Henry Krinkle & Katrina Stonehart “Henry + Katrina”

29 Oct 2013 — Trey Reis

I’ve seen my to-do lists growing on my days off. Additional responsibilities of being an adult, I suppose. It can be difficult to make my way through the list at home where distractions are plenty. Cafes are the ideal place for productivity for the antisocial. At least in America. Something about surrounding myself with people who want nothing more than to ignore each other provides fertile ground for inspiration, especially when it means being away from a wall of records at home, an untouched internet connection quick enough to stream movies, and my cat. There’s solitude in these kinds of social situations. They force you to draw your lines, put up your walls, and only view what’s going on around you from the fortress you create for yourself wherever you go.

Being able to erect these boundaries wherever you go puts an even greater emphasis on the locations you frequent, as you can then experience them from the safety of your own comfortability. It’s like listening to a record or viewing a film as an audience member.  Every sound loud enough to penetrate my headphones adds to the composition the same way the acoustics of a venue can change the way a live show sounds or feels.

Henry + Katrina finds collaborators Henry Krinkle and Drew Gibson (of Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk) as Katrina Stonehart, experimenting with the same building of walls to separate and respond to a location. Quite literally, in fact the duo recorded the album into an old karaoke machine inside a blanket fort constructed in the middle of an early 20th century ballroom.

You can hear the separation as the waves of ambient noise splash back and forth between the walls, like water swirling and climbing the sides of a glass in an attempt to escape into the shapelessness outside its boundaries.

Henry + Katrina was originally released in 2011 through Gibson’s label at the time, Teen River. The tape is now being reissued via LA’s Hi Shadow label. You can order it over at the label’s website.