Kate NV – “WOW” | Album Review — POST-TRASH

Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)

teeth RVNG International Are you trying to establish yourself as a sort of downtown music continuum label? The last time I wrote for Post-Trash was the important Kyle Gann book on late 20th century writings on composer music in downtown New York. I went to the library in search of music downtown It remains essential reading and more important than ever. Firstly, the current lack of local or local coverage exacerbated by a desire for greater indifference/hate on your local blog depends on the area where he finds himself and his situation at the moment. It has been brilliantly refuted in numerous discussions, reviews, interviews and aesthetic dialogues. You don’t want hate You need a clear voice that has perspective and calls the bluffs and clocks the present moment. Secondly, opposition to “downtown” music, or heavily written institutional music, does exist, albeit in a way that perhaps cannot fully identify its dominance in the 21st century. The music has permeated the upper tier of indie music (looking at the New British Underground) as much as private press ambient and tape labels. Let’s take a look. it’s all around us.

What does it mean to record a composer’s music “against”? I started to think that RVNG Intl has been playing the aesthetically oriented game for a long time to transition itself into Composerhis label. I couldn’t say this circa 2018 or 2019 (that’s a long time ago, for blogging), but in the last few years I’ve been referring to Freedom to Spend and Commend, an electro-acoustic production and a Cage-oriented ” I was able to find both of the “Chance” compilations. Holly Hendron, Lucrecia Dalt, Horse Rose, and now his M. Sage are all academic artists working outside the institution, for deep brains who actively abandon the rigor of institutional music. making deep music. They are quirky!

M. Sage, like today’s featured artist, Kate NV, is an orange milk alum. For a long time (alongside Hausu Mountain) Orange Milk was a label rarely recognized for curating the talent and high benchmarks that a modern composer label like ECM should have, but instead It’s left to Ferrick alone. Even with the opposition, Orange Milk was his 2010s downtown. When Orange Milk reissued his Noah Creshvesky pivotal work of the 20th century, it was a true culmination moment in the label’s “hyperrealist” (see also “goocore”) compositional aesthetic. It’s been here for almost a decade, no doubt, but has rarely transitioned to larger productions on other labels.

Katya Shironosova (aka Kate NV) has been working on something for a few years now. She could possibly serve as a modern-day accessory to Laurie Anderson in the ’80s. She is a composer who understands the abstraction of pop vocabulary.I just arrived in 2020 and was late for the whole shebang moon roomSo I spent years working her way back through her Orange Milk tapes and her first RVNG album. former, follow them 2016 exploded with pop nuggets that flourished from an unusual Russo-Japanese context. for, conducted considerable research revealing NV’s capabilities for the freewheeling synthesizer roadmap. It tunneled and ripped through another whole sound outside of her pop songs and punky spirit, and reminded me more of Sandro Perry’s Puzzle Box than any other of her contemporaries. NV is presented as a unique pop-her Maverick. One foot is Bedroom her pop composition and the other is tied to Stockhausen’s Noisnik.

NV revealed in an interview that she is eclectic and multilingual when it comes to music. moon room It was arguably the first time that synth funk and private-press grooves fused together, moving between American indie and Japanese city pop to really get noticed. It’s a charming pastiche, a presentation from outside Western online circles that didn’t quite fit in a slot like her previous releases, prompting listeners with a contextual understanding of Japanese and Russian culture. Her NV’s biggest achievement on this album was language correction. One song here in English and another of hers in French, in a Russian string. Language was very important to LP. Because language was used in a way that changed with the sound it landed on. It abstracted itself to the point where it didn’t matter where it came from or where it was going.

oh It leverages the past three Kate NV releases and her catalog over the past six years. Recorded between 2016 and 2022, oh We collect a series of cutaways and castoffs that never openly found their way into a proper Kate NV release. A fragment that haunted the hard drive and appeared several years later. Indeed, they still radiated a deep emotional resonance. NV are well known for premiering tracks years before their release and waiting for the right time to distill it into a studio recording. But by integrating these snippets from the past six years into this album, NV masterfully demonstrates her songwriting abilities that have lain dormant for far too long.

Sonically, the collection’s warped temporality shines in a novel light. I’m not stuck in the immediate present, but I rarely look back or feel like I’m ready to date. It serves a similar purpose as Grouper. Remains provided her catalog for Fall 2021. For NV, it provides a new accompaniment to her previous releases while also tapping her into a novel fusion of her sounds. The biggest platforming this side of the orange milk goo core noise aesthetic is… Lil B.

For what it’s worth, this is a Kate N.V. album nonetheless, albeit a looser rendition than previously assumed. Cheerful synthpop fit for the disc-ejected PS1 platformer, but RAM stubbornly keeps tripping (“Them,” “Meow”). Open zone environment (“Sleep”, “Flu”). The biggest leap is almost a club banger (“mi (us)”, “razmishlenie (thinking)”) into other hyperrealist hoodmen and his adventures in dexterous footwork listening environments. It’s a nodding cut. A fascinating idea that invites you to take it out of your hands and enjoy it.

Synths ranging from Prophet, Sequential OB-6, Alpha Juno-2 and Novation Ultranova all move seamlessly one after another with her signature broken orchestral samples and punchy drums. All the ideas here are based on her Kate NV releases, but more glitchy and more processed outside of the meatspace that her three previous ones at least alluded to. The brilliance of this sonic palette and the tremendous glee of these melodies does not exist in the real world, but only here as a broken, thrilling transmission captured as a seamless package.sense of personality moon room Have fun spilling words here oh

NV’s greatest asset to this is her cunning bedroom production and mixing technique. Here it operates at a career peak in that it drops features against the immediate pop bliss of previous releases.beat on oh routinized and layered to subvert each other to legitimate constructivist effects. It’s exactly the result of someone with self-diagnosed ADHD searching for the perfect pop sound to listen to. Exponentially, however, this tinkering enacts excessive rewards. Bright sound that doesn’t interfere with hi-fi. The effect enhanced by (among other things) ridiculously chopping and twisting her voice into mere syllables is fairly evident throughout the album.

oh‘s acoustic palette is a major evolution in her vocal NV usage as a multivariate instrument. Yes, it can be sung, but often distorted to the beat or stripped of direct persona. In recent memory, few people worked this way. Another composer, Ka Baird, performs extraordinary heroism with her voice, transforming it into unidentified creatures and drones that evoke generational trauma and historical devastation, sometimes defining the quality of the ‘game’. sometimes. However, Kate NV’s vocal her game doesn’t have the same effect. Similar to Keith Rankin’s eyeballs and creepy glasses, it works in the surreal space of many of these tracks. Almost like a percussive or glitchy quip, it’s more unreliable stream-of-consciousness than narration…a translation that still conveys and conveys the manic annoyance her other releases avoided. . No more dreams of punch-drunk crashes and plans in happy places, even as NV defends her music as a remedy for “getting back to feeling light, warm, and happy.” There is only a chirping ringing like a scroll. A curious mind that retaliates for its morbid humor.

The album’s shocking lack of direct language deliberately pushes the NV collection towards viewing it as a gigantic (happy) accidental compositional body of work. Most songs have a way to start at point A and move to point B without losing the rhythmic melody or moving to an entirely different planet. Still, NV’s sonics are the same haptics that evoke the emo-ambient, psychedelic abruptness of his BPM-switching advances. cheer stick slide, and the sheer awe of finding non-linguistic connections… just repetition and tactile.to lose yourself oh A journey of 40 minutes or longer seems to startle the body towards the preconscious, which is focused on the details around oneself.

to bring us back to the beginning oh It’s hyperrealism music. It’s like being able to diagnose modern conflict without consciously exposing it. The kind of work that attempts to invite you in with surprising glee while defiantly opposing both pop’s apocalyptic boredom and the rigidness of contemporary composition. Frankly, I can’t get her melodies out of my head until I see her at Big Ears.