All music was written, performed, & produced by KATE CRASH, mixed by Ethan Kaufmann, mastered by Marco A Ramirez or Stephen Marsh.

Electronic Afterlife

LINER NOTES by Michael J Masucci

When an artist interrogates a challenging subject, such as self, or identity, they reveal aspects about our own lives and placement within the vast substrate that is existence.

In “Electronic Afterlife”, Kate Crash is allowing us into her most intimate thoughts, where her understandable concerns for the near future of our species and this planet as a whole are driven starkly, and uncomfortably honestly, into realms which force us to take positions we may not be ready to address.

Crash’s concerns for oligarchy and the unraveling of personal identity and choice is at the core of this artistic achievement. There can be no mistake that Crash is bringing us not only to the brink of crisis, but deep within the very heart of it as well. 

Crash produced the music for this work prior to the Covid crisis and the notion of a “Great Reset.” And also, before the mass media began to discuss the idea of the “metaverse.” At the time of this writing, we do not know if the predictions of this metaverse will simply be vaporware, or actually the actual next evolution for much of humanity. Or if the metaverse will embrace us, nurture or enslave us. 

As in any true work of art, there are far more questions than answers. Crash demands we decide for ourselves our own answers to the most difficult questions, not only of our era, but of our very history. Here we cannot avoid the questions, or deny that we must all individually, to rethink our positions on everything. Politics, gender, nationhood, community, all these are being twisted into a new shape, for which we have little say or control. The combination of music, poetry, performance, film craft and discourse is more a work of philosophy than politics. Yet it refuses in courageous and daring terms, to shirk from the responsibility that any true artist must take: to be true unto oneself.

For this, Kate Crash has done admirably well, and as we take this journey with her, we can only hope that we too can rise to the courage and insights that “Electronic Afterlife” offers.

Fuck the Internet

LINER NOTES by Chiwan Choi

The horror and beauty of William Gibson or Lauren Beukes has always been how the fantastical, how the future world, was not in a future so far away from my own life, from my own body, that once I closed the book I could return to a safe place. It was that this frightening future of violence, of simulation, of virtuality and bodylessness was always just around the corner, no further than another turning of the arms around the clock.

As the first song, “Post Apocalyptic Ecstasy Slavery,” opens, we are thrown off kilter by the dissonance, by the noise and absence of a familiar melody, jolting you awake in a world that you can’t recognize, or perhaps more accurately, a world you want to ignore. You say, “This isn’t here yet. This is fantasy, imagination. This is fiction,” and return to the safety of a familiar life.

Kate Crash, the artist, the prophet, the singular being, has herself been the vision of a future in various corners of Los Angeles, appearing and disappearing before she could be trapped by the world, it seems. She has always been a messenger from the near future of Gibson and Beukes and the realm of all the visionaries like herself, both the thunder signaling a storm to come, and the beam of light that lets us see the beauty of our world.

Near the end of the album, “in A Stray Without A Body,” Kate Crash confesses to this truth, reminding us of what all of us who’ve encountered her have suspected, that she has already moved on from our time and our space, and her own body, and is singing to us, speaking to us, from this darkness that is coming.

But you see, even this darkness, is just another beginning. And her beautiful melodies, that harken all of our most personal memories, our most cherished things that go so far beyond the physical, tell us that even when it’s too late it’s not too late.

As Kate Crash sings in the same song, there is a darkness, but she is also the dark that is “against the dark.”

JUNK HEART BOYS

LINER NOTES by Chris Begoch

Kate Crash once again soars through uncharted musical realms with Junk Heart Boys — a transcendental kaleidoscope of surreal mystical magical audiocandy that is still tickling my mind long after it had its way with me. Don’t just listen to it, give yourself to it.

 CONFETTI SUICIDE

LINER NOTES by Nacho Vigalondo

So after you touch the ground at LAX you have to ask the driver to follow an specific route that you have previously draw on the back of an authentic flier of a Suicide Live show circa 1978. The driver doesn´t need to know that the route he is following, filled with loops and spirals, is actually made from a sigil you have designed mixing the routes of all the Celebrity and Haunted house tours, the locations of all UFO sightings and the list of of the clubs that remind open despite a tragic backstory. When you reach your destination you hear inside the eco of the the sum of all the first kisses given in the last 24 hours, you are invaded by the irrational fear of spontaneous combustion and Halley comet is back in the sky. It´s a suprisingly enormous abandoned theme park you never heard of, a wax museum filled with replicas of unknown people, a confetti covered graveyard or Kate’s place. Either way you enter, and dig a hole on the ground, and find a chest, and inside that guy you find a volcano that throws smaller volcanos that have speakers instead of mouths so you can hear this soundtrack, in which you can find that millisecond that makes you feel exactly like you did during that millisecond in your adolescence that you have never been able to talk about.

TO YOU, NEVER AGAIN

KATE CRASH & THE UFO CLUB

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