed into the music’s key themes of partnership, ancestral worship and motherhood. Several of the unorthodox samples portray the emotions of childhood and parenthood, like a phone recording of her babbling baby opening the track ‘Ayla’, or the sample of a child’s wind-up toy playing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ on ‘Uncrustables Rich’. All in all, Ginamaya has turned the bubble of her existence into a vast yet relatable aural world – as all the best pop music should.
‘Miss Moon’ is out via Bandcamp
