FEATURE: Spotlight: KatzPascale — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

KatzPascale

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THERE have been a fair few…

contenders for E.P. of the year so far, but KatzPascale’s ELEGY is up there with the best. How would you define the duo of Sammi Katzmann and Jenna Pascale? Many go with Chamber, or they could be Neo-Classical. However you categorise them, their music is extraordinary. ELEGY is a staggering listening experience. I will end with a review of it. KatzPascale is a stunning New York City-based Chamber/Neo-Classical, Anti-Pop duo formed by cellist Jenna Pascale and saxophonist Sammi Katzmann. They are known for looping their instruments and using vocals texturally; they blend classical training with immersive, unconventional live performances. In October, they come to the U.K. If you are able to go and see them perform live then please do, as I can only imagine how incredible and awe-inspiring their music sounds on the stage. Against a Pop landscape that can be samey and offers few surprises, the music of KatzPascale is a welcome breath of fresh air. I want to start out with some interviews. I don’t think that you can call their music Classical, because there is immediacy and flexibility rather than the more rigid structures of the genre. Sweeping and experimental at one point, it can then switch to something as immediate as Pop. I am going to start out with CLASH and their Next Wave feature from June:

“KatzPascale began two years ago, even though they had known each other for four years after meeting through playing in indie bands in New York. Both have a background in classical training and after promising to make music together for years, the chance came when Pascale wanted to switch up her indie project for a gig she was booked for. She asked Katzmann to join her.

“It was just us fucking around on our instruments playing ambient, vibey, ethereal stuff,” says Pascale. “Everyone was like ‘what the fuck is that?!’.”

“It was the most magical live experience we’ve felt,” reminisces Katzmann.

They have since built up many hours playing together to refine their sound that has culminated in their debut EP ‘ELEGY’ released this month on the SONIC GUCK label. They call it neo classical, post punk anti pop.

The pair stress their sound was never intentional but evolved from improvising live together. It’s akin to melancholic chamber pop, but more abstract and avant-garde. To recreate that magical energy from their first show, they held a residency at 66 Greene Street in Soho that helped them build a setlist.

“It was an ominous space, pretty foggy and you couldn’t really see anything. But it was free, the doors were open and the music played out onto the street,” says Katzmann.

It proved an ideal spot that birthed tracks from ‘ELEGY’ that move fluidly between soft, gushing harmonies into prickly, disconcerting textures. Drenched in layers of loops and fx, the core of the cello and saxophone hold together the expansive range of classical, ambient and jazz into experimental elegance.

KatzPascale are influenced as much by Brian Eno, Four Tet, Max Richter and Boards of Canada, to artists 2hollis, Addison Rae, Bjork and Imogen Heap. Another influence of what they’ve created came from a gig in an unusual venue.

“We went to see multireedist Colin Stetson in a graveyard,” says Pascale. “That was the first time I heard anything like that. We were like ‘aaarrrggghhh, this is crazy!’”

“That subconsciously plays a part in our sounds,” adds Katzmann. “We just wanted to make something different. That’s what happened with the first show. We had no direction; we just did it.”

Colin Stetson-inspired saxophone is present throughout ‘ELEGY’, with their cover of the Sam Wilkes and Sam Gendel track ‘GBTC’ one of the best examples of how their sound can feel heavy, but hauntingly delicate too. The raspy saxophone warbles beautifully as the cello teeters on top of the percussion.

The meditative energy from the music even puts Katzmann into her own “flow state” when playing. “It’s so fun and nice to lock in with just one person. We look elusive and mysterious on stage, but Jenna will do something cool and I’m just smiling.”

“Sometimes I get the chills from something you do,” Pascale responds. “We get surprised by ourselves a lot while it’s happening. We came up with the track ‘MOTHER’ at the residency and both of us cried on stage because it was really touching.”

With a UK tour coming in the autumn, the pair is looking forward to collaborating with artists and releasing more music. But they want to go further with their live sets and put their fans in places they’re not expecting.

“We want to get weirder with it,” says Katzmann. “We’d play a show in a butchers, or an abandoned mall. The space we play is really important and we want to experiment in more unique spaces”.

I did want to bring in byline and their interview from this year. I like the questions they asked and how it is a bit different from other interviews. They spoke with a phenomenal duo who make “ambient, spell-like music for grief, catharsis, and whatever people need to feel”:

“Since this is for our Out of Body issue, I have some spiritual questions. Have you guys ever had an out-of-body experience?

JP: I feel like every time we play.

SK: When we saw Colin Stetson at Green-Wood Cemetery, that was out of body. That was before the band started, probably like two years ago. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Green-Wood Cemetery, but they throw concerts there, and we went with some of the indie rock people, which is ironic. Colin Stetson is a saxophonist, and he mics his body to give a percussive element to the music. It’s not just the saxophone, it’s also his voice. He did the Hereditary soundtrack.

JP: It was just him on stage with these massive speakers, so subby, and we were standing in front of them like, holy fuck, what is this?

SK: It’s a very unique feeling that I hadn’t felt from live music in a while. I feel like that’s only been replicated when we play.

JP: I also think it was when we accidentally wrote “Mother.” It was at one of these Soho shows I mentioned earlier, where we were just messing around in front of an audience on our instruments. We locked in over this drone that I looped on the cello, and we played the melody that’s in “Mother.” I was actually crying as it was coming out of me, and you were crying too. We had never played it before. We just locked in, in a moment, and made this melody, and it actually made me cry.

SK: And at that show, there were so many technical difficulties. Everything was not working, but we still randomly wrote that. It was so awesome.

JP: We took that melody and turned it into “Mother” way later.

Does making music bring you closer to your higher selves? And what have you found out about yourselves in writing these songs for the upcoming EP?

JP: 100%. Another realization I had in the past month was that the only thing that takes me out of anxiety or overthinking is music. That’s the only surefire way to reset my brain.

SK: Totally. It is the ultimate form of happiness too. Playing or making something is number one of all time, I think.

JP: Definitely. Part of it is that I feel like I’m doing something, like I’m being productive, which is a good feeling. But it’s also something else.

SK: There’s a lot in it. The ability to have it resonate with others positively is such a reward. Of course that’s a product of it, but creation is so fun.

PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe De Blasis

The songs you’ve released so far, and this upcoming EP, sound like they’re dealing with grief or getting through some kind of traumatic moment.

JP: Something someone said recently after one of the shows was that because there’s no clear storyline in our lyrics, it gives people space to project their own shit onto the music. I think maybe that’s part of the reason why it’s helpful for people when they’re going through something. What we want people to take away from the EP is that they can go in with their shit and be able to project their own things all over it, and hopefully come out the other side feeling lighter. Here’s the soundtrack. Go through the shit. It’s less lonely that way, because we’re there with you.

SK: Yeah, I completely agree. The EP is like the show. We play all the songs at the show, and it’s not about us. When people are watching us or listening to this EP, it’s totally not about us. It’s about how you react to it and how it makes you feel.

JP: We had a girl bring her dad and her mom to the show in Leeds, and after, the mom came up to us and was like, “I haven’t seen him cry since our wedding.”

SK: Twenty-five years ago.

JP: Then he came over and started saying, “I don’t know what about it…” and then he started crying again.

SK: That was such an awesome moment. This curmudgeon dad who hasn’t cried in 25 years is sobbing in this random little city in the UK. That’s what we want, if that’s what feels right. We want to be a safe space to feel any emotions. What the music means to Jenna or me or you is going to be different than anyone else in the crowd, and I think that’s a good thing.

JP: It’s kind of more like the way visual art is. I feel like that’s more common with visual art, where you look at it and everyone’s got their own thing. Songs aren’t always like that. They’re more like, here’s how I feel, I’m in a breakup, you had a breakup, the song’s about a breakup. But our music is more like, it could be about anything”.

KatzPascale are, in the words of NME, “rewriting the rules of live music and making you cry in the process”. An entrain live act, I can see their U.K. dates selling out pretty soon. NME spoke with KatzPascale earlier this month. They have had an extraordinary summer. In terms of their live sets, audiences often pour into the streets afterwards “heralding the experience as a catharsis, an awakening, perhaps even an exorcism”:

“In an age of detachment, terminal online-ness and AI, the gigs offer a sensation that feels increasingly hard to find. “You know when you’re a kid, and you’re lying awake at night, and you’re just seeing shit in your brain before you fall asleep? I feel like we don’t do that anymore because everyone is just putting a show on or scrolling,” Pascale ponders. “[The shows] are like putting you back to your child self and letting your imagination take over again.”

“Playing together is the ultimate distraction from all of the other distractions in the world” – Sammi Katzmann

It’s a notion carried into their debut EP ‘Elegy’, released earlier this year. The project is unique in that every song on it was played and perfected live for months before being recorded, with each gig in some way informing the way it exists today. It’s why pressing play feels like bearing witness to two musicians born to play together, their instruments circling each other in a dialogue that drifts from deeply harrowing and frantic to delicate, sombre and, for brief moments, even sweet.

Though unmistakably chamber music, the EP also contains elements of their eclectic range of influences, offering a sonic scrapbook that shifts from Ethiopian jazz in Katzmann’s saxophone playing to references to their shared childhood love of The Beatles in the way Pascale’s cello slides down in harmonic, repetitive overlapping on ‘An Elephant Never Forgets’ – a direct nod to ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Another key inspiration was ‘Clube da Esquina’, a collaborative album from Brazilian musicians Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges, which deeply informed Katzmann and Pascale’s shared musical language. “We ultimately were very, very inspired by that album,” Katzmann says. “The melodic ideas are just so, so rich and so, so sticky, as we like to say.”

A creative relationship like theirs is rare – one that spawns art which somehow, without words, can depict the deepest human experiences. It’s a calling that cannot be ignored, which is why, they tell NME, new music is already on the way. “Playing together is the ultimate distraction from all of the other distractions in the world,” Katzmann smiles. “It’s like the reset button. When we play music, we can just be totally present and real in our own minds. And it’s amazing to be able to extend that to others who are witnessing it”.

I am going to end with a review of ELEGY from Pitchfork. There were not as many reviews of this E.P. as you’d hope. I think it might be the best E.P. of the year. I am new to the music of KatzPascale, and I am instantly stunned and seduced. I will have to see them live very soon, as it sounds like an unforgettable experience:

“At a recent performance at the Whitney Biennial, Sammi Katzmann played a run on saxophone while Jenna Pascale bore down on her cello with such weight and precision it seemed as if the bow were forged from titanium. They had been darting close and drifting apart for a while, then suddenly happened upon a perfect harmony. It sounded like beauty and it sounded like terror. The two musicians looked at one another and began to cry. They had communicated telepathically and for a moment became one: KatzPascale.

The duo formed two years ago, shortly after meeting while working as hired guns for bands across New York, from Porches to Sunflower Bean, as well as backing a live performance by Michael Imperioli and recording a couple of songs for the Terrifier 3 soundtrack. They bonded over a shared love of Olivier Messiaen, 2hollis, and Addison Rae. At the time, Pascale and Katzmann were trying to find their footing in New York City’s music scene while promoting themselves on TikTok with hashtags like #indieartist and #songofthesummer.

Both musicians came up through classical training from a young age. Katzmann began piano lessons at five, while Pascale, daughter of the director of the South Pasadena Strings Program, was just two when she started playing violin, five when she switched to cello. At six, she played Carnegie Hall. It’s been three years since she gave up classical cello for “absolutely any other genre.” KatzPascale’s entire modus operandi now is to liberate the process.

They refer to their music as “neo-classical-post-punk-anti-pop,” which sounds facetious, but there’s something in all those modifiers and adversatives. It’s ambient and experimental and a bit like a Nicholas Britell film score, but with an anti-institutional streak. Theirs is chamber music that is socially divorced from the classical music world.

Their debut EP, ELEGY, runs on the euphoria of quitting school, and does what any debut should: It gathers every idea and feeling they’ve ever had into a single work. It is ostensibly a record about memory and relief, and the whole of their lives sounds concentrated within it: childhood recitals, lonely practice rooms, post-college ennui, friendships, breakfasts, love. ELEGY transforms all of it into something emotionally direct and simply pleasure-inducing.

Pascale’s cello generally swoops and sustains while Katzmann’s saxophone jitters in search. Playing together, they are two lost wanderers shining torchlights down a tunnel, with no destination in mind other than back to each other. On “SINK WHERE YOU SLEEP,” their instruments zoom around each like frantic bugs trapped in an upturned glass. The saxophone sounds tangled in lament and inquisition before skronking what sounds like an emergency signal. It’s sexy and it’s scary and it keeps the Roadhouse’s red lights running.

Pascale’s vocals float in on “AN ELEPHANT NEVER FORGETS,” operatic and glass-like, recalling her grandmother, who was also an opera singer. The closest recent comparison might be Maria BC. She sounds like she’s calling to Katzmann, flickering and throwing light around the swinging lampshade of the saxophone. Pascale’s playing is deeply measured, the years of classical training paying off, with not a hint of scratchiness to be heard. Together, they sound electrically activated, as though their nerves are starting to work for the first time.

The greatest moment on the EP is Katzmann’s all-timer of an ostinato on “SPILL YOUR TIME.” Katzmann plays it with a throaty voice, a little like Colin Stetson, the physicality irreducible. Pascale accompanies her with deceptively simple down-bows and up-bows, bearing the technical difficulty lightly, as though that’s just the shape and movements her hands happen to take.

During an immersive 30 minutes, ELEGY achieves something many postclassical records strive for but rarely attain. It is unmistakably chamber music in its concentration and instrumental discipline, yet its six pieces communicate with the immediacy of a song, particularly on “HOLD ME (SLOWLY),” with its simple guitar riff and clear vocals, which even lean towards pop. Together, Pascale and Katzmann dart after heart-sinking feelings, shooting their arrows and nailing life to the wall”.

It is a shame that more mainstream Pop will get a lot of attention and streams, whereas music which I deem to be deeper and much more affecting and good will struggle comparatively. However, KatzPascale have a growing fanbase and word-of-mouth is creating so much buzz and love. If you are new to them, I implore you to listen to ELEGY right now. It will definitely leave an impression and it will move you. I definitely have to catch Jenna Pascale and Sammi Katzmann when they visit the U.K…