London-based Estonian Maria Juur has the slightly unenviable honour of taking the penultimate “featured artist” slot of 2011. This is not to say, though, that the music she makes should suffer any similar such near-overlooking. A hazy, trippy, skewed, near-unhinged variation of MTV-pop, Maria Minerva has all the faded-memory qualities of a forgotten, warped, foreign-language hits cassette played through a battered stereo - equal parts melodic, disorientating and familiar, with sleeve art to match. “As if Throbbing Gristle or Chris N Cosey had made a 21st-century R&B album” writes another smitten reviewer.
Her 2011 album Cabaret Cixous was released by LA’s massively cool Not Not Fun (run by members of Pocahaunted) on cassette in August, and features the sultry, hallucinogenic California Scheming:
