Maria Minerva

Juur grew up in Tallinn.^[6][7] She is the daughter of the Estonian humorist, television presenter and music critic Mart Juur.^[8][9]

She graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a bachelor's degree in art history in 2010.^[8] She obtained a master's degree in aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London,^[2][1] where she studied with the British cultural theorist and music critic Mark Fisher.^[10]

Juur began recording music in London in 2009, while interning at The Wire, after buying instruments and equipment online.^[11][12] She signed with Not Not Fun after emailing the label on the last day of 2010.^[13] She began releasing music in 2011, when Not Not Fun and 100% Silk issued her album-length cassette Tallinn at Dawn^[9][14] and the 12-inch Noble Savage.^[9] The second album, Cabaret Cixous, followed that August on Not Not Fun; its title nods to the French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous.^[15] According to the Russian music outlet Zvuki.ru [ru], the title alludes simultaneously to the band Cabaret Voltaire,^[6] which she cited among her influences around this time.^[9] In a later interview, she would also mention Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lætitia Sadier, Kim Gordon and Laurie Anderson as musical influences from youth.^[12] Reviewing the album for The Quietus, Rory Gibb called the record "bedroom pop with ambitions far more expansive than its four walls".^[16]

In 2012 Minerva released two albums on Not Not Fun: Will Happiness Find Me?^[17] and The Integration LP, a collaboration with label co-owner Amanda Brown's LA Vampires project, which The Quietus's Charlie Fox wrote "settles into a rhythm of intermittent greatness".^[18] Her fourth solo album, Histrionic (Not Not Fun, 2014), written after a move from London to New York, drew on contemporary club music; Fact's Maya Kalev found it "an enjoyable bedroom curiosity rather than a high achievement",^[19] while the Estonian culture newspaper Müürileht [es] wrote it was, "according to many critics her best album yet".^[4] At the Estonian Music Awards in January 2015 she won Best Female Artist and Best Electronica Album for Histrionic.^[5] After a five-year break from solo albums, she returned in September 2020 with Soft Power, released digitally and on cassette by 100% Silk and described by XLR8R as "neon-lit diva-pop disco".^[20]

Minerva remixed John Cale for the 2012 release Extra Playful: Transitions,^[21] and appeared on the track "Remynd" from Cities Aviv's 2012 album Black Pleasure.^[22] She performed with Mark Van Hoen at the Unsound festival in New York in 2012,^[23] and in 2013 recorded the collaborative mix Maria2maria with the artist Maria Chavez.^[24] She appeared in Silk, a 2013 documentary about 100% Silk's 2012 tour.^[25]

With Ugnius Gelguda she created the soundtrack for Popcorn, Pepsi, Petabytes, a 2014 exhibition at the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard.^[26] Her music appears in the visual artist Phil Collins's listening-booth installation my heart's in my hand, and my hand is pierced...,^[27] and she composed the soundtrack for Les Singes (2017), a performance work by Naomi Toth and the poet Vanessa Place.^[28] She has hosted Estonian Air, a monthly programme on the Los Angeles community radio station Dublab.^[29] She appeared in u.Q., a 2021 documentary by Ivar Murd about the musician Uku Kuut [es].^[30]

Fact called Minerva's music "arch avant-pop"^[17] and described her as an "experimental chanteuse",^[38] while Dazed & Confused characterized her early recordings as "densely yearning, electronic bedroom jams".^[9] NPR praised her "beautiful and mysterious lead vocals",^[39] Interview wrote that her singing "evokes the alienated soul of Nico",^[1] and Spin discussed her reverb-laden records among indie acts indebted to the music of Twin Peaks.^[40] Reviewing the 2011 EP Sacred & Profane Love for Pitchfork, Lindsay Zoladz called it "Minerva's most immediate release yet" and her music "a place where academia and pop culture… commingle in a hazy, libidinous swirl",^[41] and reviewing her 2019 EP with Cherushii, Pitchfork's Harley Brown described her "featherweight (and at times ever so slightly off-key) croon" as "a cross between Blossom Dearie, Brigitte Bardot, and the Estonian pop singers she grew up listening to".^[42]

Critics in the 2010s placed Minerva's music within the lo-fi and hypnagogic pop current of the period.^[12][16][39] Zvuki.ru counted her among the most representative artists of lo-fi's second generation.^[6] In 2011 Simon Reynolds named her among the foremost of a new wave of female synth musicians in a New York Times feature, describing her music as "hazy lo-fi synthpop".^[15] Fact wrote that she had come to embody the DIY aesthetic of her labels, Not Not Fun and 100% Silk.^[19] Writing in The Quietus, Rory Gibb distinguished her from other stylistically related Not Not Fun artists by her music's physicality and sense of motion.^[16]

NPR presented her in 2012 as the first artist to bring the sound out of the Baltic region, and as a potential forerunner for other Estonian acts.^[39] Writing for Bandcamp Daily in 2018, Daniel Dylan Wray called her "perhaps one of Estonia's best-known and celebrated contemporary artists",^[3] and Müürileht described her in 2015 as one of the few artists from Estonia to have "emerged to the top of the global alternative music scene".^[4] The online magazine Estonian World placed her on its 2015 list of the "Top 12 most outstanding Estonian women in the world".^[2] The Guardian included her in its 2017 interactive feature "The Sound of LA".^[43]

After leaving Estonia she lived in London and New York before settling in Los Angeles in the mid-2010s.^[4] She worked in the United States on O-1 "extraordinary ability" visas from 2013, obtained permanent residency in 2015,^[44] and later became a United States citizen.^[8]