From within an opening mass of cloudy digital fragments comes a nimble if martial beat. It’s adorned, in time, with squiggly computer noise and a humorously sublimated vocal. The track is titled “Y’all” and it’s by Katie Gately, who’s based in Los Angeles and whose work here comes across like synth pop turned inside out. There are words caught in endless echo-repeats, phrases uttered and forgotten, raw syllables left to their own devices. The voice, which is to say the voice’s comprehensibility, slowly decays over the course of “Y’all,” and it ends up sounding like HAL 9000’s little sister crashing hard after a multi-day bender. What makes the track so great is how it seems like pop music even though it’s almost devoid of a proper song structure (there is something akin to a chorus, but it only occurs twice, and the second time it falls apart quickly). Even better is how the vocal line’s disintegration is treated as part of the music’s overall compositional development, how the words — or lack thereof, as it progresses — function as rhythm, melody, instrument, sound.
Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/fionamoocow. The above photo is from Gately’s bio as part of the team behind a video game called The Moonlighters.