KATIE GATELY - Loom

My mother's voice is on this record, her photo in the liner notes

This album is for her

The loom is the figurative instrument with which Katie Gately returns to the scene, giving shape to her intricate weave of personal emotions. An album arriving four years after the strictly modern creative splendor of "Color", her electronically dynamic debut, brimming with filtered voices and rhythmic dislocations of Björk-esque stock. A highly decorated beginning that put her on the radar of the circles that matter in the world of electronic music, particularly in Europe. It's no coincidence, in fact, that this experimental musician - born in Brooklyn and raised in California, now based in Los Angeles, where she teaches Experimental Animation at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) - landed on the venerable Houndstooth, the label run by London's Fabric.

"Loom" is first and foremost an intimate, private album. A majestic and complex work, dedicated to her mother, who passed away in 2018. Originally conceived in an entirely different form, the record took an abrupt turn once news came of her mother's diagnosis of a rare form of cancer.

Having rushed back to the family home in Brooklyn, the young musician decided to rebuild everything starting from the ten minutes of "Bracer", her mother's favorite track. A rhythmically hypnotic suite, marked by sudden booms and powerful timbres, complete with filtered sax, piano evoking an 18th-century cabaret, and blood-red electronic blasts in the vein of Nine Inch Nails, placed at the end to seal her grief, along with a mournful melody that rises softly to the surface, revealing the inner demons gripping Gately. A liturgy that repeats itself in the almost twin track "Valzer", laying bare an immense pain that only dissolves in the liberating final prayer.

On the instrumental side, meanwhile, "Loom" shows the marks of newfound maturity and considerably greater experience, gained over the past five years thanks to a clear affinity for machines - see her remixes for Björk and Zola Jesus, and above all her co-production work on "Soil" for serpentwithfeet. The lyrics constantly underscore unease, pain and perdition, never giving up a certain vague abstraction.

Scattered thoughts that unfold ever so slowly, from one moment to the next. "Tower" touches on medicine, "Allay" on cancer. "Flow", meanwhile, is a letter written to her beloved mother. The first sign of this renewal, however, comes through the voice, slightly more prominent in the architecture of the sound, at times layered like a choir of angels gripped by cosmic sorrow ("Tower").

The instrumental backdrop is likewise rich in natural sounds: bottles shaken and shattered, coffins opening, shovels digging into earth, grinding stones, the howling of wolves, fax machines and other office equipment. But the most intense, layering sound is that of earthquakes, a vibration that for Katie Gately represents the state of mind that followed the grief of losing her mother, whose presence also echoes in audio captured from footage of her parents' wedding. The American artist's neoclassicism thus takes on noir shades and signals a profound sense of emotion.

The riot of glitch-pop and art-pop colors found in the intriguing collage of "Color" is firmly set aside here. In the opening "Ritual", for instance, spectral yet angelic voices build an alien substratum suspended in a limbo of ghosts and the grayest of clouds. "Allay" then brings forth a deeply alienated mantra that evolves into an increasingly complex litany, caught between the sacred and the goth.

In short, "Loom" is an album that alternates theatricality and gloom, various kinds of upheaval, and enveloping synths used like medieval organs. Like the all-consuming, free-falling one of "Flow", or the martial, near-metronomic one of the album's first lead single, the Andersson-esque "Waltz". A richly colored record, notwithstanding its immense sense of tragedy. Worth noting, too, is the goth-folk singing that cyclically intertwines with other voices and melodies from other eras. The American musician's shamanic voice invites the listener to settle into a world full of ghosts and piercing pain. A sonic microcosm bristling with jagged guitars and menacing ups and downs, whip-crack sounds alternating with the chime of little bells, while obsessive vocal textures intoxicate the room.

Essentially, listening to "Loom" is a bit like lingering in a dark, damp cave, only to suddenly be overwhelmed by a deafening thud, which repeats amid dissonance, counterpoint and drumbeats that reverberate in unison, all around. Within its folds lie the monochrome mood of Laurie Anderson and the synthetic warmth of Vangelis.

Closing the doors on this lysergic mantra is the liberating, at times magical, movement of the majestic "Rest". Almost a prayer of organs and layered voices, with synths evoking the toll of a Tibetan bell. Pain has never sounded so epic, or so unsettling.

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01/02/2020