Katsy Pline is a singer and guitarist living in Berkeley, CA. Combining fingerstyle guitar with the glitchy, granular, and synthetic processing of contemporary electronics, her instrumental work hews an otherworldly path both celestial and earthbound. Drawing from the melancholic yearning of early country and folk, Katsy’s heartbreak ballads spin tales of apocalypse, beauty, and loss amidst the ruin of the present. Her new album, Incandescent Fire, is released today.
The phrase ‘Incandescent Fire’ comes from Acéphale, a WWII-era occult group composed of Georges Bataille and other French intellectuals. Formed during the Nazi occupation of France, the group attempted to develop a religion after the death of god that lived outside the antinomies of reason, capitalism, and civilization. Translating to ‘headless,’ Acéphale sought to combat the imprisonment of life’s infinity into forms that capital, reason, and the state could exploit– the self, the people, and nature.
In this spirit, ‘Incandescent Fire’ sets out looking for uncontrollable desire amidst the infinite blues of the present. It narrates this spirit through tales of lost love and existential confusion, the beautiful struggle to affirm life amidst catastrophe and unimaginable exploitation, even when all appears hopeless and lost. ‘The world will not be saved,’ as the author of Desert puts it; how can we continue to labor after the end of the world once we have abandoned our religious faith that the world can be saved? To live honestly in the blue is to struggle in hopeful hopelessness, working towards ends impossible to realize. As Maggie Nelson puts it in ‘Bluets,’ ‘When I say “hope,” I don’t mean hope for anything in particular. I guess I just mean thinking that it’s worth it to keep one’s eyes open.
Check out ‘Guess I’m Aways Leaving’. The track comes via Katsy Pline’s third album, out now via Take a Turn Records.
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