JD Zazie

In the artist's words:

VALERIA MERLINI aka JD Zazie is a Berlin-based Italian experimental turntablist, DJ, sound artist and curator. After graduating in architecture in Florence, she completed a Master's degree in Sound Studies at the UdK Berlin. She has spent several years researching different approaches to the real-time manipulation of fixed sound recordings. As a composer-performer, she explores the boundaries between DJ mixing, free improvisation and composition. Fragmentation, decontextualization and the repetition of scratches, mistakes and sonic textures are fundamental elements with which she organizes and rearranges her sound material. As an experimental turntablist, she contrasts samples as media sounds with the materiality of records and turntables, but also of CD players. The peculiarities of the devices and the sound carriers are also an inspiration for abstract sound generation and sound modification. In 2019, she received the New Music & Sound Art working grant from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe for a record player-related project. JD Zazie composed the sound for the work Gaddafi in Rome: Anatomy of a Friendship (2024) by Alessandra Ferrini, which was shown at the Biennale Venezia.

She is a member of the Reanimation Orchestra, is part of Hic Up and regularly plays solo and in duo with Heidrun Schramm and Peter Cusack. She is the artistic director of the MuseRuole - women in experimental music festival, a member of the Burp Enterprise collective and broadcasts monthly on Colaboradio and Reboot.fm.