KEE AVIL JOINS CONSTELLATION
SHARES NEW TRACK & VIDEO “SEE, MY SHADOW”
Constellation is honoured to welcome Montréal producer Kee Avil to the label. Her hybrid songcraft of postpunk, electroacoustic and electronics gets inside our heads and under our skins in the best way. She’s celebrating by sharing a song and video today. Details of her first and phenomenal full-length album to follow in early 2022.
“See, my shadow” is a kinetic assemblage of tension and release with chiselled guitar lines, plucked and pounding prepared piano, scraping metal, electroacoustic micro-samples and alternating blasts of crisp drum programming, all galvanised by Kee Avil’s intimate, inscrutable, insistent vocal.
RIYL: Scott Walker, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, Juana Molina, Bjork, Matmos, Rashad Becker, Eartheater, Autechre, The Books, Pan Daijing
| About the song: “A shadow’s moment, distorted. Warped piano samples, chipped ceramic cups, swirling metal, feedback assembled. I used to think this was a love song. Constructed from a demo, never finished, originally recorded for the Kee Avil EP. See, my shadow is one of my most produced songs – a large part of the work was to strip it down and find the right balance between chaos and density vs stability and drive. It will be the first song on a new album. Writing this I find myself trying to find a reason why I would ‘stand here blind, deaf and mute’ – ultimately the words are there for their rhythm, imagery and texture. The text for the ending was written in one moment, intense but fleeting, later adapted. The meaning of the song changes all the time – fittingly, it’s as though this moment has been passed on to my shadow.” |
| About the video: “To reveal what I’ve hid, what is recognised, ignored, what is real. Blank, misdrawn, rebuilt, the creature as the i. With masks, I break and reconstruct these ideas, mix the familiar with the abstract.” – Kee Avil – |
| About Kee Avil: Led by Montréal producer Vicky Mettler, Kee Avil combines guitar, voice, electroacoustics and electronic production to create song assemblages that teeter on the edge of collapse while oozing forward, like sticky resin picking up and shedding disparate elements along the way. Kee Avil evolved from playing guitar with broken cymbals and drumsticks to forging askew tempos and templates glued together by samples of screws dropped into crystal bowls. Her self-titled debut EP, released in 2018 on Black Bough Records, harnessed her improvised music and prepared guitar background toward a newfound structural sensibility and arresting vocal / lyrical experimentation; she has been immersed in the exploration of distinctive compositional architectures ever since, expanding her sonic palette with increasing and intensive detail, where twitchy, finely wrought postpunk electro-industrial avant-pop songs are meticulously assembled to resemble disassembly. Honed through pre-pandemic tours in North America and Europe (sharing stages with Marc Ribot, Pere Ubu, Bill Orcutt and Fly Pan Am, among others), Kee Avil’s emerging body of work signals a vital, viscous, virtuosic new voice in experimental songcraft – where touchstones include Juana Molina, Scott Walker, Fiona Apple, and Eartheater; where PJ Harvey meets Pan Daijing or Grouper melds with Autechre. Kee Avil will be presenting a new and definitive collection of studio recordings in early 2022. Vicky Mettler has been a burgeoning force in Montréal’s experimental music community. Under her own name, Mettler has played guitar in a variety of avant, noise and improv combos—including the most recent iteration of Sam Shalabi’s acclaimed Land Of Kush—and co-founded Concrete Sound Studio, a recording studio and multidisciplinary production space in Montreal, where she also curates and produces the online concert series Live in Concrete. |