Racer Session #545 | Kaley Lane Eaton | Sunday July 3rd, 2022
Greetings, Racers!
Welcome back for a new month of Racer Sessions. We’re excited to be presenting not two, but THREE sessions in July, and are excited to kick it off with a presentation by Seattle composer, singer-songwriter and producer, Kaley Lane Eaton. A conservatory-trained classical pianist and vocalist who fell into creating electronic music shortly after a stint playing Baroque lute, Kaley’s music is colored by this eclecticism. Her “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Weekly) compositions combine innovative digital processes with ancient performance practices, questioning humanity’s growing dependence on technology and the resulting exploitation of the planet. Most recently, her work has been commissioned and performed by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Modern Orchestra, the Fresh Squeezed Opera Company (NYC), and Karin Stevens Dance, and has enjoyed support from such organizations as the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, the Allied Arts Foundation, the International Alliance for Women in Music, and 4Culture.
Her debut solo album cedar, an electro-chamber pop song cycle oriented in both art song and ambient IDM, came out in February 2022 on Bright Shiny Things. Cedar, both origin story and manifesto, captures a distinct Pacific Northwestern aesthetic: tuneful beauty, solitude, and destructive noise.
In addition to frequently performing her own work as a vocalist, pianist, and laptop wizard, she is an avid collaborator, enjoying both traditional commissions and unconventional creation with choreographers, solo artists and chamber ensembles across the country.
Kaley is going to be taking things down to a solo level this Sunday with a set of new music for electronics, and we’re stoked to be hosting the stage for that presentation! Keep reading for some great and thoughtful words from Kaley ahead of her set, and get yourself to Cafe Racer on Sunday at 7pm to see it all go down and sonically react to it in the aftermath.
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Kaley Lane Eaton
“What is a song? In a conservatory education, you are taught early on to always distinguish between a “song” and a “piece” (and some annoyingly pick up the habit of correcting others when they use the “wrong” term). In the classical world, a “song” is a short piece of music for a singer and instrument(s) with a melody and lyrics - the text - which are almost always poetry written by someone other than the composer. A remote collaboration, in which the poem exists on its own first, written by some poet either great or obscure, and then a composer sets this text to music. But - be careful!! - an operatic aria within the context of an opera is not a song, even though it includes melody, lyrics, and a singer! But, any sung bit of music from an American musical is a song (even if it is functioning exactly like an opera aria……)?
To my delight, as I make my slow, complicated, laborious and potentially never complete “exit” from the classical music world, this all falls apart rather quickly and none of these distinctions are really important, valuable, or true in an artistic sense. That being said: there is something about a song. This something rarely reveals itself to me when I hear a symphonic work, an ambient electronic piece, and instrumental jazz work. A song is a fundamentally different experience to me than an instrumental work, as a performer, listener, and composer. Song has always been my greatest love - as a child with folk song, a teen in garage bands, and as a graduate student in vocal performance who would hole myself away in the library with annals of German Lieder - but in the flurry of activity of composition in my life just prior to the pandemic, I had lost sight of it a bit, as I was running around with code, cables, improvisation, and staff paper so frantically I had forgotten I was a poet.
The pandemic allowed (forced?) me to find my way back to my songwriting practice after this long hiatus. In this glorious and complicated immersion I’ve begun to form an opinion that songs - still undefined, to me - are some kind of musical thing that represent the perfect alignment of my own human expression. I’ve been down rabbit holes of Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Annette Peacocke and Joanna Newsom, rabbit holes that felt more like cathedrals and catacombs and hollow root systems of magnificent forests that somehow told us our origin stories and forecast our downfall with the same 10 words in a line of pentameter. There is some ancient, primordial Knowing that lights up when the mystery and mathematics of language intertwine infinitely and perfectly with the quantum power of harmony, rhythm, and melody.
On this journey I rediscovered my childhood self that would sit on the floor of my bedroom with my guitar writing long and winding poems with words that somehow emerged from the placement of my fingers on the fretboard, my ancestral memory, the texture of the wall, the smell of the air, the sound of the summer frogs outside my window, words emanating onto the paper simultaneously with harmony, melody, emotion, and narrative. For me it is all one thing and it happens at once. There is no “first.” I can’t identify exactly how yet, but this is a different process than when I improvise, or when I compose, or when I set pen to paper for any type of music. It is like finding lost buildings underwater.
Songwriting - and performing my songs - is centered in my life for now, and maybe always. While I had to set aside chamber music, technology, and improvisation for a bit of time in order to make room for it, these more recent beloveds are now returning to my practice with a vengeance and inserting themselves into the songwriting space. I’m entirely uncertain and blissfully excited for what this new fusion will hold, but on July 3rd, we’re going to see what happens when a poem meets an algorithm, a song structure opens up to caverns of improvisation, and a pianist’s hands play a Push instead of the keys!”
- Kaley