Depressed at the state of the world, Canadian vocalist and producer Katie Stelmanis dove into Naomi Klein, Star Trek, cyborgs and Latin American dance music to find inspiration for new album Future Politics. Fittingly, it’s due on the day Donald Trump becomes US president
It’s a chilly December day in New York and the fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art is full of future visions from the past century. There are combinations of the technological and the human that range from Oskar Schlemmer’s vibrant, simple Triadic Ballet to Bruce Conner’s horrifically beautiful Crossroads, which sets footage of a 1940s atomic explosion to a sumptuous Terry Riley composition.
Katie Stelmanis, the Canadian vocalist and producer who records as Austra, drinks in the exhibit’s floor-to-ceiling video projections and immersive exhibits; her third album, the stunning Future Politics, could very well have been included. A broadside against the technologically dictated future, one that finds strength in its belief in a better world, Future Politics combines Stelmanis’s voice, which balances strength and weightlessness as it skips through octaves, with thumping beats and lyrics that outline disconnection and the wish for something more.
Continue reading...by Maura Johnston via Electronic music | The Guardian
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