Tracklisting: 01 Seed 02 Howl 03 Fawn 04 Cleave 05 Peeve 06 Scale 07 Meat 08 Brute 09 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. When I got pregnant, 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. 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 Gatelys 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”. Katie is also an in-demand producer, who worked on Serpentwithfeet’s LP, Soil, and has produced and remixed for both Björk and Zola Jesus, with Björk. Katie was also part of Mary Anne Hobbs curated ‘Queens of the Underground’ Festival in Manchester alongside Houndstooth artist Aisha Devi and is currently teaching at Calarts and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts.
