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CMU Approved
Approved: Katie Gately – Pivot
By Aly Barchi | Published on Wednesday 3 December 2014
LA-based pop scientist and creator of “scary, mechanical worlds” Katie Gately makes weird, tricky, extraterrestrial pop songs in a stylistic voice like no other, also working a paying day job as a sound designer on things like this vivid ‘Sensory Overload’ clip, part of a project titled ‘Interacting With Autism’. Still, if you must have a point of comparison, imagine the sound of scholarly avant-gardish artists like Julia Holter or Lydia Ainsworth, only pulled about like taffy and/or chopped up in an industrial car-crushing machine.
Gately released her ‘Pipes’ tape, as well as an eponymous EP, last year, and has since shared a FatCat-released split single with beat-maker Tlaotlon, donating to that a track titled ‘Pivot’, which at fourteen minutes plus is still a relatively neat in-road into her work.
Not that it’s really neat in any shape or form; more a maze of crashing tidal waves of noise, broken into blocks by mini filmic tableaus; chanting, squeaking, screaming, blaring, elephants wailing, whispering and even ‘real singing’. It’s probably one of the more extraordinary things I’ve heard all year.
Trip to an all-new animated clip featuring a shortish ‘Pivot’ extract here, or hear all of the song via Spotify:
