Editor's note: After this story went to press, the release of Stars Aligned was postponed until Nov. 13 due to delays in vinyl manufacturing. The digital edition of the record will be held back as well.
Three years ago, Eve Maret was California dreaming. As the St. Louis-raised, Nashville-residing musician struggled to find a local audience for her nascent analog-synth soundscapes, she felt drawn to the electronic music MFA program at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. Avant-garde composer guru Terry Riley famously taught there, along with the late John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. The thought of living in the Bay Area, a renowned experimental-music stronghold, was enticing for Maret.
Then that dream came true: Maret was accepted to Mills. But as John Lennon once said, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Maret had been so consumed with plotting her escape from Music City that she almost neglected to notice the community she’d been craving cropping up all around her. The shows were getting better: Maret earned a slew of new admirers after opening for JEFF the Brotherhood and Coupler at The Basement East two Octobers ago. Local fixtures in experimental and experiential music — like saxophone virtuoso JayVe Montgomery (alias Abstract Black), drum juggernaut Will Hicks (aka B|_ank) and drone-folk songwriter-producer Jess Chambers (who performs as Dream Chambers) — were no longer just acquaintances. They’d become friends and collaborators.
“It was like everything I wanted had started to unfold in my immediate reality,” Maret tells the Scene via phone. When Chambers pitched her about starting a collective to amplify female, trans and nonbinary voices in electronic music — the group was later dubbed Hyasynth House — Maret decided Mills could wait. “I felt like I needed to stay in Nashville and do the work I needed to do,” she says.
Hyasynth started 2019 strong, with a plethora of shows, film events and workshops around town and a performance at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival. Later in the year, the collective dissolved, freeing Maret to finally give Mills and Oakland a proper shot. Once there, however, she found herself quickly at odds with “dogmas and certain beliefs” toward what is and isn’t “free” music.
“I was like, ‘I want to be experimental, and I want to be pop too,’ ” Maret says. After her first term at Mills, she felt held-back by the time commitment grad school called for — “I was ready to bust out, do all these things” — and returned to Nashville.
Stars Aligned, out Friday via Cincinnati’s Whited Sepulchre Records in the U.S. (with London indie PRAH Recordings doing an international release), seeks to immortalize in sound this formative, eventful period in Maret’s life. Steadfastly resistant to staying in one place, Stars has an experimental brain and a pop heart. You can dance to it (opener “Synthesizer Hearts,” which establishes a high-BPM baseline for the proceedings), sing along to it (the playful but firm “Do My Thing”) and just as easily get lost in it (the spellbinding album centerpiece “Impressions,” a longform exploration of tone and texture in the vein of ’80s film scores by Vangelis and Tangerine Dream).
The nine-track LP doubles as a celebration of a highly creative cadre of contemporary Nashville players. Among others, there are assists from Montgomery, MVP guitarist-about-town Sean Thompson, Lou Turner from folk-pop-rock outfit Styrofoam Winos (who plays flute here) and ambient pedal-steel luminary Luke Schneider.
Though Stars is fearlessly eclectic, it’s got a steady pulse. Maret studied at Fork’s Drum Closet with jazz hero Chester Thompson, who’s also kept time for Genesis and Frank Zappa. In addition, she has a deep love of Neu!, Can, Kraftwerk and other ’60s and ’70s Germans whose patient, propulsive psychedelia, which came to be known as krautrock, was crucial in helping reshape their nation’s cultural identity post-World War II.
“Krautrock feels very expansive, very true,” says Maret. “It isn’t about anything other than having a spiritual musical experience. I have German heritage too, so that makes me feel even more connected to it. Krautrock was the sound of a new beginning for those people, for that country. That affects me in a big way. I love it.”
How musicians here in Nashville and around the world will bounce back from COVID-19 remains to be seen. But for now, Maret is seizing the opportunity for deep listening, marathon music-making sessions — she’s got a new series of one-synthesizer, single-take improv recordings in the pipeline — and self-reflection at every turn.
“Because I’m not playing shows or touring, I’ve been taking the time to come back to my intention around creating,” Maret explains. “To ask myself why I make the music I make, why I like the sounds that I like … and try to go deeper with all of it. My intention is to explore the healing properties of sound … so when I share my music with others, they can experience a little bit of that, too. That spiritual connection, reassurance and trust I feel is very necessary during these chaotic times.”
