Catherine Elicson – River Of Fat
Catherine Elicson, primarily known for her virtuosic guitar playing and wooly, melodic vocals as part of her lauded noise punk band Empath, is announcing her debut solo album, River of Fat, due November 6th on Community Music.
Alongside the album announcement, Elicson is sharing an animated video for the album’s lead single “Figure.”
On “Figure,” Elicson’s warm, warbled vocals explore memories and past lives blurred by time, as if seen through warped glass, before the song collapses into a scrappy, tuneful guitar solo.
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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