by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
Is RVNG Intl trying to position itself as a sort of downtown music continuum label? When I last wrote for Post-Trash, I was headed to the library for a crucial Kyle Gann book on his late 20th century writings on New York downtown composer music. Music Downtown remains an essential read, more important than ever. Firstly, the current lack of regional or local coverage that’s festered into a want for greater apathy/hate at your local blogs is refuted brilliantly in his situated arguments, reviews, interviews, and aesthetic dialogues of the region and moment he found himself in; you don’t want hatred, you want distinct voices that have a perspective and call the bluffs and clocks the present moment. Secondly, a “downtown” music, or an opposition to institutional music writ large, does exist albeit perhaps in a way we cannot quite pinpoint to a dominion in the 21st century. Yet in this century, composer music has been weaving its way across upper tier indie musics (turn to the New British Underground) as much as private press ambient and tape labels. Take one minor gander, it’s all around us.
Although what does it mean to record composer music “in opposition”? I have started to think RVNG Intl has been playing a long, aesthetic-oriented game to move themselves into a composer label. You could not say this around 2018 or 2019 (an eternity ago in blog years), but in the past few years I could point to Freedom to Spend and Commend and find both electroacoustic works and Cage-oriented “chance” compilations. Holly Hendron, Lucrecia Dalt, Horse Lords, and now M. Sage are all scholarly artists working outside of institutions, making deep music for deep heads that actively forgo the rigidity of institutional music; they are quirky!
M. Sage, like today’s artist of focus, Kate NV, is an alum of Orange Milk. Orange Milk has long been a label that (alongside Hausu Mountain) is rarely credited for curating compositional talent and high benchmarks that should be on contemporary composer labels like ECM, but are instead left solely to the ferric; if there was an opposition, Orange Milk was the downtown of the 2010s. When Orange Milk reissued crucial, but underheard Noah Creshvesky works from the 20th century, it was a real culminating moment in the label’s “hyperrealist” (see also “goo core”) compositional aesthetic; something that definitely has been here for almost a decade, but oftentimes has rarely wiggled its way into larger works happening on other labels.
Katya Shilonosova (aka Kate NV) has been on to something for a few years now. She might just possibly be functioning as a modern ancillary to 80s Laurie Anderson; a composer who understands abstraction within the pop vocabulary. I was late to the whole shebang, only arriving in 2020 with Room for the Moon. So, I spent years working backwards to her Orange Milk tape and her first RVNG album—both conveniently released on cassette in varied capacities and contexts. The former, Binarsu burst with pop nuggets that flourished from Russo-Japanese contexts outside of what was the norm in 2016. The follow up, для FOR, did considerable legwork revealing NV’s capacity for free-spirited synthesizer road maps; it tunneled and tore through a whole other sound outside her pop songs and punky spirit, recalling Sandro Perri’s puzzle boxes more than any other contemporary. Taken together, and both present Kate NV as a unique pop maverick, one foot in bedroom pop composition and another tied to Stockhausen noisenik.
NV’s made it known in interviews that she is an eclectic polyglot when it comes to music. Room for the Moon was arguably the first time this really focused into view, a melting of synthesizer funk and private press grooves that tilted between American indie and Japanese city pop. It was enticing pastiche, a presentation from outside of western online circles that did not slot neatly and nudged its listeners for a contextual understanding of Japanese and Russian culture as her previous releases had done so. NV’s greatest achievement on the album was the mending languages–one song is English here, another in French there, amongst a litany of Russian. Language was crucial to the LP because it was utilized in a way that shifted with the sonic it landed in. It was a suggestion, a pathway to what was happening in the sonic mise en scene. It abstracted itself until it really did not matter where you came from, just where you were headed.
WOW capitalizes on the last three Kate NV releases and the past six years of her catalog. Recorded between 2016-2022, WOW collects a series of cutaways and cast-offs that never have openly found their way to a proper Kate NV release. Fragments that have haunted the hard drive and come to reveal themselves years later; truly, they still emitted a deep emotive resonance. It does not come as a surprise. NV’s often been known to premiere a track years before its release, waiting for the right moment to distill it to a studio recording. However, in uniting these fragments from the past six years into this album, NV makes a deft display of her compositional capacity that has laid dormant for far too long.
Sonically, this collection’s warped temporality gives it a novel glisten. Unstuck from the immediate present, but also barely ever looking back or in such a way that feels immediately dateable; it serves a similar purpose that Grouper’s Ruins provided her catalog in fall 2021. For NV, it both offers new accompaniment to her previous releases, while also still tapping her into a novel amalgamation of her sound. That is to say this is the biggest platforming of the 2020s era of Orange Milk goo core noise aesthetics this side of… Lil B.
For what it is worth, this is still a Kate NV album, albeit one playing looser than previously assumed. Future funk deconstructed (“confessions at the dinner table”, “early bird”). Chirpy synth-pop fit for a PS1 platformer that you ejected the disc from but the RAM keeps stumbling with stubbornness (“oni (they)”, “meow”). Open zone ambience (“asleep”, “flu”). The biggest leap is in a couple of almost-club bangers (“mi (we)”, “razmishlenie (thinking)”), cuts that take nods to other hyperrealist Foodman and his adventures in dexterous footwork listening environments. Gripping ideas that shift out of your hand and beckon you to revel with it.
Synths ranging from a Prophet, Sequential OB-6, Alpha Juno-2, and Novation Ultranova all make appearances alongside her signature usage of the broken orchestra samples and punchy drums that seamlessly travel from one cut after another. Every idea here has been on a Kate NV release, albeit now glitchier and further processed outside of the meatspace that her previous three at least alluded to. The radiance of this sonic palette and the madcapper glee of these melodies simply does not exist in the real world, only here as a broken, thrilling transmission taken as a seamless package. A sense of personhood that Room for the Moon spoke to is cloyed and reveling above language here on WOW
NV’s greatest asset to this has been her crafty bedroom production and mixing techniques. Here it operates at a career peak in how it functions less for immediate pop bliss of previous releases. Beats on WOW are routinized, layered in ways that topple on each other into a legitimate constructivist effect. Truly, the result of someone with self-diagnosed ADHD searching for the perfect POP sound that piques the ear. Exponentially though, this tinkering enacts over-abundant rewards; bright sounds that flood yet never over encumber the hi-fi. The effect, bolstered by the immense chopping and screwing of her voice (amongst others) into mere syllables, is rather apparent across the album.
WOW’s sonic palette is a major evolution in NV’s usage of her voice as a multivariate instrument: yes, it can sing, but it’s often been warped into beats or stripped of immediate personage. Few have worked in this way in recent memory. Another composer, ka baird, has done exceptional heroics with her voice, turning it into cryptids or drones that evoke generational trauma and historical blights, while occasionally stipulating a “game” quality to it at times. Kate NV’s vocal games don’t reach for that same effect though. It functions in the surrealist spaces of these many tracks akin to Keith Rankin’s eyeballs and eerie spectacles. Just now akin to an-almost percussive or a glitchy quip, it’s less a narration than an unreliable stream of consciousness… a translation that still comes through and conveys a manic malaise that her other releases shied away from. Even if NV has championed her music as a remedy to feel “light, warm and happy again,” no longer are there punchdrunk crushes or dreaming of plans in happy places. There’s just flu, meows, and dont’s that honk and squeal like a daily scroll. A curious mind retaliating against morbid humor.
The album’s shocking lack of immediate language purposely pushes a move towards considering NV’s collection as a giant (happy) accidental compositional piece. Most songs do have the wherewithal to start at point A and travel to point B without losing their rhythmic melodies or foregoing into an entirely different planet. Yet, NV’s sonics are flush with haptics that recall the advancements in emo-ambient, psychedelic sudden BPM switches akin to Chiastic Slide, and a genuine awe at finding a connection outside of language… just the repetitions and haptics. To lose yourself in WOW over the forty minutes becomes its own journey, one that seems to startle the body towards those preconscious focuses on the details around yourself.
To take us back to the start, WOW is hyperrealist music. The kind that can diagnose a modern strife without having to consciously expose it. Such a piece that seeks to invite you in with a startling glee, while defiantly opposing both a terminal boredom of pop and a rigidity of contemporary composition. Quite frankly, I won’t be able to get the melodies out of my head before seeing her at Big Ears.