Lights Out is Kate Simko's debut album, but it comes more than 10 years into her career as a DJ and recording artist. Simko was classically trained on the piano as a child growing up in Chicago, but the music that caught her ear was coming out of the city's vibrant electronic music scene. Fascinated with the sounds she was hearing from Chicago house and IDM producers, she got herself some turntables and set to the task of learning to make this music herself. The music has since taken her to Chile, where she was half of the duo Detalles with Andres Bucci; back to Chicago, where she released a handful of singles and EPs, as well as the mostly ambient score for The Atom Smashers; and then to Buenos Aires, where Lights Out was born over the course of a year.
Simko may have conceived the album thousands of miles to the south, but her formative Chicago house influence is certainly audible. The music is built firmly on a foundation of straight-ahead Roland beats-- nothing we haven't heard before, to be sure, but Simko has her own, often-engaging way of treating them once they're in place. Among her signatures is the way she wraps her basslines around the monolithic pulse of the kick drum. She keeps the bass tone as clean and shiny as new chrome and has a weirdly graceful way of integrating it-- it's like watching a cat sit down and slowly curl its tail around its front paws. This process is very easy to hear, because otherwise, Simko approaches her work with a minimalist's sense of space and patience, letting her club beats become mantras before introducing small changes.
For instance, she waits until nearly halfway through "Beneath" to introduce a new chord change, but when she does, it instantly brightens the music. On vocal tracks "Mind on You", "Had It All", and "Flight Into BA", she uses her guest singers in much the same way she uses the rounded synth tones she's created, dropping them in at intervals as a way of evolving the music. "Mind on You", in particular, has a jazzy slide that the vocals almost get lost in. The one place where Simko works with messier sounds is "Mira Vos", which is invaded by strange synths that sound like doves cooing. All this adds up to an album that's strangely absorbing when you put it on in the background, but perhaps a little blank when you're paying close attention. You have to be in a mindset for minimalism when you listen to it, just as you would with Terry Riley or Philip Glass.
If Lights Out has a failing as an album for home listening, it's a run of three tracks that each stretch past seven minutes. These three songs ("Cairo", "Bikini Atoll", and "Last Breath") push the overall running time past an hour and simply aren't that interesting outside of a club context. You can hear how they might work in a dark room full of people who are there to dance, but they push the minimalist angle a little too far for passive listening. Outside of that, Lights Out is a solid debut, albeit one that will appeal primarily to listeners well within the core dance music audience.
