KATIE KIM
Mood is central to the expansive musical landscape of Katie Kim. Darkened corners, icy atmospheres and hypnotic knife edge soundscapes. Piano chords stretch to infinity, silence is employed as devastating punctuation, while the voice, in it’s salience is all the scattered beauty a glimmer of light can illuminate. Cinematic in scope and tectonic in delivery, It's as deep as you want or need it to be. A slowcore waltz at the bottom of the ocean, steeped in gloomy ambience. Tension tugs at the heart with this euphoric exploration into the depths of darkness and light.“Holding my hand now the tides incoming/Make us a shield so the light won’t get in.”
Katie Kim has released four studio albums to date: Twelve (2008), Vaults Vol.1 (2011) Cover & Flood (2012) (UK release 2013) and SALT (2016) Nominated for The RTE Choice Music Award for Album Of The Year. SALT was recently performed live in a series of concerts with Katie Kim and Crash Ensemble in its entirety, in an alternative reworked form, with arrangements from composer Sean Clancy for Crash. She has also scored an original soundtrack for the 1928 surrealist Germain Dulac silent film, "La Coquille et Le Clergyman", commissioned by The Cork French Film Festival, which she also performed with her full band, live, in front of a sold out audience and acclaimed director Agnes Varda.
She has been part of many collaborations, including The Waterboys, Sean MacErlaine, Crash Ensemble, David Kitt and Halves amongst many.
"Katie Kim evokes everything from William Basinski’s starker works, early Labradford and the landscape of loss so masterfully soundtracked by the likes of Aidan Baker, Tim Hecker and Stars of The Lid " - Pitchfork
“'Salt' is an album to surrender yourself to.The artist’s third album is a journey worth taking. If you don’t want to, then you definitely should take it anyway. The music is hypnotic. Katie Kim’s voice lulls you into an uneasy sense of calm while the knife-edge soundscapes of 'Salt' always feel inches away into becoming all-encompassing wave of sound that could easily swallow the record whole. 'Salt' is unflinching precision.” - The Irish Times
“Your jaw drops. At times the production is deceptively murky and reverby, as if trying to shield the listener from the gorgeous songs lilting underneath. Any cleaner and we couldn’t handle it. And the voice, oh the voice! As relaxed and unaffected as it sounds, the album is just riddled with beautiful vocal performances throughout, as soft as crystals.'Salt' is intriguing, sharp and bold, and where you could be forgiven for thinking Katie Kim already had a solid mastery of inventive songwriting, this is a fairly staggering leap forward.” - The Gaurdian
“Salt illuminates and ignites her songwriting pedigree to a brilliant new level; these nine vignettes align craft and technique with outright innovation. Most excitingly, the textures are almost tangible in their ferocity – Kim’s own vocals are soothing and empathetic while also sounding a million light years away. And therein lies the tension at the heart of Salt, the album flirts with extremes, making these extremes feel incredibly seductive. Cinematic in scope and tectonic in delivery, Salt is a richly rewarding and profoundly intense listening experience” - Uncut
"Let us get to the heart of the matter straight away: Katie Kim’s Cover And Flood is very, very good. Appealingly minimal half-whispered melodies blend with primitive guitar arpeggios, or pianos and cellos, or organs and harmoniums, or drum-machine beatz, or electronic fuzz, and over it all varying degrees of echo, reverb, distortion and background noise wash like a comforting lo-fi sea." - Hot Press
"There are twenty songs on Cover & Flood, twenty pieces of sound patched together to form an overwhelmingly beautiful whole. It's a myriad of tones and shadows, an experience that rewards close listening as much as it is great to fall asleep to. It's as deep as you want or need it to be. New elements peek their way out of the dusk with each new listen and old, forgotten ones eventually return with all the joy that accompanies a meeting with an old friend. It's an album made for the four sides of vinyl it will appear on, with each flipping of side or changing of disc further building the ritual around listening to it. Noisy, small and half-hidden, it makes no grand gestures or sweeping statements. It is an album confident in itself, as it should be. It will seek no gratification, though it deserves to find it. When Katie Kim's first record, Twelve, came out, it felt like a one-of-a-kind experience, a moment in time. Cover & Flood is all that her début was and much, much more. It's stronger and more assured, with every minute detail bearing signs of the loving touch of its creator. A singular achievement and an important record." - Thin Air
"Katie Kim transports the listener from the mundaneness of an overcrowded 8.45amtrain to the dark of a high-ceilinged townhouse in the throes of night. It shows the talent is there, but the Waterford lady's passion is in idea-forming, not in tidying up for any record companies that might be passing through her recordings. It indicates that not one sound is there by accident, it's been pored over. It proves she's an artist of the purest kind, a visionary." - Fractured Air
"Waterford songstress Katie Kim offers her forthcoming sophomore release, Cover and Flood. Like the echo chamber divinity of a Zola Jesus ballad or CocoRosie’s dank naïveté. Irish native Kim writes a soft dirge. Heavy with bare gossamer isolation, the album eventually rises to the elegant, murky cloud of its conclusion, a total-bummer canticle reminiscent of Long Division-era Low or DM Stith’s “Braid of Voices.” - The Skinny UK
“'Salt' sees the revered Irish musician explore deeper into the ethereal dimension, for which she has long ago established. The striking intimacy and hypnotic spell cast by the gifted songwriter throughout ‘Salt’ unleashes the most deeply affecting batch of songs to have been unearthed for quite some time” - Wire
