Kallai

Alright. I am giving a shot here. Hoping to have some new material up there in a few months.

Tl;dr - Kallai is no longer a band, but it is still an active music project.

The long, overwrought story that I am posting because I secretly miss oversharing on LiveJournal:

This project was initially put together by my friend Jack Norton and Brian Wilcher. The idea was to do something in the shoegaze / dreampop space. Jack invited me in to co-write, play guitar, & sing. After a few writing/practice sessions Jack left, & Brian pulled David Gross into the project. The idea at that point was to do something shoegaze / post-punk with David & I each writing & singing songs. That worked for basically the first two things we put together , “Always/Never” & “Palisades.”

At that point—due to a variety of reasons—David stopped writing new songs for the band.

Around that time we decided we needed a name that *wasn’t* just an Autumns song. The guys landed on the working title of the demo that eventually became “The Beautiful Ones.” That name, Kallai, was something I had picked up from Maya Deane’s novel “Wrath Goddess Sing” in which it is the term used by and for the trans feminine worshippers of Aphrodite.

To be honest, I was never 100% on board with that as the band name. I did not feel like it fit for the kind of songs we were writing. I was also a bit uncomfortable about naming the project after a community of which only one member of the band is a member. But I didn’t have any better ideas and was outvoted.

That all left me in a position where I was now the sole songwriter and front-person of a band named after a part of my identity.

I felt like I had to step up & do as much as I could to make this thing as successful as I could. That meant songwriting, promotion, digital marketing, social media, graphic & web design, and eventually booking. I was also invited in to the Dreamgaze PDX family, which needed a good deal of project management and promo/press work to get rolling.

Once the festival was done, the election rolled around & the implications for trans people—that are largely proving true—were terrifying.

(Cont’d in comments)

We’re excited to announce the May 1 release of an alternate world version of “We Are Forever” featuring remixes from some of our favorite bands near and far:









There’s also an in-house reimagining there as a little treat.

TTFN,
Cate

Tonight’s the night all. Please come out and give a nice Portland 👋 to our LA pals . The dreamy goodness of kicks things off at 9 sharp at .

This is also, sadly, going to be the last local show for this version of Kallai. The project is going through a transition, and was always going to go in to hibernation for a little bit starting in May. Like most periods of transformation, this one introduced a lot of stress on all of us and an inflection point came a bit sooner than planned. We hope to see you out tonight.

TTFN,
Cate

We will be in Tacoma on Saturday, April 18 with .gaze.band and

Doors 7. Music 8.
$12 ADV / $15 DOS