Khate article

This article will run in Signal-to-Noise Magazine later this year.

Khate

By Raymond Cummings

Psych-rockers troll dusty music stores for vintage effects pedals. DJs scrounge through fifth-hand vinyl bins in record shops for sample fodder. Ethnomusicians meld vacations with scouting trips, scouring the globe for obscure instruments. Khate Gausman’s hunting grounds include flea markets and yard sales, where broken-in toys that emit tot-pleasing sounds – the tools of her trade – can be had for a song, even if the multi-layered electronics/noise she’ll eventually bleed from them is likely to terrify your kids and alienate your co-workers. Gausman, who resides in Newport News, Virginia and daylights as an audio-visual tech, is a circuit-bender.

“In a nutshell, circuit-bending involves opening up some sound-making or -altering device - toys, keyboards, guitar pedals, etc. - and re-wiring it to create sounds the manufacturer never intended,” she explains in an email interview. “The results can be controlled effects or random glitching. Sometimes I play the instruments; sometimes, the instruments play me. With certain bent instruments, it's often seemingly up to chance what they will spit out. In those instances, I record gobs of material and then edit it down into interesting and digestible chunks. Other times, I'll have a theme in mind and either use the reliable bent instruments or my straightforward gear. Most often, it's a combination of the two, layered upon each other and ‘iced’ with field recordings and samples. Part of the allure - for me, anyways - is also modding or re-housing the case, so the instrument becomes not only a unique source of strange sounds, but a work of art unto itself.” Photos of Gausman-modified “instruments” are available on her website.

Since 2004, Gausman has self-released six solo CDs and a pair of collaborative recordings with Wayne “FERALCATSCAN” Jacobs, her partner both in love and circuit-subversion.

“Back in '98 I bought a CD & book set called Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones, which features work by Reed Ghazala,” Gausman recalls. “Flash forward two years, when I find a Speak & Spell in a thrift store and think ‘Wait, can't I do that circuit-bending thing on that?’ Curiosity soon became an obsession. I come from a visual art background and only started making noises in the late 90's, so the idea of constructing a unique sonic sculpture was a very happy marriage of old interests with new.”

One of the most intriguing – and ironic – aspects of her prolific catalogue is a gradual shift from early, relatively beat-oriented material to more atmospheric compositions that can’t be properly classified as “songs” in the traditional sense; rather, they suggest sonic tye-dying or collaging. Thus, texturally, Gausman’s early, relatively concrete music has transitioned into a more abstract, atmospheric realm that reflects her Master’s degree in art therapy. While fritzing crackle, sticky-sick static, AM/FM dial-twist samples, and Conet Project foreign-speaker code enunciation characterize Khate’s entire body of work, definite separations can be made.

There’s 3-inch CD-R Apertif (2004), which mined a original, hybrid vein of muddily dramatic trip-hop and glitch – “Teratogenic” even sported, seemingly, simulations of starved birds of prey contemplating a apocalyptic landscape. This doomy, foreboding structural stalk was followed by stylistic hodge-podges Ononharoia (2005) – an album Gausmann declares a personal favorite – and Circadian (2006), the spiked, angular, jolts’n’edges Parts (2006), and the shadowy, humidity-hemorrhaging amorphousness of Composition of a Recorded Mass (2007).

There are methods to Gausmann’s madness: “Within the last year, I've accrued a backlog of material that has only recently been mastered; with more tracks to pick from, it's easier to arrange them by theme. I don't mind the potpourri approach to album mixing, and will probably release some like that in the future. It's simply that the most recent work has sounded better grouped with neighboring themes, and I have enough of it to do so.”

Field Report, Gausman’s latest effort, holds an unusual distinction. While Report is what she terms “an orphanage of an album,” a grouping of songs that “didn't play well with others, so they're forced to play with each other,” it nonetheless adds up to her most engrossing release to date: a darkened, entropic rumble that sneaks up on the listener. “Riesling” presents overlapping, bass-level concentric tones that continually expand outward, simulating bloated indigestion; “Imaginary Numbers” suggests loops of a live microphone-recorded thunderstorm with vintage 50s public-access samples folded in. Gausman created the latter using a 1980s record of office sound effects: “Lots of clunky teletext and now-antiquated copy machines. It employs the Vinyl Translator a great deal, a circuit-bent turntable that runs forwards and backwards from about 10 to 50 rpm. It's very fun to play, and gets trotted out to live gigs regularly.”

Field Report is available now. For more information, visit www.khate.org.