debit aka Delia Beatriz is an electronic music composer, sound expert and accomplished critical intellectual based in nyc.
Debit has performed and participated in hundreds of shows & festivals worldwide such as like roskilde,atonal,sxsw, norberg festival, RMBF & the whitney biennial and in a number of conferences and panels, including Audio Engineering Society, unam’s aleph, Mutek Montreal, Mutek Mexico, Rewire Festival, among others.
She is an adjunct professor of Global Electronic Music, Electronic Music Performance & Computer music synthesis in the Music Tech program at NYU.
she holds a Masters degree in Music technology from NYU. Her research involves Music information retrieval (MIR), (proof of )conceptual applications of these state of the art processes and the critical interrogation of the power architectures of databases that source these.
Her graduate work connected AI and an archeological archive of Mayan wind instruments from the Late Classical Period, while surveying pre-hispanic electronic music legacies, resulting in a critically acclaimed record she performed around the world in various scales of production.
She got her B.A. from Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Latin American Studies. Her bachelor’s thesis titled The Incunables investigated the role of the book & the printing press as a colonial technology in Mexico.
and is currently developing catabolism, an open education resource focused on the creation and commission of critical tools for electronic music praxis, community and profit building.
Long Bio
Born and raised in Monterrey, Mexico before her family relocated to Texas when she was a teenager, Delia Beatriz aka Debit has long straddled two distinct worlds. As a DJ, her selections burn the unmistakable swing of Latin club music into ironclad techno frameworks, and as a producer and composer, she drifts seamlessly from avant-garde and drone modes into experimental dance music without hesitation.
Since her graduation from Brown University in 2010, Beatriz lived in and was involved with electronic music communities in various places in South America. It was her permanent move to New York City in 2013, where Martinez traded the synth rig for a USB, DJing regularly in the local dance scene and establishing the Debit moniker. Her debut album “Animus” was released in 2018 by Mexico City collective N.A.A.F.I., and wove pneumatic club sounds with melancholy ambience, receiving acclaim from FACT, Resident Advisor and Noisey. She swiftly followed it up with “Love Discipline”, a beatless opera of futuristic, cinematic and sinister soundworks.
While she was studying a graduate degree in Music Technology at NYU, Beatriz assembled her most defining statement to date, “System”. This EP solidified the duality of her unique approach, reconstructing tribal guarachero music using sounds snatched from industrial techno. “System”, which featured collaborations with Teklife’s DJ Earl and tribal innovator Javier Estrada, was universally acclaimed, and placed prominently on year end lists at FACT, Pitchfork and Resident Advisor.
In 2022, Beatriz released her next album “The Long Count”, an ambitious electro-acoustic tome that delves into the past to peer into the future. Using research she made into Mayan wind instruments and how AI could aid in a creative recontextualizing of the instrumental archive, Martinez developed digital instruments and harnessed machine learning to compose music that feels completely out of time. The album was on legendary British imprint Modern Love in February and it was placed in best album of the month at Resident Advisor, Mix Mag, Dj Mag, while being named the Global Album of the Month by the Guardian. The album received critical acclaim and features in BBC 3, Pitchfork, Dazed, ID, amongst many others and was ranked 3rd best global album of the year at the Guardian.
