American experimental musician and producer Katie Gately is up to mischief on her new album Fawn / Brute, 11 songs of innocence and experience exploring the light and dark of childhood energy following the birth of her first daughter. It is an album of two halves, that moves from the effervescence of early years to the defiance and turbulence of teenage angst.  

Events in recent years gave her the space to acknowledge what she had been putting off: "For me, that was having a baby," she says. "I turned to my husband and said 'I think we should have a kid'. When I got pregnant, I started to get creative again. I had a lot of energy at first, but later on, my pregnancy was stressful and worrying, so the music got darker and darker: I was making angry music while I was supposed to be feeling maternal." The album is dedicated to her young daughter Quinn, born in 2021 – the track 'Fawn' is a love letter to her.

Quinn is referenced in the artwork's harlequin, with two readings of the harlequin's mischief captured in the two sides of the record, being both cheeky and transgressive with disruptive intent. "I wanted the album to feel like something my daughter could enjoy as she grew up," she explains, "so the first tracks are childlike and upbeat, but as we get older we start to experience a volcano of emotion, angst, and conflict."

The album is her second for Houndstooth, following critically acclaimed 2020's Loom, made in the wake of her mother's death. But where that album explored grief and long goodbyes, this album is one of play, embracing unstable mood shifts from joy to fury, embracing the energies of childhood and intensity of new life. Previous to Loom and Color, Katie has also released 12”s and a cassette on a number of notable underground labels – Public Information and Blue Tapes, as well as the critically acclaimed FatCat Split Series. Katie is also a producer, who worked on Serpentwithfeet’s Soil (2018), and she has produced and remixed for both Björk and Zola Jesus, with Björk saying in an interview that she was struck by how Gately’s productions seemed to be “from a microphone point of view”. She was also part of Mary Anne Hobbs' curated ‘Queens of the Underground’ Festival in Manchester (2019) alongside Houndstooth musician Aisha Devi, and is currently living in LA and teaching at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and the California Institute of the Arts.

bio by Jennifer Lucy Allen