Maria Chávez

Born in Lima, Peru in 1980, Maria Chávez grew up in Texas and began working with turntables as a teenager in Houston, developing what she calls abstract turntablism — a practice rooted in chance, failure, and Deep Listening as taught by her late mentor Pauline Oliveros. She is the only practitioner who performs with the RAKE Double Needle, a rare device with two needles on one head that reads two segments of a record simultaneously. Her 2012 book Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable, which she wrote and illustrated herself, documents her methods. She is based in New York.