For Portland-based electronic musician Natasha Kmeto, “my favorite type of music is music that is trying to push things forward and infuse new things,” as she said in a telephone interview earlier this week. It would hold that that is exactly what the music she makes is. She is wont to describing her music as “futurist soul,” and that may be a good starting point, but it leaves out where she seamlessly uses elements of hip hop, jazz, down-tempo trip hop and more into one unique and innovative sound.
Even as it becomes harder to pin down Kmeto in the electronic music world – one defined by forward-thinking creativity – she’s the rare beat scientist whose strong and gorgeous voice can be as prominent as the melodic beats she’s crafted.
Last November, she released her first LP, called Expressor. It’s likely the most accessible starting point for Kmeto’s music. “Cynical Integrity,” for example, brings to mind an Amy Winehouse-like soul number where the consistent beat that begins the song shares equal billing to the harmonies, even when the beat descends in a different, unexpected direction. “Party Girl” may be the closest thing to a dance pop hit in Kmeto’s deep catalogue of music, with its use of the 4/4 beat and a chorus that starts only a few seconds in. Shortly before that, she released an EP called 9, followed shortly after that by an EP of remixes, called √9.
The Portland Mercury said of Expressor:
It’s a recording that obnubilates the traditional structure of what we all know as R&B, and instead reinterprets the genre as a foundation for pulsating beats and a blurry haze of electronics that coat every inch of the album. It’s the pristine groove of Aaliyah buried beneath the clattering static of Dntel, an inventive method of warmly tarnishing a genre of music that the FM airwaves have turned into a glistening, soulless exercise in studio precession and vacant-eyed pop starlets.
Though Expressor has come out last November, she’s been remarkable prolific before and after its release. She told me, “I’m ready to roll with a bunch of new stuff. Expressor came out last November, so it’s almost been a year. I have a new EP ready that I hope will be out either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. I have some podcasts coming out and a couple of free download-type things. I put a free instrumental mix up on my site a couple of months ago…” “I’m always working on new stuff and I like to get it out as soon as possible so that people know where I’m at and I can share that back and forth with people. I’m constantly, constantly writing,” she added.
What will the forthcoming material sound like? “The new material is basically an extension of Expressor. It’s continuing to explore meshing analogue sounds and digital sounds. The next EP is a little bit more electronic sounding. It’s also very R&B. I’m really excited about it,” Kmeto explains.
That desire to craft a unique sound that both uses different genres of music as influences and starting points while dismissing genre as a whole makes Kmeto the type of artist Decibel Fest has thrived on presenting. She’ll be very busy this weekend too. In addition to playing her showcase Saturday afternoon, Kmeto will be on a panel at the dB Conference discussing women in electronic music on Friday afternoon, and between those, she’ll also be playing the “Sexy in Seattle” dB afterparty early Saturday morning, starting at 4am. She’ll also return to Seattle at the end of October to open for Gold Panda at the Crocodile on Wednesday, October 26.
Kmeto moved to Portland in 2007 after growing up in California, including attending the Musician’s Institute in Los Angeles. She is not the first artist to tell this website that she’s found Portland to be a comfortable place for their art to flourish. On moving to the Northwest, she said, “I heard that Portland had a great art culture and a great food culture and the cost of living was reasonable, so it sounded like a harmonious place to go and do what I wanted to do.” She also noted that one of the reasons for this was the weather, “Being in LA, it’s basically the same weather every day. It was nice to come here and have it be cold and rainy. There’s something about the gloom that let me settle down in my basement and start working on music.”
Although Portland may be known mostly for its flourishing indie rock scene, with members of Spoon, Pavement, Sleater-Kinney and The Decemberists all calling it home, she says it has a thriving electronic scene, as well. “I feel like I meet a great producer everyday. Me and a couple of friends started a producer meet up and I was overwhelmed at how many people were into making this kind of music, or DJing this kind of music. I think there will be a lot to see from the electronic scene in the coming years,” she said in our interview.
For her live show, she said, “I wanted it to be a cathartic experience. It could also be a dancefloor experience if people wanted it to be.” Regardless of what one takes from Kmeto’s music or live performances, she’s an artist one should want to follow through her career because it’s evolving while she grows as a musician. Simply put, she says, “I’m always looking towards making new and interesting combinations of sounds.”
{Natasha Kmeto appears at Decibel Fest on Friday, September 30 at 4pm, at Fred Wildlife Refuge at the dB Conference, on the panel Women Composers and Performers in Music, and on Saturday, October 1 at the dB in the Park/Frite Nite showcase, which starts at noon in Volunteer Park. Both events are all ages and free.}
02 – Mrs. Knowitall by natashakmeto
03 – Cynical Integrity by natashakmeto
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I went to the dB Panel on women in electronic music. It was a really well attended session and the conversation was insightful.