Debut LP Crease gathered consideration in esotericist circles and received Mettler collaborations with an emergent songwriting-producing elect together with Claire Rousay. While earlier choices have been likened to glitch-pop, Backbone stretches digital composition to the brink of sound design – a sinuous, hyper-produced opus which provides speedy compulsion in its use of not-quite-recognisable natural sounds and digi-horror components. Described by the artist as “uncooked and bony”, its presentation attracts deeply on the uncanny valley, pocked with motifs that veer in direction of the acquainted after which quickly again into obscurity.
Mettler’s profession as a sound engineer and line in experimental prepared guitar music equip her with the final word toolkit for designing Kee Avil’s horrible, visceral vignettes characterised by indecipherable manufacturing methods and crawling, repetitive lyrics. “Felt” introduces a sort of in-between tonality via a pedal observe that relentlessly shifts out and in of pitch. Mettler’s relentlessly uncanny supply recollects revolutionary vocalists like Regina Spektor and Marina Herlop, though the aggressive vocal fry and whining swoops in tracks like “the iris dry” and “do that once more” produce a texture that’s a little bit irritating at occasions. Repeating lyrics is a favoured and highly effective method that pulls on glitch-pop pioneers like Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz – in “do that once more”, phrases repeat incessantly and crumbling, as if transferring in direction of some sort of tragic defeat. However it’s the warped sampling and experimental manipulation that’s the hook right here – the moist inflections shuddering via ‘fading’, together with one thing very dry like a creaking door that catches up with itself after which slows down once more; elsewhere you catch the hideous, natural sounds of insect wings, of footsteps, of flames and lighters. Whipping between the corporeal and the manufactured, “Gelatin” begins with a sort of monster roar, which turns right into a airplane engine, then dissolving into these gasmask hoarse vocals layered in bizarre, pitchy intervals with moments of reassuring vocal homophony which can be simply as rapidly dismantled. “Croak”, too, is very natural and physiological in its darkness, recalling the post-Hereditary wave of body-horror filmmaking.
Backbone is straightforwardly experimental in its deconstruction of rhythm and tonality; its genius ploy is to stay accessible by incorporating these blistering but interesting sound design components. It affirms Kee Avil’s standing of an aesthetics and manufacturing virtuoso akin to Jlin or SOPHIE – producing a dripping, cavernous model of glitch slammed with manipulations. All the identical, when the darkish storytelling and physique horror aesthetic wears off, you’re left with the sensation that one thing’s lacking. Amongst flashes of tragic communication – like the place repetitive phrases construct out a home nightmare in “at his arms” – after forty minutes, what stays is type slightly than substance.
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