FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Kinlaw – The Tipping Scale
___________
THIS feature…
is normally about albums from the last few years that are either underrated or have not been played a lot recently. For the next few parts, I am looking back at albums from last year that some missed out on and were not reviewed widely. Not on everyone’s radar was the debut album from Kinlaw. The Tipping Scale was released back in February. Available on vinyl, this is how Rough Trade describe an exceptional album from a very compelling artist:
“Recommended If You Like: Choir Boy, Jenny Hval, Kate Bush, Boy Harsher, Caroline Polachek, Black Marble, Julia Holter, Grouper, Pop. The Tipping Scale is the definition of dark pop - it’s an epiphany in a public space and an unraveling on the dance floor. Kinlaw’s unstoppable singing will guide you through an introspective and very strange dance party, complete with synths, whispers, and high energy beats. A deafening debut, these are songs to move your body to.
Kinlaw is a smart, conceptual writer, one not afraid to explore deep emotions like loss, regret, and confusion. She explains that The Tipping Scale is an ideal metaphor for the record, the idea of an ever-present slipping in and out of change and acceptance. Kinlaw is a composer, choreographer, and artist focusing on empathic potential and agency developed by performance through audio, dance, and sculptural installation. Known for solo works and productions, she studies themes of power, memory, trauma, and connection. Her performances have been featured in institutions like MoMA and MoMA PS1”.
The Tipping Scale is an album that I only found a few weeks back. I have been listening to it since. I have been struck by the power of her voice, in addition to the incredible music videos. Prior to coming to a couple of reviews for The Tipping Scale, I want to bring in a review from November 2020. Them. introduced us to a the queer performance artist who was brewing and building this amazing album - one that a lot more people should be conscious of:
“The North Carolina-born artist is upbeat, even, as she tells the story of how it happened: While having a “confident morning” over at her sister’s studio in Bushwick, she picked up a Roomba (one of those robot vacuums) the wrong way and dropped it on her foot. She pantomimes the whole incident with her slender fingers, which flit gracefully through the air throughout our entire conversation as an instinctual part of the way she communicates. “This is not a big deal, it will heal,” she tells them. “If I have the chance — while it’s healing and getting stronger — to work with what I have, I will do that, because that's what I've always done.”
Rising out of disaster and trauma also happens to be the focus of Kinlaw’s new music video for her single “Permissions,” taken from her forthcoming debut solo album The Tipping Scale, out January 22 via Bayonet. The visual, directed by close collaborator Kathleen Dycaico, sees Kinlaw emerging bloody and bruised from a devastating car crash. While she tries to regain composure, a few people descend upon the scene to dance and take pictures. One couple begins kissing right next to the wreckage, while a news anchor grabs Kinlaw to ask her what happened, although she’s visibly dazed.
What was the start of your artistic journey? Where were you physically? What inspired you?
I'm gonna bring it way back to seven years old. I had been singing privately, and I don't really think anyone from my family knew that I sang yet. My aunt brought me to sing for a musical, Charlie Brown. I think I was auditioning as Snoopy, because I was so small. I started singing, and I distinctly remember my aunt turned around and her eyes were all big. The pianist turned around and their eyes were big. I was just like, “Damn, they're really listening.” I talked earlier about communication and exchange, and songs being kind of like a bridge, that connection with others. So I'd say it started the first moment I saw someone pay attention.
How do you think your queer identity informs your work?
Well, it both builds my heart and breaks it every day. It does. What growing and maturing does for some of us is, we start to feel like there is no separation between queer identity and just identity. For me, when that bonds together, you get in a place where you can really honor yourself and your needs. I don't feel like I need to separate it.
What advice would you give to people who might want to use movement in order to cope with the stress of the world today?
First of all, I’m no doctor. Yeah, not a doctor yet. But we really can regulate our own physiology, by the way that we move. To move through this great time of despair and difficulty with COVID, with Trump, with the things that come to us in the daily... The way I see it, the best way that we can work through this and with it is through reactivation of our bodies. We do that by letting ourselves move around, vocalize, and speak. Empower yourself through movement and surround yourself with a community of people who believe in curiosity and who believe in empowering you”.
I am including quite a few words when it comes to Kinlaw and The Tipping Scale. It is a fantastic release that ranks alongside the most underrated of last year. Although not every review was glowing, there were a lot of positives from critics. This is an album that needs several listens so you can absorb it. Audiofemme gave their thoughts about The Tipping Scale in February:
“As an artist whose primary medium is choreography, it comes as no surprise that Kinlaw’s process for writing this record was anything but orthodox, beginning with mere movement. “Years ago, working with a band, [songwriting] would start with someone having an idea and then suddenly there’d be a lot of sound, and quite a lot of noise, and then [we’d] kind of shape it down,” she explains. Their songwriting process as a solo artist happens nearly in reverse. “The entry point for a lot of these is really super quiet,” they explain. “I would start with a gesture, and let it build until a memory attached itself to it.” Different gestures intuit different sounds, associating smoother gestures with vowel sounds and those that were more “crinkled and quick” with consonants. “It’s all just a huge trip but it works for me,” she says. “It makes it so I don’t feel intimidated by the songwriting process. It makes it so that I feel like I’m making material that feels of the moment to me.”
The depth of The Tipping Scale is such that it’s difficult to articulate in words; Kinlaw refers to it as “an introspective and very strange dance party.” Wrapped in pop music that is both accessible but somehow wholly original, it combines lyrics deeply personal to Kinlaw with universal themes like loss, regret, identity, and more than anything else, change. The title itself is a metaphor for change, the idea of an ever-present slipping in and out of change, and the acceptance of it, what they describe as a constant “pull-tug” between past and present versions of ourselves. The songs are fluid, ripe with meaning never meant to sit stagnant, but rather to evolve with the listener and their environment.
For instance, Kinlaw says, “What I might have written ‘Blindspot’ about initially, is not always what it’s going to continue to be.” The video for this track was directed by her dear friend Kathleen Dycaico, who provided a mirror to reflect these ever-changing meanings. “I think working with Kathleen was a really really great thing for me, because I’m able to see that the relationships I have with other people so often parallel the ones I have with myself,” Kinlaw says. “And so even the difficulties or the grief, or the loss or the frustrations I have with things, relationships that have died, I can see them mirrored so clearly in so many things I experience on my own, with myself.”
Change is a strong theme on the album, but also configured heavily into how Kinlaw has released and promoted it; the events of the past year altered their intentions regarding The Tipping Scale. She began filming the visual component as an alternative to the live performance it was supposed to be, and the realization that a performance would not happen as soon as she had hoped. “People who were part of the developmental phases, I told them the album was a script. And that really for me, the reason I was doing it was so I could create a live show in accordance with the script,” she explains. “So for me to make a record was a really exciting thing because, like, how fabulous to have a new starting point to spend a lot of time and consideration on these songs and to allow them to have another phase, like when you do the performance.”
While I have no doubt that whatever live performance Kinlaw would have crafted (and will certainly craft, once we’re allowed live performance again) would have been powerful in its own right, I would argue that the transition to produced videos has opened up a previously unimaginable realm of possibilities for these songs. The medium provides her a vehicle to really delve into the meaning of change, the different characters she portrays and the different worlds she inhabits. Like Kinlaw says, “Music videos are great – you could do anything in three to four minutes. Whatever world you say, then that’s the way it’s gonna be.”
As a visual metaphor, hair factors strongly into these videos, changing from track to track and sometimes in the middle of the video. In “Permissions,” they crawl from a wrecked vehicle in a choppy red wig. In “Blindspot,” she and her childish counterpart begin with sleek ponytails before they take turns chopping at each other’s thick blonde braids, until Kinlaw emerges with her hair curled. In “Haircut,” her hair remains natural, but they articulate this sentiment in lyrics: “There’s a rule/That when you cut off your hair/You let the old things go.”
The strong imagery resonates with anyone who ever got a new haircut in the midst of a bad break-up, or hacked some ill-advised bangs with a pair of craft scissors on some uneventful childhood afternoon. “I think it brings to mind a lot of the symbolic ways that we try to cope as people, and it’s been interesting, since writing [‘Haircut’] and talking about it with some folks,” they say. “It’s been really interesting to see people be like, ‘Oh yeah, I totally get it,’ and they’ll tell me a story: ‘Oh I chopped off my hair that one time in like 2005, I was so upset’… I guess it’s just like identity, and an extension of, and memories. I’m also really quite stubborn with my hair, like I refuse to cut it for long stretches of time.” This last statement is thick with irony, given the artist’s dynamism and penchant for constant reinvention.
Reinvention can surely be at least partially attributed to Kinlaw’s commitment to a rigid therapy practice. I felt it reductive to ask an artist of Kinlaw’s caliber who her sonic influences were in the creation of The Tipping Scale, and I told her so when I asked, to which they unsurprisingly responded, “I can honestly say I don’t [have any].” Rather, warning that what she would say might be construed as “cheeseball,” she listed therapy as their greatest influence in the writing of this album, particularly EMDR therapy, which utilizes binaural sounds to create a pattern of eye movements and from that, spawn memories. “That, to me, is what spawns storytelling,” they say, “understanding firsthand what the crazy connection is between a body and your thoughts, and sound, and how sound influences your body.”
Pop music can be its own kind of therapy, a means of transporting oneself across energy levels and moods, something anyone who has ever turned on Top 40 radio to dance away the blues knows well. Describing pop music as a “raft boat,” Kinlaw explains, “I purposefully chose pop music because I wanted to feel like I could move, dance, party forward into the next chapter of my life. The juxtaposition of having these confessional songs paired with pop sounds was a really strange space that I wanted to learn more about.” But did the process of setting traumatic memories to music designed to lift the mood provide therapeutic relief for the artist? “I don’t know, but it’s like I wanted to float these songs on the lens of pop because I hope it will make me feel better,” they say. “Talk to me in a year and I’ll tell you if this worked out for me or not”.
The reviews that are out there for The Tipping Scale are appropriately long and deep. It shows that those who listened have really connected with the music! I think it is an album that deserves more airplay and focus this year. Pitchfork provided their impressions on Kinlaw’s impressive debut album:
“A crucial bit of Sarah Kinlaw biography is that she’s a choreographer with an operatically trained voice. She’s become a fixture of the Brooklyn art scene; her best-known project to date is Authority Figure, an interactive dance-performance piece co-created with Monica Mirabile (of experimental dance duo FlucT with Sigrid Lauren), which cemented her as somewhat of a luminary in the milieu. Kinlaw exercised her vocals and songwriting in an art-pop band she had for many years called SOFTSPOT, with Bambara’s Blaze Bateh and Bryan Keller Jr. But when the small experimental tape label Soap Library released her 2017 debut EP as Kinlaw, a trigger for every body—which came with a lemon-jasmine aromatherapy sniffer—it was clear she was much more striking as a solo performer, her sound somewhere between Jenny Hval, FKA twigs, and Cate le Bon.
On Kinlaw’s debut album, The Tipping Scale, she’s incorporated all this experience. As any artist deeply in tune with their body, she’s clearly aware of the ways in which sound has a physical effect, as well as the many sounds our corporeal selves can produce. Kinlaw has a keen ear for texture, which grounds this record. And along with all the humming synths and stuttering beats, she stretches her vocals to great impact.
The way she refers to the creation of this record is almost philosophical: she speaks of vowels and consonants the same way she does melodies and key changes, and calls the making of The Tipping Scale a construction of gestures. She turned the writing of “Permissions” into a “game,” only allowing herself to work on it while she was physically moving: every lyric and melody written “on a bus, in the back of a car, on a plane...while walking or running.” In the song’s excellent video, directed by longtime collaborator and fellow dancer Kathleen Dycaico, she crawls from the wreck of an overturned car and bounds down the middle of the street, as though reclaiming her body, her story, her right to shift and change. This is what The Tipping Scale is about.
If The Tipping Scale is constructed of gestures, shaped and honed from spurts of sound, then it makes sense to think of it as choreography, architecture, and story, all at once. Each song feels like a room on wheels, especially “Haircut” and “Home,” the album’s softest moments, with twinkles, sighs, and echoes giving them a chamber-like quality. “Home is where we put things together,” sings Kinlaw on the latter. The concept of storytelling through the body is key. It is only through memory—intrinsically attached to bodily experience—that one can form a narrative of self. As she intones on “Oleander,” a feathery-crunchy choice cut, “This episode is a new memory collection/A tapestry/The lines weave in and through me/Remembering the time in my house.” She’s on par with Austra, a like-minded operatic synth whiz. It feels like the record’s core, especially when Kinlaw says: “I feel like I’ve got five bodies in mine.” That sense of self is in constant flux, and that’s a beautiful thing”.
A gem from 2021 that did not get as much spotlight and column inches as it deserved, I would encourage anyone to listen to the album – as it is such a moving experience. An artist who is going to put out a lot more music (I predict), I really love Kinlaw’s The Tipping Scale. It is an album that is…
UNDENIABLY incredible.