Kee Avil Shares Bewildering New Video and Single, "Gelatin" From Spine, Forthcoming via Constellation

Montréal producer Kee Avil combines guitar, voice, and electronic production to forge deconstructed songs informed by a distinctive amalgam of post-industrial, avant-pop, glitch, minimalist, and experimental folk sensibilities.

Harnessing a background in improvised music, Kee Avil’s self-titled EP (2018, Black Bough Records) introduced the project with a triptych of layered and fragmented vocal, segmented guitar, and electronic ooze, glued together by samples of screws dropped into crystal bowls.

Catching the ear of Montréal label Constellation, Kee Avil’s debut full-length album Crease was released on the imprint in 2022, garnering widespread critical accolades and a Juno Award nomination. The Quietus called Crease “a stunning debut, with a keen ear for experimentation, whose musical explorations are as intriguing as its emotional impact” and Mojo declared “the ferocity of her vision, coupled with unpredictable wafts of delicious melodic certainty, make Crease a compulsive journey through an aural dreamworld.” This “modern deconstructed gothic dream” (MaryAnne Hobbs, BBC6) was a Bandcamp Album Of The Day and among its Albums Of The Year: “Sounds hang together like organs in a body, tightly wound and uncomfortably amorphous, each instrument partially digested, every tension unplaceable ... a debut of fiendish creativity filled with uniquely gentle terrors.”

Full of twitchy and finely wrought avant-pop songs, meticulously assembled to resemble disassembly, Crease expanded Kee Avil’s sonic and structural palette with intensive detail, revealing a compelling new voice in experimental songcraft, where touchstones include PJ Harvey, Eartheater, Shygirl, SOPHIE and Lucretia Dalt; where Juana Molina collabs with Coil, or Grouper melds with Autechre.

Kee Avil performed Crease extensively in solo and duo configurations, playing at Ruhrtriennale, Le Guess Who?, A L’Arme, UH Fest, Wine Nat White Heat, Guelph Jazz Festival, Vancouver Jazz Festival, Tone Festival, FME, and Pique, supporting SUUNS on a UK tour, and opening for artists such as Stephen O’Malley, Xiu Xiu, Kikagaku Moyo and Klô Pelgag. Live performances often included an accompanying visual component by video artist Myriam Bleau, whose visual album works for Crease were also featured in the film programming at Wavelength Festival and Supersonic Festival.

The Crease Remixed EP was released in 2023 featuring reworkings by claire rousay, Ami Dang, Pelada, and Ceci