Hailing from Stuarts Draft, Virginia,
located in the Shenandoah Valley, Katie Laub creates music that combines
traditional, acoustic style folk ballads with modern electronic soundscapes.
The end result is highly engaging, largely due to the fact that the songwriting
serves as a nice relief to the at times abstract intensity of the electronic
music.
Her musical
journey started with the piano; guitar, mandolin, and banjo followed. In the
fall of 2010, she took a sound class through RISD, learning about sound
programming and ‘other ways to approach noise making’. Though musically
involved for most of her life, actively pursuing composition of any type is an
activity that has only recently come to draw her focus.
When the
understanding is given that she lists traditional bluegrass music as well as
Throbbing Gristle among her influences, things begin to clarify. Add John Cage
and Godspeed You Black Emperor, and we have some philosophical insight as well
as an indication of some kind of contemporary esthetic. For the uninitiated,
John Cage left a body of work that raised questions about sound and silence, as
well as the relationship between composer and performer. It is therefore
fitting that a musician with such an overtly searching bent would list him
among her biggest influences. Add in the fact that she was raised up in the
Mennonite church, has blown glass, and is influenced by the idea of home and a
longing for a simpler way of life, and this blend of old and new becomes much
more clear
There is
something naturally authentic about her songwriting. Let us take track 7 of the
SoundCloud site, ‘You Gotta Fly’, as an example. Accompanying herself on banjo,
she sings effectively simple lyrics set to very diatonic, major key melodies, harmonized in very traditionally standard
ways. The end result is a solidly written and executed tune in a much older
style. By the time she abandons spoken language for a series of melodicized ‘La
la las’, you may find yourself wonderfully engaged in the music.
The next couple of tracks highlight her
experimental side. ‘No More’ and ‘Sparcile’ are intensely abstract and ‘out
there’ compared to ‘You Gotta Fly’, but they are just as convincing in their
way as ‘You Gotta Fly’ is in its; you have to be willing to actually listen to
what she has to say. ‘Sparcile’ is particularly interesting because of the way
it combines Katie’s untreated voice intoning against the isorhythmic and
dissonant background. The last two tracks round out the proceedings nicely, as
the long, searching experimentation of ‘Destination’ is met with the brief,
extremely diatonic elegance of ‘Goodnight’.
Katie Laub is a
very talented musician. Aiming to blend
the old with the new, she is carving out her own path; while others have engaged
in similar musings, there is a freshness to her approach that is thoroughly
contemporary. Anyone interested in having their sensibilities stretched, and
fans of such disparate musical entities as Controlled Bleeding and Pete Seeger
would be well-served by investigating the sonic landscapes she creates.
Check her out at:
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