Katie Gately - Fawn/Brute (March 31, 2023)

ItsAndrew · Mar 28, 2023

1. Seed
2. Howl
3. Fawn
4. Cleave
5. Peeve
6. Scale
7. Meat
8. Brute
9. Chaw
10. Tame
11. Melt

American experimental musician and producer Katie Gately is up to mischief on her new album Fawn/Brute, 11 songs of innocence and experience exploring the light and dark of childhood energy following the birth of her first daughter. It is an album of two halves, that moves from the effervescence of early years to the defiance and turbulence of teenage angst.

Events in recent years gave her the space to acknowledge what she had been putting off: "For me, that was having a baby," she says. "I turned to my husband and said 'I think we should have a kid'. When I got pregnant I started to get creative again. I had a lot of energy at first, but later on, my pregnancy was stressful and worrying, so the music got darker and darker: I was making angry music while I was supposed to be feeling maternal." The album is dedicated to her young daughter Quinn, born in 2021 – the track 'Fawn' is a love letter to her.

Quinn is referenced in the artwork's harlequin, with two readings of the harlequin's mischief captured in the two sides of the record, being both cheeky and transgressive with disruptive intent. "I wanted the album to feel like something my daughter could enjoy as she grew up," she explains, "so the first tracks are childlike and upbeat, but as we get older we start to experience a volcano of emotion, angst, and conflict." The first half channels inspirations from the busy and unsubtle dynamics of kids TV music and stomp and clatter of early Animal Collective albums, as in the brittle joys of "Howl". For the second half she was thinking about the brutalist sonic experiments of the British post-punk she obsessed over as a teenager, from PiL and Gang Of Four to This Heat, as in the industrial throb of 'Chaw' or the raw low end grafted onto sparse vocal lines in 'Brute', its massive basslines constructed from the manipulated rattling of cardboard shoeboxes.

In typical maverick style, Gately plundered cartoon sound libraries magpie-like to build signature nests of sounds, integrating her own idiosyncratic sound recording strategies and sampling techniques, from shoeboxes to theremin and with a boisterous recurring saxophone. The album opens with 'Seed', a track that contemplates the possibilities of new life, in forward marching step. 'Howl' was originally released as a single for AdultSwim, capturing the explosive energies of a sugar rush in a dense traffic jam of samples from dogs and animals to human screams. 'Cleave' is Gately's distinctive take on the archetypal teenage heartbreak pop song; 'Peeve' plays with theremin samples to channel lyrical frustrations about minor irritations. 'Scale' and 'Meat' dig into anxieties driven by medical concerns towards the end of her pregnancy. Whirring motifs of 'Tame' are claustrophobic and maximalist, a final burst of accumulated voice and electronics before 'Melt' returns to the start in a love song, Gately style, that bends and whorls with brass samples and the whispered mantra: "mischief, mischief, mischief".

The album is her second for Houndstooth, following critically acclaimed 2020's Loom, made in the wake of her mother's death. But where that album explored grief and long goodbyes, this album is one of play, embracing unstable mood shifts from joy to fury, embracing the energies of childhood and intensity of new life. Previous to Loom and Color, Katie has also released 12”s and a cassette on a number of notable underground labels – Public Information and Blue Tapes, as well as the critically acclaimed FatCat Split Series and Tri Angle Records.

Katie is also a producer, who worked on Serpentwithfeet’s Soil (2018), and she has produced and remixed for both Björk and Zola Jesus, with Björk saying in an interview that she was struck by how Gately’s productions seemed to be “from a microphone point of view”. She was also part of Mary Anne Hobbs' curated ‘Queens of the Underground’ Festival in Manchester (2019) alongside Houndstooth musician Aisha Devi and is currently living in Pasadena and teaching at Calarts and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.

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Katie Gately - Fawn/Brute (March 31, 2023)

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