Catherine Elicson – I’m On Fire & All Sound

Catherine Elicson, the virtuosic guitarist and singer of the lauded noise punk band Empath, shares a pair of new singles “I’m On Fire,” released alongside an incredible live video, and “All Sound.”

The tracks are standouts from her singular debut solo album, River of Fat, due November 6th on Community Music.

“‘I’m On Fire’ is a song about feeling trapped in your internal world and the void that creates. It has a meditative quality to it; I like to get lost in the repetitive heaviness,” Elicson says. “The video was shot on a friend’s cedar tree farm in New Jersey by my girlfriend Halle Ballard and bandmate Johnny Costa. I rented a generator from Home Depot and played the song as the sun set. Shaun Sutkus, who also recorded the album, captured the live sound.”

Of “All Sound” Elicson says “‘All Sound’ is built entirely on improvised guitar and vocals. I wanted to preserve the song’s intuitive, unedited energy, so I deliberately kept the little imperfections in. It has a levity that breaks up some of the heavier moments on the album.”

While enamored with her working relationship with Empath, Elicson found herself wanting to push her creative boundaries further. In the pursuit of self-exploration and musical experimentation, Elicson retreated to her home with a guitar, 4-track, sampler, and synth and began to write her bedroom odyssey River Of Fat. With the help of longtime collaborator and audio engineer Shaun Sutkus, Elicson began capturing and mixing River Of Fat using a droning Korg, a Roland SP-404, a vintage Stratocaster, and a Tascam 4-track tape machine. Inspired by legends like John Cale, The Urinals, and contemporaries like Amen Dunes, Elicson sought to test her own capabilities through a minimal palette of instrumentation. Each song was performed live to tape in its entirety, with the goal of creating recordings that could be faithfully recreated on stage, performed alone and in the same manner they were recorded. Through this process and its self-imposed limitations, she discovered a new, more vulnerable and tender voice in her songwriting.

While River Of Fat is Catherine Elicson’s first solo release, it feels less like a debut than the beginning of a larger body of work. The album shares a quiet kinship with the intimate worlds of Arthur Russell, Sibylle Baier, and Brian Eno, finding beauty in restraint, atmosphere, and texture. Patient, intimate, and quietly expansive, these songs reveal an artist discovering new possibilities through limitation and finding a voice that feels at once deeply personal and strangely timeless. Catherine Elicson’s River Of Fat is an eternal rainbow refracting directly into your heart.

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