Eve Maret belongs at the forefront of any discussion about synthesizer-based music in Nashville. Since she returned to Music City from a 2019 stint at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. (which announced last month that its 2023 graduating class will likely be its last), the quality of the 27-year-old’s output has been rivaled only by her drive to keep creating more of it.
On her fall 2020 release Stars Aligned, Maret’s second full-length album, concise and ebullient pop songs sat side by side with long-form avant-garde jam-outs. Meanwhile, February’s propulsive and psychedelic “Space Freeway” — the debut single from The Feature, Maret’s duo with friend and collaborator Adrienne Franke — tapped into the St. Louis native’s deep love of krautrock. The past month saw two more new releases from Maret. There was Multiplicity — a collab with her partner, visual artist David Onri Anderson, under the name Body Horse — as well as The Zone, a collection of four solo improvised pieces recorded at home during quarantine and released via Curious Music.
The Zone was a work in progress when I spoke with Maret in the fall. She explained that each track was a “one synthesizer, one take” affair, an adventure into new territory that she found time to take during quarantine downtime. Maret held an online launch party Sunday for The Zone, taped at Queen Ave Collective in East Nashville and streaming via Bandcamp. The half-hour set, which was followed by a live Q&A I unfortunately missed out on, highlighted the sense of pride and personality that informs all of Maret’s work. It’s a quality that sets her apart from the often overly mysterious pack of solo home recordists.
Working with a compact synthesizer, a mixer, a sampler and a laptop, she played two improvisations that were along similar lines to The Zone. Droning single notes gradually opened and closed around glimmering synth figures that recalled the power-up sound a vintage arcade game might make when the player picks up an extra life. I heard shades of Tangerine Dream’s celestial electronic psych in the dramatic builds. A viewer in the chatbox also drew a comparison to another 1970s influence, analog synth pioneer and composer Suzanne Ciani.
While you could argue that The Zone is the least accessible of Maret’s recent releases, it retains the audible joy in sonic exploration that made Stars Aligned and “Space Freeway” as fun to listen to as they seemingly were to make. And though the production wasn’t over-the-top, it did add an extra dimension to the show. The closeup-heavy camerawork put the viewer right in the room, and a backdrop of blinking strobe lights and undulating, kaleidoscopic black-and-white patterns were projected behind Maret and overlaid on the screen. The display made it feel like the tones and textures the artist coaxed from her equipment were able to breathe and move. It was the kind of multisensory art experience that won’t be easy to replicate at an in-person show.
