With a fierce independence in language and performance, insisting on self-publishing through her I Actually Like Music as a primary way of conveying her music, Katie Kim arrives in Portugal in the wake of the release of Hour Of The Ox, her fifth album, after collaborating with Crash Ensemble on Salt Interventions. Originally from Dublin, Kim has been walking through an atmospheric territory where the singer-songwriter syndrome is obliterated in a sense of constant discovery that asks for help from both the most alive processes of modern composition and some of the most deviant pop.

An album that walks safely and slowly in a constant limbo between intimism and theatricality, containment and expansiveness, Hour Of The Ox is, so far, the most revealing piece of Kim’s vision, in nine songs where her so close voice, sometimes only above a whisper, assumes the narrative axis of her stories made of diffused memories, paranoia, anguish, and the resignation of lonely days. The slow rhythms in a hypnotic torpor where the darkness lets itself be invaded by rays of light in a deliberate and patient progression to which serumbathic synthesizers come in due time, string arrangements that give cutting tension reach liberating spaces and creeping sounds without defined origin in an inebriated haze from which it is possible, even so, to glimpse some hope. Thank goodness for that. BS

Guitarist, he was part of Brainwashed by Amália at the beginning of the millennium, having then explored the electric guitar solo and with musicians such as Filipe Felizardo (The Things Previous, THE ORM), Pedro Sousa, Diana Combo and others, in different contexts of improvised music.

“Erigindo a rough music and sharp edges works in a field where the riff is assumed as matter in constant deconstruction, close to noise but with a firm foot in the tradition of blues and rock, in the lineage of names like Keiji Haino, Bill Nace (Body/Head), Donald Miller (Borbetomagus) or Peter Kolovos.” BS