Katie Dey: My Data | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It’s hard to find Katie Dey in the physical world. It’s also the case that a lot of what you can say about her and her music is tied up in that. The bizarre, pitch-shifted and massively distorted pop that began appearing half-a-decade ago was almost like a transmission from another dimension: a voice trying to break through invisible barriers and just be here. I’ve found it intriguing to follow the evolution of Katie Dey’s voice -and I mean her voice, literally- as it has fleshed out, become more human and real. Over the course of four-or-so records, it has been emerging from hiding, at home, online and in her head and on her latest record, My Data, you can make out more of the broken pop princess than ever before.

To be fair, there was already quite a lot you could find out about Katie Dey, if you went trawling through the annals of the internet: in salty twitter feeds and expansive Reddit AMAs. A picture emerges -and it’s one confirmed in her music- of a woman often consumed by pain, introversion and despair. I think the most chronic expression of this is a neurological condition which Dey talks about quite candidly on occasion. Take the track hurting, for instance: “the nerve pinched in my neck / is sending needles down my arm / primary victims left two fingers / hand half working do no harm / tiny bleeding stomach shredding / particles that numb my head / sometimes what you think will help you / fucks you up instead.” Chronic neuropathic pain and its medication is no joke, although it has spiced up Dey’s Twitter feed. For instance: “everyone loves the miserable upper class suburban wine mom author drunk tweeting but when im on 300 mg of pregabalin zoned out nonstop tweeting about jizz at 4 in the morning it's 'concerning’.”

Music has been one of the -perhaps more socially appropriate- means for Dey to enter a human world, one where she’s far from comfortable. Music wasn’t easy either, for that matter, and using a simple Windows autotune and pitchshifting plugin -Vst Kerovee- with its dials twisted in extreme directions, she created a unique mask, a mutilated pop that best expressed what she was feeling. Speaking to The Fader she put it this way: “Originally, it was a way of relieving dysphoria and making my own music more palatable for me to listen to so that it didn't upset me — like putting an Instagram filter on your face. I wasn't trying to make some kind of statement, and it wasn't an artistic decision — it was really just for my own well-being. I'm not destroying my voice as heavily as I used to. That might be something to do with dysphoria lessening, or maybe wanting to be a little bit more understood. I guess I'm feeling a little less ashamed of my lyrics.”

Even on My Data, where she goes much easier on her plugins and the lyrics are more decipherable than ever before, Dey still coats her sound in a patina of digital distortion, which can make the thread of her impassioned writing hard to hold on to. However, as with her previous record Solipsisters she’ll be posting a lyric sheet on Bandcamp, bravely letting you know exactly where she’s at.

If you want to boil it right down, My Data is a maelstrom of pain -both physical and mental- and longing. I think that last part is a key development from Solipsisters: Dey is reaching out, beyond herself, to others, with a kind of desperation. Take these lyrics from early single dancing: “i need you / to be my choreographer / dance until everything hurts / i can take it i am stronger than you think / i am sick / of dancing by myself at night / i will learn how to take flight / you could come with me / if you wanted to.” There’s a mixture of naked vulnerability and emotional vampirism that is as hard not to sympathise with as it is unsettling. I’m often arrested by a real beauty in Katie Dey’s writing -full of fiery surges, gruesome honesty and pitch black pain- and it’s quite a separate quality from the music she makes.

Speaking of which, My Data makes a few new moves on the music front. I think I can hear more of Dey’s infatuation with Kate Bush, in the synthetic strings and mutated, twee pop. It’s funny, as Dey gets closer to emulating the pop music that other people make, it becomes more of an acquired taste. Harking back to a record like Flood Network I really did enjoy her sounds at their most incandescently bizarre and now that this damaged-android pop-simulacrum comes into focus, there’s an uncanny valley quality to the experience. Ironically, that’s spot-on for Katie Dey’s persona, even if it makes My Data more difficult to listen to. Her sound is still certainly nothing if not complex and I feel like I've spoken at length, before, about its variegated influences: suffice to say, there's a lot of the history of pop in her surreal realm, waiting for the adventurous neurotic to label it all.

Katie Dey exists among the ranks of burning souls like Sarah Mary Chadwick and Uboa, unflinchingly depicting a brutal progression through a life for which she was ill-equipped. Her personal journey has become, for me, completely compelling. At points it is difficult to comprehend, painful to behold or even like different elements were pulling in multiple directions at once, threatening to tear the whole thing to shreds. It’s a true expression of who she is. Dey is reaching out fervently, for many things, but something that underwrites every one of them is her struggle to exist in this world at all.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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