Bleep

Since entering the fray of her solo career, Kate NV has explored all manner of glistening, synth-led, pop-leaning worlds in her quest to magnify “funny tiny sounds”. While Room For The Moon found inspiration in Japanese city pop and Russian fairy tales, WOW turns even further avant garde, doing away with structure and origin altogether. Throwing every colour of paint at the canvas, Kate NV embarks on instrumental non sequiturs, allowing squealing synth creatures to play with their voices as she constantly morphs her own.

The limitless experimentation of WOW never feels too heady or cumbersome; even the disembodied digital choir of ‘razmishlenie (thinking)’ has a poppy, accessible slant to it, its rhythmic vocal samples (and literal bubblegum-popping mouth sounds) tracing the inner workings of a crowded mind. There’s an all too human sense of humour to the carefree melange of ‘d d don’t’ with its cartoony MIDI instruments and exclaims of “I don’t care about anything!”, and a sense of fun in finding sounds hiding under floorboards, logs, and mossy rocks that could only come from Planet Earth.

Across the album, we find bright-eyed creativity distilled into song. Software guitars on ‘early bird’ blend in with the dawn chorus collage of chirps and bicycle bells in a musical aviary, preceding the blue-skied woodwinds of ‘flu’ trilling like complex bird migration patterns. Angelic vocals sigh wondrously over watery, rattling loops on ‘mi (we)’, chopped in time with punchy kicks and slowly succumbing to effervescent chaos as the track stutters and dazzles.

For all of Kate NV’s hyperspeed presentation of musical micro moments, WOW is not so much a dizzying experience as it is a totally exciting, optimistic, and joyful one.