Maara wrote most of Ultra Villain in Montreal, during and after a rupture she has been unusually direct about, and she finished it around a move to Berlin. The record came out in February on NAFF and has spent the six months since then as a headphones object. Tonight it finally gets a body, because she is playing it live for the first time anywhere, in the basement of arkaoda on Karl-Marx-Platz in Neukölln. Doors are at 8pm, entry is ten euros, and DJ AYA opens the night with a downtempo set.
Maara: Ultra Villain live debut
arkaoda Berlin, Karl-Marx-Platz 16, Neukölln. Thursday 13 August, doors 8pm, €10, with DJ AYA opening.
Most people in this city met Maara through the decks. She locked into the Montreal scene as a student at Concordia and came up in the same orbit as Priori, Ex-Terrestrial and Dust-e-1, which is one of the few places on earth where you can learn to make dance music that sounds emotionally specific rather than merely effective. She has released through Isla, X-Kalay, Step Ball Chain and Radiant Love, and Kalahari Oyster Cult put out "The Horse Track" in 2023. She also runs her own imprint, Ancient Records, whose catalogue includes titles like "Das Dykes of Deutschland" and means exactly what it sounds like it means.
What she is known for, live and in the record bags of everyone who has seen her, is a particular strain of '90s prog and trance played fast and without irony. Her 2023 album The Ancient Truth was the high-water mark of that mode, and it is still the record people cite when they book her for a peak-time slot. If you have danced to her at four in the morning, that is the artist you think you are getting.
Ultra Villain is a different animal. It runs to fourteen tracks and her own voice carries nearly all of them, which is something she had never done at album length before. The tempos come from trip-hop, the detail work comes from IDM, and the songs are built with the structure of leftfield pop rather than the arc of a club track. Francis Latreille, who runs NAFF under the name Priori, and Patrick Holland handled additional production and mixing at Jump Source, and Noel Summerville mastered it.
The functional material is mostly gone. This is a record you sit inside rather than one you beatmatch, and it asks for the kind of attention that a dance floor is not usually built to give.
Press photographs courtesy NAFF Recordings · Ultra Villain cover art by Dodleyz, design by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier · Flyer courtesy arkaoda Berlin
The record
The album makes its argument in the title. Somebody cast her as the villain of a story, and instead of arguing the point she took the part and played it to the end. "I realised people can only meet you where they've met themselves," she said around the release, which is the kindest available way of saying that the other person was never going to get there.
"Obsessive Compulsion" sits inside a loop of intrusive thoughts and refuses to resolve it. "A Moving Blur" is the track she has described as the most cathartic to finish, and it was built around a miscommunication that never got repaired. "I'm The One You Want" runs under three minutes and lands like a message you should not have sent. The closer, "Come Home," was written just before her live debut at MUTEK Montréal in 2024, which is a useful thing to know, because it means the live show and the album have been circling each other since before the album existed.
She has described her writing process as a kind of emotional journal, where the narrative only becomes visible later, on the reread. You can hear that in the sequencing, which has the logic of something assembled after the fact from evidence rather than planned from the start.
What the live show has to solve
A vocal record made slowly in a studio is a hard thing to stand behind in a room full of people. There is no crowd-management tool anywhere in these tracks and no drop to fall back on when the middle of a set starts to sag. The interesting question tonight is which direction she takes it, because her instincts as a DJ are kinetic and physical while the album is close-miked and interior. A first performance is where you find out whether an artist builds the show outward toward the club or lets the record stay quiet and asks the room to come to it instead.
Either answer would be worth being there for. First performances have a quality that later tour dates never quite recover, which is that nobody in the room knows how it goes yet, including the person on stage.
The room
arkaoda took over a former bowling alley on Karl-Marx-Platz in 2018, and it is the Berlin offshoot of an Istanbul club that has been running since 1999. Upstairs there is a bar and a kitchen, and both are usually full and usually loud. The basement is the actual venue, a wide low room with a small stage and Persian carpets on the floor, and it holds volume without punishing anyone standing in it. The programming leans toward post-punk, krautrock, dub, ambient and disco, which is why a trip-hop album with vocals ends up here rather than on a Neukölln club floor with a bigger rig and worse sightlines.
The room is not large. Resident Advisor has the night listed as a pick and around 120 people have marked themselves as attending, which on a Thursday should mean full without being crushed. If you want to be near the stage, go for doors rather than drifting in at ten.
DJ AYA opens
DJ AYA warms the room from doors with a loungey downtempo set, and that is a genuinely fun piece of casting. They were born in Zurich and are based in Berlin, and their taste was shaped by UK bass and grime, so they normally work at the end of a night rather than the beginning of one. The rooms they usually play are Hör, Panorama Bar, Boiler Room and Khidi, where the reggaeton edit tends to arrive at exactly the wrong moment and turn out to be the right one. Watching a selector with that instinct play slow for two hours is its own reason to arrive early.
Hear it first
Ultra Villain runs to fourteen tracks and roughly an hour, and the live set will make considerably more sense if you have heard it at least once beforehand. NAFF pressed it as a double LP, so there is a physical copy to take home as well.
You can buy the digital album on Bandcamp, and the vinyl comes directly from NAFF Recordings.
If you would rather stream it, the record is on SoundCloud and on Spotify.
You can follow her on SoundCloud and on Instagram, where the tour dates go up first.
Practical
The venue is arkaoda Berlin at Karl-Marx-Platz 16, 12043 Berlin-Neukölln. The closest station is Karl-Marx-Straße on the U7, and it is about five minutes on foot from there.
The show is on Thursday 13 August and doors open at 8pm.
Entry costs ten euros.
You can buy a ticket in advance through Resident Advisor or simply pay at the door.
The full listing, with the map pin and everything else happening around it, is on Dizko here.
Why bother on a Thursday
Berlin gets a great many touring live sets that turn out to be a laptop and a smoke machine playing the album back at you at 120 percent. This is the other thing entirely. A producer who could comfortably coast on club bookings is taking the most exposed record she has made and putting it in front of a room of people standing on carpets, for ten euros, without knowing yet how it is going to go. The version of this show in eighteen months, after a festival run and a proper visual, will be a great deal tighter than tonight's. It will not be this one.
Images: press photographs of Maara courtesy of NAFF Recordings. The Ultra Villain cover art is by Dodleyz and the sleeve design is by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier. The event flyer is courtesy of arkaoda Berlin.
