Kee Avil announces new album Spine and tour dates
Shares album track “Felt” with video
Touring Europe in May with BIG|BRAVE and release show at the PHI Center in Montréal, May 30th
The follow up to Kee Avil’s acclaimed 2022 debut album Crease
Spine is out 03 May 2024 including Deluxe 180gram Vinyl Edition with extensive art prints
Montréal guitarist and producer Kee Avil returns with Spine, the follow up to her 2022 debut LP Crease, an intricately constructed, knife-edge take on avant-pop which garnered plaudits from outlets like The Wire, The Quietus, Mojo and Foxy Digitalis, picking up a Canadian Juno Award nomination and Bandcamp Album Of The Day and Albums Of The Year along the way.
Kee Avil’s music is both adventurous and intimate, intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant, and with her sophomore release Spine, she strips back her heavily textured compositions, opening up a much rawer sound. She calls it folk—and while traditionalists might scoff, this is urgent music that reflects the precarity of modern life, as well as the jarring mixture of electronic and real-world interactions that have become the fabric of our day-to-day experiences.
There’s a hypnotic post-punk somnambulance to Spine, using the repetition and fracturing of melodic phrases interwoven with delicate electronics to create curious and persistent hooks. While not a concept album, themes of time’s passage, remembrance, and decay crop up across multiple tracks. Each track intentionally only has four elements—guitar, electronics, and two other instruments, with Kee’s voice and guitar pushed to the front. Within this minimalist framework, the juxtaposition of beauty and discomfort that is key to the Kee Avil sound stands out in skin-prickling relief. “We’re shaped by many versions of ourselves,” says Avil. “I was looking back at these versions of myself and what could have been, what didn’t end up being and what did end up being, and going back like that through time. Seeing the future, the past.”
Spine was written in Kee Avil’s home studio after a lapse in writing while touring Crease and working on other projects. She is a well-known and respected member of the Montréal experimental scene, and formerly ran Concrete Sound Studio with Zach Scholes, who continues to work with her as a producer on Spine. Compared to the three years that went into making her debut, Spine emerged in a matter of months—a process that may also be a factor in its intensity and sharpness: “This record was much harder, like it was really discovering everything from scratch.” In her desire to not simply replicate or extend the sound of Crease, she felt she had to rip up the rule book, write in a different way, and pare back songs against her usual instincts.
Sometimes, when we work against our ingrained habits, we get to the core of who we really are. Spine is an exercise in that process. Without over-intellectualizing or being didactic, it hits immediately and emotionally, especially if you are a person who has spent much time in the process of self-examination. Kee’s voice hisses, whispers, and chants; her guitar bends and rings; electronics skitter and crackle; violin creaks like a door in the wind. There is something so evocative about the atmospheres she creates that it’s easy to overlay one’s own feelings onto her work, but to do that wholly would be to overlook one of the most important things about Spine: Kee Avil’s clear and thoughtful vision. This isn’t just the next step forward in her artistic trajectory; it’s a stunner of a record that stands on its own, a bracing and thrilling listen that has much to reveal about the contradictions inherent in being human.
— jj skolnik
I heard recently that crafting memories can feel like slowing time. For 2 years after Crease, I didn’t write music, words were just tip toeing in my brain. Spine had to happen fast, so I wouldn’t get frozen in time again.
Crease was controlled and synthetic. Spine is raw and bony. I wanted to write songs that I could sing on guitar, to combine the energy of folk music with dry, sharp electronics. These are songs for the past year, but they also contain all the years before,these various versions of myself. Seeking the common thread between these rejected ways of being. Not to erase, but maybe realign.
In my album notes, the idea of clutter reappears constantly, of feeling buried. These songs are minimal, written with 4 elements each, or less. I wanted to show their core, to strip off the excess, to dig myself out.
I wanted to condense time. I like seeing it pass, how dust finds each crevice to settle in. It feels like a cloudy massage that numbs my brain.The mold of the artwork is this beauty in decay. The imagery is raw, exposed, like the music feels -teasing, confessional, telling a secret about nothing. The album took one year to finish, this is a snapshot of that year being pulled apart into 40 minutes.
– Kee Avil
KEE AVIL LIVE • MAY 2024
05.03 Duisburg, DE Stapeltor *
05.04 Brussels, BE Les Nuits Botanique *
05.05 Paris, FR Le Point Ephémère *
05.06 Bern, CH Dachstock *
05.07 Schorndorf, DE Club Manufaktur *
05.08 Graz, AT Orpheum Extra *
05.09 Budapest, HU Durer Kert *
05.10 Vienna, AT Chelsea *
05.11 Krakow, PL Kamienna12 *
05.12 Warsaw, PL Hydrozagadka *
05.14 Berlin, DE Arkaoda #
05.15 Prague, CZ Meetfactory #
05.16 Hamburg, DE MS Stubnitz
05.17 Copenghagen, DK A Colossal Weekend
05.30 Montreal, QC Centre Phi
* w/BIG|BRAVE # w/Tellavision
Kee Avil Bio
Montréal producer Kee Avil combines guitar, voice, and electronic production to forge deconstructed songs informed by a distinctive amalgam of post-industrial, avant-pop, glitch, minimalist, and experimental folk sensibilities.
Harnessing a background in improvised music, Kee Avil’s self-titled EP (2018, Black Bough Records) introduced the project with a triptych of layered and fragmented vocal, segmented guitar, and electronic ooze, glued together by samples of screws dropped into crystal bowls.
Catching the ear of Montréal label Constellation, Kee Avil’s debut full-length album Crease was released on the imprint in 2022, garnering widespread critical accolades and a Juno Award nomination. The Quietus called Crease “a stunning debut, with a keen ear for experimentation, whose musical explorations are as intriguing as its emotional impact” and Mojo declared “the ferocity of her vision, coupled with unpredictable wafts of delicious melodic certainty, make Crease a compulsive journey through an aural dreamworld.” Crease was a Bandcamp Album Of The Day and among its Albums Of The Year: “Sounds hang together like organs in a body, tightly wound and uncomfortably amorphous, each instrument partially digested, every tension unplaceable…a debut of fiendish creativity filled with uniquely gentle terrors.”
Full of twitchy and finely wrought avant-pop songs, meticulously assembled to resemble disassembly, Crease expanded Kee Avil’s sonic and structural palette with intensive detail, revealing a compelling new voice in experimental songcraft, where touchstones include PJ Harvey, Eartheater, Shygirl, SOPHIE and Lucretia Dalt; where Juana Molina collabs with Coil, or Grouper melds with Autechre.
Kee Avil performed Crease extensively in solo and duo configurations, playing at Ruhrtriennale, Le Guess Who?, A L’Arme, UH Fest, Wine Nat White Heat, Guelph Jazz Festival, Vancouver Jazz Festival, Tone Festival, FME, and Pique, supporting SUUNS on a UK tour, and opening for artists such as Stephen O’Malley, Xiu Xiu, Kikagaku Moyo and Klô Pelgag. Live performances often included an accompanying visual component by video artist Myriam Bleau, whose visual album works for Crease were also featured in the film programming at Wavelength Festival and Supersonic Festival.
The Crease Remixed EP was released in 2023 featuring reworkings by claire rousay, Ami Dang, Pelada, and Cecile Believe. Kee Avil’s follow-up Spine will be released by Constellation in May 2024.