In early 2023 Kee Avil invited artists she admires to re-imagine tracks from her Juno Award-nominated debut album Crease (released 2022 via Constellation), the result is Crease Remixed. A selection of tracks as interpreted by Ami Dang, Pelada, Cecile Believe, and claire rousay.
About these remixes, Vicky Mettler (Kee Avil) comments: “I feel really lucky to be hearing my songs through the minds of these artists that I love, clashing minds for a second, peeking into some kind of alternate reality of what these songs could have been, are, where curiosity grows. They’ve brought the music to new places, and us along with it … grateful for the ride.”
Ami Dang adds, about the remix of “And I”: “I was really inspired by Kee Avil’s dynamic vocals on the brooding track ‘And I.’ I wanted to take her vocals and bring them to the forefront using various choppy delays and layering them on top of a more driving remix. I also worked with producer ZT Christensen to process the guitar parts through modular synthesizers — time stretching, pitch shifting and more.”
Crease was released to broad acclaim in March 2022: a masterful and unique debut full-length album of deconstructed electroacoustic post-punk songcraft, where touchstones range from Scott Walker and Coil to (early) PJ Harvey and (later) Fiona Apple, Eartheater to Pan Daijing; imagine Grouper produced by Matmos, or a freshly exhumed Björk / Throbbing Gristle collab.
Chiseled twitchy minimalist guitar, sinuous electronics, industrial and prepared-instrumentmicro-samples, furtive rhythmic propulsion, all galvanized by the anxious intimacy of finely wrought lyricism / vocals: Crease is one of those debut records that excites a wide range of peerless references precisely because it’s so compelling and convincing in its own idiosyncratic originality, vision, detail, and execution.
“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. I wrote 1 song a day until I had an album. These are songs for the past year, but I also wanted them to contain all the years before. I wanted to write songs that I could sing on guitar. Minimal songs, written with 4 elements each, or less. I wanted to show their core, strip off the excess. I wanted to condense time. The album took one year to finish, this is a snapshot of that year slowly being pulled apart into 40 minutes.” – Vicky Mettler / Kee Avil
Crease Remixed breathes fresh new life into an already great body of work by Kee Avil, and shows glimpses of a promising future. What you do think about her remixed LP?
