Path to the flower patch: an interview with Kitty Craft.
Pamela Valfer chats with Firebird about Simon & Garfunkel, visual DJs, and touring in Japan.
It was August and I was on a bus back from the beach, almost dozing off, when “Alright” by Kitty Craft started playing in my Discover Weekly. The pushy beats on the looped background set the scene for the mellow female vocals, “First day / Your skateboard aspiration on tip and tongue.” With the end of August derailing my summer aspirations to learn how to skate, the song perfectly depicted the nostalgic feeling of September approaching. The peaceful and rhythmic synths create the impression of regular waves on a beach, but the gentle vocals make the scene precarious, almost comforting you that the summer is over. “It’s alright, it’s alright.”
When it comes to Kitty Craft, it’s all about images. Perhaps due to her job as a visual art teacher, Kitty Craft, also known as Pamela Valfer, has a certain aptitude for painting scenes with her production, as much as she does with her paintbrush. This talent extends to her sonic adventures, which are never banal, but always unexpected and on point.
“Embroidered samplers in grandma’s house, frosted cake decorations, a kitten playing with a ball of yarn… the very definition of quaint.” This Spotify description, Valfer revealed, is a fan’s comment about her music. Pastel-colored images perfectly sketch Kitty Craft’s curious aesthetic, and ready the audience for a unique listening experience.
I had the pleasure to ask Valfer some questions and to get to know her better as an artist, teacher, and human being.
Onofrio De Michele: Does the name Kitty Craft mean anything special to you? How did you come up with it?
Pamela Valfer: Back when I started my music, I would make tapes and also design covers for them. I had these old 1950s magazines that I made my collage covers with. One day, I simply found a cool font that said “Kitty” and a cool font that said “Craft,” and I stuck them together. Its aesthetic just spoke to me and I thought to myself, “That sounds right!”
ODM: How did you first start making music? And how did you reconcile it with your interest in visual arts?
PV: I’ve always had these two sides of myself — music and art — and I joke that they’re like my two children and I couldn’t love them both at the same time. So I’ve always tended to shift in between the two. If I look back, music was definitely the first which I started taking seriously, when I was 15 and got a bass guitar for my birthday. Since then it was a constant back and forth. I went to art school, but right after I graduated, I started focusing on music again. I then went to grad school and that’s when I had my first tour in Japan. So it never felt like the two touched timewise, although they share my interest in exploring the human condition in all its foibles.
ODM: How did you end up having your first show in Japan?
PV: I had released the record in Japan and it had done well, so I got to open a few shows for Cibo Matto. And what a life experience in my 20s! My head was completely just swimming. Lots of Japanese interviewers and fans told me that the way I constructed my songs sounded very Japanese. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I take it as an honor.
ODM: Did you have other experiences in the music scene before Kitty Craft?
PV: I used to be the lead singer in a band called Saucer. We toured down the East Coast in a van and I remember being so exhausted. It was fun to a certain degree but the old harcore touring in a van was also very intense.
ODM: Where in the US did you have shows and how did the American public react?
PV: I did well on college music charts, when that was really the only game in town. I made it in the top 10 of the CMJ. I opened for bands like Luna in Minneapolis. I played the Fez in New York for the CMJ festival and I brought a cello player with me. That’s something fun I started doing. I had the foundation of the loops, harmonies and other instruments playing live.
ODM: If you had to explain your album Beats and Breaks from the Flower Patch in one word what would it be and why?
PV: Hope. When I did Beats and Breaks I was working a full time job, and then I’d come home and I’d record my tracks. So there’s a sense of desperation and maybe that’s why the lyrics are so sad. Usually people listen to Beats and Breaks and they call it a “summer wind” that makes them very happy. But the lyrics are dark and what I was writing about was fairly sad. There’s a bit of ennui for my situation, but also hope.
ODM: As a visual arts teacher, what does your creative process look like and how does it differ in visual arts and music?
PV: I like to think of myself as a visual DJ. Meaning that I don’t believe I have original ideas, but I simply reposition what’s in the world. This pastiche materiality connects to the worldly content of my art. As a dark kid, I’ve always been aware of the fragility of living. So I would say that the motivation and drive of my art comes from a place of mortality. In my creative process, I’m working in tandem with my head and my gut and music is more of a gut thing. In my art, I work in a more conceptual framework and there’s a lot of thinking to come to that point of creativity. While my music is less self-aware, the point of connection between the two is references I extrapolate from the real world.
ODM: What’s your experience teaching arts and what role does that play in your own artmaking?
PV: Teaching is an extension of how I think about my artwork. I like to invite people to change the way they look at things. We make a lot of assumptions on the visual information we are bombarded with, so I feel like in my teaching there’s a bit of an undertone of subversive political activity.
ODM: What artists were you most influenced by as you recorded your tracks?
PV: Kitty Craft started off as a guitar based pursuit, but I was also intrigued by the whole movement of hip hop and rap. So Kitty Craft became the marriage of harder hip hop with something more melodic. Because I also love Simon & Garfunkel and these rich tapestries of harmonies. I grew up in the 70s and it was soft rock and harmonies. Kitty Craft was an opportunity to stitch together all these different influences.
ODM: Have you been working on your music lately? Can we expect more tracks coming our way?
PV: Over the past few months, I’ve been translating the songs over acoustic guitar and that’s been super fun! I always thought to myself that if I did it again, I would really just do it stripped-down on an acoustic guitar. It’s been awesome to shake off the dust and exercise that part of my brain again. I had recorded so much back then that right now I just want to release the stuff that I already have.
edited by Eric Harwood.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.