Kate Crash

Collaborations

Michael J Masucci & EZTV have been Kate Crash’s longest-running collaborators. Almost all of her music videos, short films, and multimedia theatrical experiments have involved them in one form or another. Michael has served as DP on the majority of Kate’s work and has been her greatest mentor.

Timothy Lee DePriest [aka @Billytombs] is an artist & actor that has starred in several of Kate Crash’s films.

Chiwan Choi is a poet & publisher (Write Large Press) that has collaborated with kate Crash on books, poetry, art, & Liner Notes.

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.”

• Chiwan Choi