Katie Gately's introduction to music making was born out of a fascination with sounds, which led to a preoccupation with making field recordings of her surroundings and saving them. "With no plan or direction and no understanding of what I was doing, I was like, 'Well, I like doing this so I'm just going to record lots of sounds. I'm just going to put them on hard drives and save them,'" she recalls. While studying at USC and working as a sound editor for films, Gately went from engineering and editing sound for films to making her own rudimentary electronic. "I realized that I wanted to do more than just correlate sounds to pictures. I'd like to take the sounds and make them the movie stars of the soundscapes. Those experiments became my songs." On her debut LP, Color, the LA based, singer songwriter-producer, has built seven maximalist electronic compositions based on the idea that more is more. Meticulously composed from layers of found sounds and manipulations of her own voice, Color pulses, lurches, and throbs with the excitement of a million barely-controlled ideas and the energy of a sped up cartoon. The cacophony of sounds could easily slide into chaos were it not for Gately's uncanny knack for melody. Even at their wildest, songs like "Tuck", "Sire", and "Frisk" all boast some sort of accessible emotional core - be it an earworm melody or the kind of winding, circular beat that becomes almost impossible not to hum or sing or feel.
