Mad Kate is a multihyphenate who also releases music and research projects as a solo artist and as half of the duo Hyenaz. In this interview, they address the challenges of writing and producing a politico-societal themed body of work, while hustling, parenting, and actively pondering on the state of our communities near and far.
Nadia Says: How does it feel to navigate or switch jobs, gender, genres, vocal ranges and all the other aspects that seem mutable in Mad Kate | The Tide?
Mad Kate: Switching between all creative hats and administrative tasks is the thing I like least about the digital age and current state of work. I find it next to impossible to deep-dive into one role and to stay there in full concentration. My life is cut up nearly minute to minute, from money work, to creative work, to parenting, to relationship work, to self-care. Regularity among three people is futile. Social posts and promotion get thrown in when I have minutes between flying somewhere else. We have never received funding for our music, so we are working our other jobs to find the money to invest in this project.
Photo by Javier Alejandro Cerrada
This album is exactly about that – the exhaustive nature of labour, the pain of trying to be “legitimatized” and the exploitive nature of capitalism. So it was part of the process; I have been writing in backstages and in the cracks for twenty years, I have saved those little shreds of notes, and somehow overtime those notes became lyrics, and maybe if I’d just had time to do one thing, I wouldn’t have had as much to say.
Switching genres makes total sense to me – though it can be hard on my vocal cords. When I first envisioned the band with Jaco, the idea was to create performance pieces. Having come from late night performance and alien drag or performance art – or whatever one wants to call it – I was used to the idea of dancing and performing to other people’s music. For me, performance was about switching genre. In essence, any performance required a metamorphosis – like any classic story telling form – there is a change. Whether from one gender to another or from clothes to unclothed, from likeable to unlikeable, the change is the requirement. So when I started writing my own music, because there was something that always felt wrong about using another musician’s work to tell my own story, I wanted to work with someone like Jaco [Jacopo Bertacco] who could help me create very distinct atmospheres. And because my performances are rooted in a concept, the first question was, is this going to be a punk song, a sweet little folk melody, just a dance, or a poem? It was kind of like: we were creating a performance in which sometimes we were performing the idea of being a punk band, rather than being a punk band doing a performance. Even though I’d say that now our band sounds more like a band, especially since Sara [Neidorf] joined with killer drums, I want to retain the idea of genre switching that we started from.
Stage and Bedroom
How important is taking your compositions to the studio and then to stage?
I write because I’m compelled to. There are lots of ideas swimming around in my brain all day, lots of sentence fragments and observations that I feel that if I don’t offload them, I get agitated or overwhelmed. The vast majority of my writing never makes it out of my computer or phone or journals. Sometimes it reaches the stage of song or performance, depending on whether I can spend time honing it and making it precise – which often has to do with that lovely thing called unpaid creative time. Then the next step is even more challenging: trying to get attention on it, trying to get financial support for it, trying to sell it. Sometimes I have found that the effort to get something out is too hard, too much of a battle, too many unanswered emails, too many rejections, too many requirements to edit, compromises to make, and I have to push or brand myself too much, so much that it starts to infect the creation itself, and I don’t want that.
I think this touches on one of the most important questions for an artist if you never try at all to get your artwork published, performed, recorded… if you ever try to make a little money for your artwork, you can’t ever get to the point that you can just do the work you might love the most. But on the other hand, when you are only doing the work of the creative spark, you can easily infect that creative self with the confusion of validation. Like, for whom am I creating this now, for my label, for my publisher, for this director, to get enough likes, to make music that other people want to hear? Or because I want to say it, because it needs to be said.
How do you make creative and other common decisions in the band?
It’s very hard to find time together because we are all working artists and musicians with several projects, and two of us are parents. I would say that on a conceptual level of the project image and the themes we explore, I tend to lead. I talk to my bandmates about the concepts, and they share opinions and thoughts, but there are certain things that I am not too willing to compromise on when it comes to the image or concept of the band. Luckily, we agree on some really important values. I would sooner walk away if I couldn’t be myself onstage. With that in mind, I think that Sara is the boss of percussion and Jaco is the boss of guitars, and I see that when we are in the studio, they will sometimes really lead what the song should sound like and have strong opinions about their area of expertise. I think that works pretty well; we know to stay in our lane.
No Other Side
What is your favourite quote from the album and why was it important to say it to listeners?
Oh that’s hard one! I think an important statement in the album is “you’re not going to be able to convince me that we have to take up arms, decorate our heels with switchblades or bullets or bombs, to win this thing, because in us there is no winning, in us there is no other side, because my blood is yours and your blood is mine”. This is important for me to say because I cannot tell you how many impassioned arguments I have gotten into about the idea of fighting violently. Like, do you know how violently angry some people can get when the idea of nonviolent conflict resolution gets raised? I’ve never felt so dismissed, belittled and small as when I have attempted to argue with someone about the idea of not going to war. We got stuck in the branding that peace is outdated, uncool, too privileged, naïve.
And I realized that I am not soft, naive, or hippy about this belief, it’s not even a moral or “peaceful” view that I have. There is a really important thing missing in the debate, violent or physical defence is one thing – I’m not a pacifist, as in, if someone attacked me directly, I would fight back. But when we are talking about war and militarized violence, we are talking about a level of weapons that has been tied up in a whole colonial system and arms trade, and the bolstering of the nation state, and saying who is terrorist and who is not, and automatic rifles filling the streets, funded by the very people who they are fighting. We are talking about money and access to weapons, weapons which have been developed since medieval times to basically make the most damage while also keeping the perpetrator most safe. That’s not defence, that’s access to billions of dollars of weapons – and I’m not just talking about the obvious, Israel. I’m talking about all the wars and genocides I have lived through in my life time. Some people get so angry, well I’m angry too, because as Audre Lorde said “the masters tools will never dismantle the masters house.”
What do you want your album to convey?
Stage and Bedroom is about how the things we practice in the bedroom, in the domestic sphere, are the ways that we practice in the world. The people who are focused on changing the power dynamics in the private sphere, but especially people who do body work, who do sex work, who do conflict resolution, teachers, therapists, care workers, parents, people who do hard relationship work with their partners, people who engage with other people in the physical world, face to face, changing people one face at a time – that work is the most important work we can do. And if we manage to do that work, with clear, calm communication, find the time to take care, find ways not to kill each other through that, if we, as Donna Haraway says, “stay with the trouble”, we are better equipped to figure out the community stage and the world stage. This is what I really want to communicate, which is adjacent to that old feminist slogan “The personal is political.”
Photo by Javier Alejandro Cerrada
I think while what we do in the personal sphere is political and important, I would just push it one step further to say that what we practice personally has to be applied to how we fight for our communities as a whole to show up in the world. Like, we have to fight to take patriarchy and racism out of our bedroom politics, but we also have to figure out how to apply that knowledge to places and spaces which don’t feel so proximate.
Sewing Community
What is wrong with the music industry and with the world, how should we change it?
There is too much wealth in the hands of too few. If the ability to make money from my music is only possible because I consent to these webs of funding, which are built from technologies created by surveillance states for the purposes of militarized defence, no thank you, I can sing alone in my room or with my family. How do we change it? I’m not sure if I believe in one stop revolution, sadly. I think we change it by sewing communities that show how beautiful it is to live without all the things many people think we need; convincing others that less is not sacrifice but a gift of time and connection.
And is punk dead?
True punk will never die, like queerness or living queerly; that’s always a choice and a lifestyle, even in captivity. It’s never a look, a style of music or anything in particular, it’s an attitude that is saying NO to what society is telling us not to question. It is thinking critically and taking risks.
Stage and Bedroom by Mad Kate | The Tide is out now. On November 6th the band is playing an album release show in Berlin supported by the band Ratas. You can RSVP here. Stay in touch with Mad Kate | The Tide and Mad Kate via Instagram.