Montréal avant-garde songwriter, producer and musician Vicky Mettler, aka Kee Avil, has announced the release of her debut full-length album Crease, out on March 11th via Constellation, following her eponymous 3-song EP released on Black Bough Records in 2018.
Kee Avil has also shared a new track and video. “‘saf’ is visualised by a mesmerising moving image based around a wax piece by Douglas Scholes. Experimentation with colour and texture, that maybe clashes or complements or both.” Kee Avil
Listen to “saf” and watch the video for it below:
Crease was produced by Kee Avil and Zachary Scholes at Concrete Sound Studio and mastered by Guy Hébert at Concrete Mastering in Montréal. Each song on Crease is its own sculpture, meticulously assembled to resemble disassembly: “each of these worlds was built without consideration for the other; it felt impossible to me, once I would enter the atmosphere of a song, to try to start another until that idea was finished.”
Read Kee Avil statement about Crease:
“Songwriting, to me, is like sculpting. It stems from an initial word, emotion or sound, which I then build on, molding it into a more refined shape, glued into an artificial structure. Other times, my role is to peel it, scrape at its exterior, to reveal its natural state and its part within the whole.
I’m led by these initial ideas; not to polish but to translate abstraction into sound and imagery. This process of decoding can be tedious; other times it’s immediate, each idea giving birth to another, together building their own cohesion. I like raw, tumbling sculptures, sometimes held together by nothing more than intent.
Crease wasn’t written with a specific narrative in mind, it was produced over a period of three years, each song written and recorded subsequently. Each represents a certain moment in time, an emotion, exercise or spontaneous idea that creates its own world. Each of these worlds was built without consideration for the other. It felt impossible to me, once I would enter the atmosphere of a song, to try to start another until that idea was finished. Once assembled, the album presents a narrative as the songs want it told.”
Crease artwork & tracklist:
SIDE A
01 See, my shadow
02 saf
03 Drying
04 Melting Slow
05 And I
SIDE B
06 Okra Ooze
07 I too, bury
08 Devil’s Sweet Tooth
09 HHHH
10. Gone Again