Yetsuby – 4EVA
4EVA
Yetsuby
Album
Electronic
Louis Pelingen
September 7, 2025
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A relaxed atmosphere builds almost in spite of the somewhat cold Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) space. In lieu of seats, people lean against the walls after a day of work. Finding a perch on which to wait, apprehensive of the floor at first, but less so as a good collection of people gather there. People warm to the space over time. As their introductory act will warm to the performance of her songs for the very first time.
General chatter hushes slightly as lights dim and rise again to reveal Jennifer Walton, mere weeks before her debut album, Daughters, will find its way to listeners around Halloween.
Her voice appears like melodic bruises in the often unwieldy body of her songs, she delivers lines in a state of mild bewilderment, pausing for breath sometimes away from the microphone. The first song is a thunderous Midwest-emo-infused lament, and the next melds a theatrical loamy rhythm with large impacts as the momentum is sent spiralling downwards into the chorus.
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The single Miss America is inevitably a standout. As the ballad is grand in emotional scope, but sharpens in the shape of lyrical trios: “Strip mall, drug deal, panic attack.” and “CIA, FBI, Appalachian patricide”. These lines are shocking, but wilt with such beauty.
After two or three songs, she announces it’s her first time ever playing these songs for an audience. Her tense performance style makes a bit more sense, now; her looks away from the black box space. But the strength of this collection of songs shows that what Jennifer lacks in performance experience, she makes up for in mature thoughtfulness. Her songs fall to beautiful pieces at every crescendo, recuperating in quieter, anxious moments.
As Kara-Lis Coverdale begins, the black box space is imbued with a strange kind of life, audience members picking out a vantage point within the thickening body of electronic collage. Blue light bathes the audience as bubbling soundscapes drift between heads and shoulders. Here, she foregoes her most recent album (the solitary piano polyptych of A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever) and – as her electronic setup would infer – pulls mainly from the album From Where You Came. She too, performs on the precipice of another release though, and the completion of this trio of releases, coming towards the end of the year.
The limbs of From Where You Came’s “nocturnal transmissions” find a new form as they fill the ICA. Coming Around and Problem of No Name pirouette with a kind of uncanny gracefulness. Those tragic, tinny Tomita-esque flourishes of the former feel more real than the album can communicate, taking up the venue space.
The extraterrestrial harmonic notes of the latter hang oddly in the air, as apt green light pushes out. The venue’s sound system carries Kara’s sculpted abstractions with power; passersby probably looked to see a UFO hanging over Buckingham Palace just down the road.
Kara works hard at the coalface of her equipment. Towards the start of the set, she bends sharply over the hardware, trying her best to identify an element (or lack of element) in the maelstrom of music she’s creating. Moments later, a galloping piano begins to stride outwards, possibly brought to the surface. Ghosts in her myriad machines are pulled to the centre of the stage.
As she ventures further, it is as if she sits at an American Fotoplayer, pulling and twiddling at nobs and levers with a great theatrical vigour, arms crossing over each other, matching her rhythmic swaying. She forms, sculpts and collages layers of sound, like some one-woman band from a distant planet, interpolating jazz, classical, ambient, drone and electronic as she goes.
The filmic forms continue to manifest for the ICA audience. One moment goes from euphoric to disquieting in a matter of seconds, compositional layers clattering over each other in a chaotic catharsis are wiped away to make space for a strange, haunted moment, a metallic chord rending an incision through a carefully built frame. At another point, golden rotor blades cut through, causing euphoria to duck out and judder with a sonic stop-motion sound.
Moments later, a galloping piano begins to stride outwards, possibly brought to the surface. Ghosts in her myriad machines are pulled to the centre of the stage.
All of this to say that, throughout the set, before the ICA audience Kara composes an atmosphere laden with rich colour – a backdrop, if you will – often electronic and ambient-coded (there’s more than a passing resemblance to the galloping cacophonies of Lubomyr Melnyk), then draws elements across that soundscape, sometimes complementary and other times contrasting, in awe-inspiring displays of detailed arrangement.
The result is a bustling ICA space as she exits to applause and people spill out onto the empty road. In the day it may fill with families talking about the wonderful tourist sights of London, but these wanderers have been further afield, to alien worlds and cinematic scenes rendered in incredible sonic detail.
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