- Across twelve releases, Public Information has steadily gained a reputation for unearthing avant-garde talent, with a roster that includes Acteurs, Love Cult and IVVVO. Katie Gately's self-titled debut is the sound of deconstruction, its songs hinting at pop only to take delight in crumbling from within. Countless timbres and textures jostle within her tracks, either crammed together in a sonic maelstrom, or separated by what feel like blasts of chilled air.
Take the yawning spaces of "Ice," pierced with grinds and blips that sound like they've been coaxed from an ancient computer. Or the expanse of "Dead Referee," across which dry gun shots ring and are joined by Gately's silken vocals. As she abstracts her voice into unrecognisable peaks and troughs, and the digital noise becomes an increasingly thick blanket, you begin to lose sight of the line dividing Gately from her racket. She lays her vocal on the butcher's block on "Last Day," hacking and looping it into wordless and worded chunks. Like glossolalia, it takes on the polymorphous qualities of a foreign language with traces of your own tongue just about discernible. "Stems" could be Julianna Barwick remixed by Demdike Stare, the introduction teasing at folk-pop before descending into a mulch of disorientation and decay.
An obvious parallel is Holly Herndon, but where her work is more refined and restrained, and borrows more heavily from techno, Gately's bleeds all over the place, in keeping with her industrial influences. They may nod to pop, but her songs are less linear; instead, they swill around with their own curious internal logic, pointing to a preoccupation with sound itself.
Tracklist 01. Ice
02. Last Day
03. Stings
04. Dead Referee
05. Left Half
06. Stems