Kinlaw

Kinlaw is an artist. She’s a vocalist, she’s a choreographer. She’s a performance artist, she’s a student of psychoacoustics and neuropsychology. She’s not a dancer who happens to make music. She’s not a composer who happens to have a movement practice. All of her work is connected, completely symbiotic, ruthlessly in conversation with itself, focused on community. She’s been living and working in New York City for over ten years, popping up as a member of several notable musical projects, while earning commissions from institutions like the MoMa Ps1, Pioneer Works, and the New Museum, and working on performance pieces scored by SOPHIE, Caroline Polachek and Dev Hynes among others.

Her new album, gut ccheck, is a sharp and thrilling alloy of pop, electronica, trap, and industrial music that creates a new horizon for art pop that she built from motion, to breath, to sound, to song. For Kinlaw, movement or gesture is often a way into the writing process for the album. Kinlaw spent two years as a resident at Bell Labs, working in its famous anechoic chamber. It is one of the quietest places on the planet. “I wanted to know what role the brain and the body played in how we hear, and I wanted to concentrate more on silence than how to fill it,” she says. There’s not a better place to do that than in a room that is so silent your brain and body freaks out. People have been known to have panic attacks and even aural hallucinations as a response to the room. This research pushed Kinlaw to obliterate any divide between anatomy and the process of writing and perceiving sound. A performer by nature, this quickly turned into a deep dive on how to use choreography as a way to write.

“Almost every time I dealt with anger around language and writing, my fix was to move,” she explains. Kinlaw writes in a non traditional way because it is intuitive to her. “I don’t trust traditional ways of working,” she says, “I hold on fiercely to what feels good to me, what makes me feel awake.”

From this, gut ccheck becomes an album that has its genesis in perspective, in interrogating what a moment or a feeling or an opinion can become. “RIDE THE RIDE,” for example, was born of this frustration turned gesture. Kinlaw crawled around the floor of her dance studio in anger. Then, she began to whisper and then started doing both to a beat. At a certain moment, she hit play, recording her music, which was also a movement, and then built from there. The resulting track reconstitutes that whisper, and crushes it beneath ecstatic distortion, sludge, and glitchiness.

“‘SPIT’ is one of the songs where the influence of my choreography is most palpable, it's breathy and yearning at 110%. Spit starts off with guitar feedback,” Kinlaw says, “Controlled feedback is a theme in this one. It’s captured chaos that builds the foundation of this track. Feedback is so reflective to the room you're in, and reflecting the space I’m in is a big part of how I'm trying to write, and work.”

Her unique approach feels playful, limitless, while tapping into catharsis and immediacy, using her practice as a means of exploring far beyond just artistic creation, and investigates choosing oneself, hope despite defeat, class divides, violence, disability, and queer sex. Playfully critiquing the treadmill of the music industry in one song then swinging far out to pay homage to her North Carolina roots and class division, much of the album draws from Kinlaw’s life. On “HARD CUT,” this lends itself to a dazzling video. Kinlaw’s anchored to the back of a pick up truck, thrashing as the truck illegally drives through the Los Angeles River. “The song is about conditions and extremes,” she says. “It’s about being fed up. Ultimately, it's a song that’s about aggressively choosing yourself and offering that permission to the listener.”

The intensely generative nature of Kinlaw’s practice is part of what is so energizing about gut ccheck, and how that translates to making a listener feel as pure and boundless and protean as her music is.