Podcast 428: Maayan Nidam

Having spent her earlier years in Tel Aviv, Israel, with brief stints in Amsterdam and New York, Nidam arrived in Berlin in 2004. It was, she says, a “desperate move,” motivated, above all, by a need to “move forward” rather than pursue any particular musical endeavour. “I needed to move, to see somewhere else and to get away from everything. It had nothing to do with trying to become a successful musician,” she says. “DJing was just something that I could do.” Over time, as she struggled to settle in the place where she had limited knowledge of the local dialect, music, she explains, became her main vehicle of communication with people in the scene. “I just spent all my time going to parties and playing music,” she recalls. Production, too, at this point began to grow. Releases, under a plethora of different monikers—including Laverne Radix, Miss Fitz and Mara Trax (her collaborative project with Vera)—became increasingly frequent, spanning from labels including Raum Music, Oslo, and Freak n’ Chic. Her first work under her own name landed in 2009, a debut full-length on Power Shovel Audio. This, she says, marked a point of maturity in her sound, and the first time she first felt comfortable without an alias.