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Katie Gately
At first glance, Katie Gately has a hell of a lot in common with Holly Herndon: both are CA-based and use the voice as their primary instrument and both debuted to international acclaim while still attending college.  The similarities end there, however, as Gately's latest work displays a strong pop sensibility and talent for hooks that was not especially apparent on her significantly more unhinged and abstract cassette from earlier in the year (Pipes).  While I still do not think her aesthetic is fully developed, her combination of heavily grinding and crunching field recordings and lush vocal loops is nevertheless quite promising and unusual.
Gately's debut cassette proudly proclaimed that "no instruments were used in the making of this recording" and her stance on that seems to have only softened slightly in the ensuing months.  For the most part, this EP is built from complexly collaged machine noises coupled with Gately's own fairly simple and unadorned vocals.  Initially, I thought Katie resembled some kind of post-industrial Julianna Barwick, but ultimately decided that was inaccurate for a very fundamental reason: Katie does not use her voice to create any kind of multi-layered, reverb-heavy, ethereal dreamscape.  Instead, she generally keeps her central vocal melodies straightforward and relatively unprocessed, which befits her quasi-hymnlike songs wonderfully.  That said, she is also quite prone to sudden artificial pitch-shifts, which keeps things nicely unpredictable and disorienting.
Given that this is only a six-song EP, there are not many fully formed songs, but the ones that do exist are almost all quite good.  "Last Day" is the closest thing to a single, sounding like a simple, pretty folk song bolstered by crunching, stomping, and scraping field recordings and a cool looped vocal hook.  That formula is reprised a bit with the even better "Dead Referee," but Gately balances its slinkier, breathier tendencies with an impressive cacophony of violently chopped and distorted vocal snippets.  I was also quite fond of the heavily pulsing "Stings," which unexpectedly gives way to a rather beautiful and warm coda.
The remaining pieces are a mixed bag, but generally a very likable one.  The opening "Ice" eschews recognizable vocals completely, but coheres into an appealingly lurching and buzzing industrial soundscape.  The brief "Left Half," on the other hand, eschews Katie's sound collage tendencies for a bit of dreamy This Mortal Coil-esque atmosphere (think "Dreams Are Like Water").  Only the closing "Stems" could be considered a bit of a misstep (albeit an adventurous one), as Katie multi-tracks and processes her vocals to a disorienting, artificial degree before plunging into heavy, grinding noise.  The ideas themselves are not bad, but their execution lacks the deft touch of the other pieces.
If this EP has another flaw, it is merely that the songs are not universally memorable enough to elevate this from a very good release to a stunning one.  While a couple of pieces are definitely hooky enough to rattle around my head long after the album is finished, these are generally more "soundscapes that sound like songs" than "songs that sound like soundscapes."  Also, I think this release would have been significantly more attention-grabbing and powerful if its harsher, more "musique concrète" elements were not quite as smoothed over.  That said, Gately's aesthetic is still quite a striking, inventive, and unique one and she tends to execute it quite skillfully.  Having original ideas and a strong intuitive grasp of dynamics and space is definitely the hard part: all the rest is just tweaking the formula.  Given the radical evolution already displayed since Pipes, I suspect that Katie's next release will probably eclipse this one handily, but this is certainly an impressively strong and promising effort in its own right.  Gately deserves far more attention than she has been getting.
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