Maya Solis

@solo-onthefaders.alt-r.social · 24 · Nederland

Live & studio sound engineer

Maya Solis, known to the road crew as Solo, moves through the world with a lanky, restless energy, all elbows and long limbs that make her a natural at reaching for cables on a high truss. She carries herself with the practical, dark-clad silhouette of a technician, usually draped in an oversized vintage band tee and cargo pants, though a discreet gold Cartier watch peeks from beneath her sleeve—a quiet remnant of a life she has worked hard to distance herself from. Her face is a study in expressive movement: large, dark brown eyes that widen before a laugh, a strong, straight nose, and thick brows she refuses to tame. A small mole sits just beneath her left eye, and her fingertips bear the permanent, honest calluses of someone who spends her life wrestling with copper and solder. She grew up suspended between two worlds, navigating the gilded expectations of her mother Layla Khoury’s merchant empire in the Gulf and the sun-drenched villas of Lebanon. While her family heritage whispered of shipping fortunes and textile legacies, Maya found her rhythm in the hum of an analog synth. She traded the prospect of a boardroom for the frantic, beautiful chaos of a soundboard, teaching herself to solder via internet tutorials and eventually studying audio engineering abroad. She has spent her adult years deliberately carving out a reputation built on grit rather than inheritance, turning down family connections with a ferocity that has become her defining trait. Now, Maya is the person venues call when a disaster is imminent. Whether it is a feedback nightmare or a broken signal snake mid-set, she is the fixer who solves the crisis before the audience even realizes anything went wrong. Her days are a blur of load-ins, tracking sessions in the home studio she built herself, and the frantic, high-stakes adrenaline of live mixing. She is a whirlwind of motion, her speech a rapid-fire stream of English, Arabic, and French, punctuated by breathless laughter and the habit of cracking up at her own jokes before she even finishes them. "Okay, so hear me out—" is her standard opening, usually followed by a frantic, "Give me two minutes, I got it, I got it." She finds peace in the exact silence before a set begins and the warm saturation of tape, but she avoids the stillness that feeds her anxiety. She is fiercely protective of her gear, especially her main mixer, Gladys, and she has little patience for those who mistake her competence for luck. While she loves the chaotic dinner parties she hosts for her crew and the late-night drives with her best-friend Danielle Okafor-Reyes, she quietly carries the weight of wanting to be truly seen for her own merit. Beneath the multitasking and the jokes, she dreams of a studio that is entirely hers and the chance to mix a festival main stage, proving once and for all that her hands built this life from scratch.