MUSIC FEATURE
musician all her life and working as a sound artist for a decade, Kate was told she was suffering from hearing loss. Kate, who prefers to discuss her condition as a change in hearing, says her current compositions are a good fit for Sisters with Transistors, a film about women embracing liberating technologies. Nelly Kate continues to After all, she says, she’s turned to electronic create despite ongoing music as “a means for exploring inaudible sounds, hearing loss vibrations [and] visualization of sonic phenomena, to earnestly attempt to create more accessible installations of sound and video work BY PAT MORAN In “I Can Hear You But I Can’t Hear You,” for differently-abled audiences.” electronic composer Nelly Kate’s collaborative installation with artist Madelaine Corbin, the pair A lifetime of music challenges our relationship with vibrations all Interested in music for as long around us, some of which we translate as “sound.” as she can remember, Kate started For the exhibit, launched in February, Kate created playing piano in Portsmouth, Virginia, a geometric notation for sounds and spelled out the where she studied as a toddler under installation’s titular phrase with those shapes. Then the Suzuki method, a discipline that she deliberately and randomly fucked it all up. creates an environment for learning “Every single time [before] I ran a print through music that parallels the linguistic a blueprint machine, I would shake those shapes in environment of learning language. this pouch I’d made, and it would discombobulate After moving with her family to [the text], so that each print had a different array Charlotte at age 5, Kate continued her of the very same text,” Kate says. Blueprints of lessons with a teacher who insisted these discombobulated phrases surrounded a that Kate learn to sight-read music. chair created by the two women. “[The chair] had Kate rebelled. She quit lessons but speakers built into it and it would vibrate. We were continued to play piano and also trying to make it so that when you moved your body, picked up guitar. it would trigger these vibrations.” Then she acquired an old Casio This way, Kate and Corbin repurposed vibrations keyboard. It marked a big shift for the into healing. budding musician. Kate will marshal many of the same strategies for “I realized there were these an electronic music set she’ll play before a screening … sounds that I had always been of the documentary Sisters with Transistors scheduled interested in, and never knew how for Jan. 5 at the Mint Museum Uptown. Filmmaker Lisa to create,” she says. “[The Casio] unlocked a whole Rovner’s critically lauded film spotlights the unsung new dimension for me where experimentation and women pioneers of electronic music, composers who electronic music could be textural.” embraced the machines and technologies that have After attending Myers Park High School for transformed music and how we listen to it today. two years and finishing her remaining two years Kate’s work draws on her experiences to build on in home-schooling, Kate attended James Madison the work of these pioneers and further expand our University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, from 2002 to perception of vibration and sound. 2006, where she studied English, creative writing It’s a far cry from the music Kate created earlier and kinesiology. in her career. “Lost/Stolen” off her 2012 full-length In 2007, she was approached by William Tate, album Ish Ish relies on moody beat poetry delivered founder of Umbau, a self-styled guerrilla studio and by Kate’s powerful layered vocals. “Judging radical architecture and design school in Staunton, Diamonds,” from the 2015 demo Woodshedding, Virginia. Kate characterizes the institution as a dives deeper into Kate’s ethereal vocals. It plays like cross between German art school Bauhaus and a soundtrack for a mist-shrouded forest of bare black international entrepreneur school Kaospilot. She trees. thrived at the school, which fosters thinking that Kate will never make music like this again, even embraces uncertainty. She learned graphic design, if she wanted to. She can’t. In 2015, after being a then began working as a designer.
Pg. 10 DEC 29 - JAN 11, 2022 - QCNERVE.COM
SOUND OF METTLE
“[Umbau was] where I started to feel an unlocking of myself as an artist,” Kate says. After leaving Umbau, she embarked on a music career, playing with Richmond, Virginia, band Warren Hixson, which Kate describes as experimental surf rock. She also worked on solo compositions and recordings. By 2015, Kate felt she was at a stable plateau in her career. She had crowdfunded Ish Ish, following that up by launching a solo art show structured around acoustic sounds. The show, titled Low
NELLY KATE PERFORMS LIVE. PHOTO BY ABBEY LEE SARVER
Frequency Travel Agency and hosted by Richmond’s Black Iris Gallery, featured suitcases containing speakers. Patrons checked out the suitcases, then took a tour of the city. The cases came equipped with a map, and when you arrived at certain points on the map and pushed a button on the case, the suitcase would play back pieces of music that had been written using sounds from that site. As a singer-songwriter, Kate shared stages with bands and performers like Marah, Angel Olsen, The Blow, Soil & the Sun and more. In 2015, she received funding from a record label to record the demos collected on Woodshedding. “I felt I was in a good place where my desire to work as a musician and the support I was seeing from my [musical] community were meeting in this sweet union,” Kate remembers. Then, at a studio session, recording backup
vocals with Warren Hixson, Kate noticed she was singing out of tune. “All the work I had made up until that point was almost entirely vocal,” Kate says. “[It] leaned heavily on harmonies, and all of the sudden, something had changed in my way of hearing myself.” Kate subsequently went on tour with her friend, performing artist Leslie Rogers. Kate performed some of her songs and ran live sound for Rogers’s show. Early in the tour, Rogers noticed that Kate’s hearing had changed, and encouraged her to get her hearing checked. When Kate returned from tour, she visited an audiologist and learned that she was experiencing hearing loss. Kate says the condition is getting worse, and no one knows the cause. She posits it could be a combination of genetics, her history of ear infections, a few viruses she caught in the course of her life, a couple of concussions and exposure to loud music. “It’s a mess of possibilities,” as she puts it. In May 2015, Kate moved back to Charlotte to figure out her next move. “I was crestfallen,” she recalls. Her hearing loss cut to her identity. “I’d been playing and making music ever since I was a kid, and I had started to have a real vision for how that could look for me in my career.” In Charlotte, Kate worked in kitchens and as a nanny. “I was so discouraged. I really felt like my life was over.”
Not damage but difference
Things began to look up when she joined with local alternative indie band Julian Calendar. Kate felt a convergence between her personal work and the material that bandleaders Jeff Jackson and Jeremy Fisher were writing. She began giving the band’s tunes electronic textures, crafting effects in much the way Brian Eno provided treatments to early Roxy Music compositions. Even doing something as improvised as that proved challenging for Kate. She lacked the confidence to play a melodic instrument because she couldn’t hear more than the rhythm in the music. “Everybody in the band was super sweet to work with, but I could never figure out a way to listen and practice,” Kate says. Still, Kate continued to work in the electronic music genre. As she struggled to let go of her old life and find a way forward, another lifeline emerged in the form of Black Quantum Futurism (BQT). In October 2018, BQT collaborated with Charlotte artist Janelle Dunlap to create a second iteration of
