by Maria Bobbitt-Chertock (@mariab4christ)
Katie Dey’s fourth album, mydata, is an electro-pop ode to virtuality. Throughout her five-year career, Katie’s material self has been in love and in contest with her virtual self – her data – which is at times sinister, at times sublime. Mydata depicts the Internet as a machine that reproduces alienation and as one that (romantically, gratefully) transforms otherwise daunting interpersonal space.
Like Katie’s previous projects, mydata uses electronics to create a genre all her own. Her instantly recognizable sonic palate neither reaches for a “future” sound nor imitates analog instruments, but rather elevates a familiar and lean Garageband aesthetic. Her arrangements are glitchy and orchestral, like theatre for the laptop age. Dry strings hum over understated ballad drum kits and lo-fi, pixilated harmonies (pun intended). Katie is not interested in creating a consistent spatiality with reverb or other effects; instead, each of her tracks highlights its own cybernation by wavering in and out of its stratified, uncanny mix.
The album’s opening track, “Darkness,” pines for the void, which is also infinity, and potentially online. Katie sings, “I wanna be a smartphone with the / face detection fingerprint scanner.” Then, “If I could just reflect all of your self-destruction and complacence – / I wanna be a black hole I can / pull apart electrons, oh.” Her music longs to echo the world’s shame as deeply as it longs to destroy it. It wants to be a screen turned on and off and on and off again. Meanwhile Katie’s double tracked vocals warble and reflect off each other, never quite settling into straight-toned pitch.
“Hurting” addresses chronic pain, the desire to transcend the body, and the desire to learn from it. Can you learn from pain even as you’re compelled to discipline your body against it? Can you resent pain without resenting yourself? How can you, in an ableist world, avoid isolating yourself in it? Katie told the FADER last year that due partly to her disability, she doesn’t go outside much, so a lot of her socializing happens online. This informs her lyrics. Her frustrations with her body compel her to reach for a disembodied intimacy – an intimacy that might be reached through cybernetics, through screens and data that compress the space between physical bodies.
This virtual intimacy doesn’t just come from an apt text, either. Like all great lyricists, Katie knows well the limitations of language. I’m inclined to say this is informed by her lived experience with chronic pain, as Elaine Scarry famously writes that pain “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” Accordingly, the music of mydata obscures its own words with glitches and noise and filters. Then there’s the almost indecipherable refrain of “Word” – “Where we’ll go / there’s no word for it” – and of course, the lyrics to “Loving” – simply, “aaaaaaaa.”
The stunning, six-minute “Bearing” is the album’s centerpiece, floating from echoing synth to crunchy bass to solo piano to a tornado of ghostly vocal samples. It celebrates finding love through Chrome windows, usernames, and WAV files, and proving oneself, in song and in community, to be more than corporeal. It’s the best example of mydata’s modus operandi: warming up the cyber-soup feeling, that unnameable love for strangers on the tl, that love that dissolves the body’s boundaries.