AEM069 KASHKA

Here at Ampeater, we’re not ashamed to say that we love Canada. The bustling Toronto scene has been a nev­erend­ing source of mar­velous music for us to present tri­umphantly to the open-eared pub­lic: Evening Hymns, PS I Love You, The D’Urbervilles, and now Kat Burns, aka KASHKA.  Burns’ gor­geous voice and sharp song­writ­ing skills (you try and slip the word “den­drophil­iac” into a song with­out sound­ing like a jerk) help make the won­der­ful For­est City Lovers what they are, but occa­sion­ally, pro­lific as she is, she churns out some songs that don’t quite fit into the FCL tem­plate, and so she’s taken on the KASHKA alter-ego to begin releas­ing those songs, which swap the Lovers’ sunny sum­mer acoustics for a sub­dued, win­try elec­tronic sound, prob­a­bly more appro­pri­ate for Toronto.

Burns describes KASHKA as “the out­let that many of my songs drift into when they feel like they may float away oth­er­wise,” and you will instantly under­stand what she means.  Rather than the roots and leaves of FCL, KASHKA songs sound like street­lights refracted through ici­cles. They are win­ter­time com­po­si­tions (both were lit­er­ally writ­ten dur­ing the dark­est evenings of win­ter), son­i­cally filled out with chim­ing key­boards, tin­kling bells, large spaces, and Burns’ lovely, pure voice, which, aside from car­ry­ing the melodies, func­tions as pretty much the best syn­the­sizer ever, whether she’s cre­at­ing warm cho­ruses of chordal oohs, fuzzy lead lines between verses, or serenely float­ing con­tra­pun­tal melodies à la a string sec­tion.  The thing that car­ries over from the Lovers is Burns sense of pre­cise and taste­ful sim­plic­ity.  She knows in either case that her voice and knack for melody will carry the song, and intel­li­gently refrains from throw­ing any kind of half-baked, overly adorned arrange­ments into the mix.  Her vocals are mixed to the front, so that they may lift the weight of the song, but they are not pushed as far for­ward as is com­mon to most electro-pop and they don’t share the ridicu­lously melis­matic neo-soul that tends to make you feel like some­one spliced some vocals in from a recent Amer­i­can Idol audi­tion.  In fact, it’s easy not to notice how won­der­fully skill­ful a singer she is until you start real­iz­ing how many of the sounds that fill out the airy space of these songs are not key­boards but rather her voice.

Mak­ing electro-pop (mak­ing good electro-pop, rather) has a cou­ple of inher­ent chal­lenges, both of which KASHKA rises to effort­lessly.  First, for your voice to slot nicely among all the pris­tine synth swells and gen­tle blips, it has to be as on pitch and tightly con­trolled as your SK-1. As you can hear in pretty much any moment of her Ampeater sin­gle, this is not a prob­lem for Burns, whose voice is as agile as it is pretty, and some­how never cloy­ing or tir­ing in the way of so many singers gifted with excep­tional vocal cords (this qual­ity prob­a­bly owes a lot to her afore­men­tioned intel­li­gent restraint).  The sec­ond major chal­lenge is that when you’re cre­at­ing a music that essen­tially exists only in dig­i­tal space, and never as a full set of live sounds in a room, it’s really easy to suc­cumb to the temp­ta­tion to layer the hell out of it (I know this because I pretty much always do so, no mat­ter how pure my inten­tions are when I set out).  This is true of all record­ing done mostly by over­dubs, but I think it’s a spe­cial dif­fi­culty with elec­tronic music, which has no acoustic corol­lary, and in which it is easy to get excited about dif­fer­ent synth sounds and just turn every­thing into consonant-sounding mud, which is one of my least favorite sounds (it is a term that is also applic­a­ble to jam bands).  KASHKA never has this prob­lem.  Her music, with its softly muted beats and warm clouds of voices, is per­fectly refined and allur­ing.  There’s not a hair out of place, and there are no screams for your atten­tion, and this is pre­cisely why it holds your ears so easily.

Despite the refine­ment and unflashi­ness I’ve been harp­ing on, KASHKA doesn’t come across as sparse or stark because those words imply a kind of spir­i­tual dark­ness that just isn’t there.  Though the songs are win­try, they are full of the warmth of hud­dling up by the fire after a long walk in the snowy evening, full of hope in the face of adver­sity.  The first lyric on A-side “Hands In” is, in fact, “put your hands in my heart tonight / just warm them there,” which is all about love as a balm for cold weather, cold weather being of course a short­hand for the larger cru­el­ties of the world.  The song begins with a quick but relaxed three note key­board pat­tern that man­ages to pro­vide the entire har­mony of the verse with­out ever play­ing a sin­gle chord.  The har­mony is so sim­ple that we don’t need any more for our ears to under­stand exactly where we are, and what’s bril­liant about it is that we barely get any more:  another, far qui­eter, single-note line, some muted per­cus­sion.  Even­tu­ally some single-note gui­tar appears, along with some dis­tant jan­gling bells, a light key­board melody, and some tom fills that always seem to sig­nal the arrival of huge­ness, yet which always lead to noth­ing, not even a crash on the down­beat.  All these ele­ments slowly and grad­u­ally coa­lesce to cre­ate the filled out song, and just at the moment when you hear this, it slips away, leav­ing only the echo of the bells (which are bril­liantly buried in the mix so that you may not have even noticed them until this pre­cise moment).  The only response is to lis­ten to it again.

“Lonely Crea­tures” begins with an absence as well, with­hold­ing all the low end through the first verse to achieve that unteth­ered, airy sound before even­tu­ally cul­mi­nat­ing in the busiest, thick­est sound on the whole sin­gle, which is of course still rather del­i­cate. My absolute favorite moment in the song only comes once (of course), and it’s right at 2:15, in the mid­dle of the cho­rus, where Burns comes in with an ethe­real ooh which is bro­ken up into six­teenth notes in a way that echoes the rolling beats of the cho­rus and calls to mind images of rip­pling water.  But it’s hard to even pick a favorite moment in “Lonely Crea­tures.” All of the back­ground vocal work is unbe­liev­ably beau­ti­ful, and so is the third rep­e­ti­tion of the cho­rus line, when it slides up with the ease of warm breath ris­ing into cold air.  The call for all the lonely city-dwellers to come together and cre­ate a spark of heat together is a per­fect call-to-arms for some­one con­cerned pri­mar­ily with spread­ing love and warmth, and though it makes for a stark con­trast with the “icy breasts of morn­ing” and cat­a­logues of inhi­bi­tions in the lyrics, what stays with you after lis­ten­ing is not the icy expanse of the back­ing track but the human­ity and warmth of Burns’ voice, remind­ing us that, when faced with the harsh win­ters of the world, our great­est asset is the heat radi­at­ing from our bod­ies and the love radi­at­ing from our hearts.

P.S. If you were won­der­ing how “Lonely Crea­tures” would sound if you acci­den­tally played Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Atmos­pheres” over it, the answer is REALLY, REALLY AWESOME.

Gabe Birn­baum

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