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Zen Mother and NU Depth at 360 Cantina
From the venue:
When Monika Khot is not on tour as SIGE recording artist Nordra and Wolcott Smith isn’t moonlighting as the touring keyboardist for LA band, The Growlers, they are Zen Mother. Formed after trading musical secrets in a windowless warehouse in Charlottesville, VA, they chose to weave their furtive styles together to create new heavy, electronic-rock based landscapes, while simultaneously uprooting themselves and relocating to Seattle, WA. On their upcoming LP, I Was Made To Be Like Her (to be released on Seattle’s Illuminasty label on 7/7/17), Industrial harshness is flawlessly paired with ambient beauty all alongside the ever-pervasive feeling of torment.
Inspired by “some kind of dark twisted shit morphing around in various planes of reality, especially in dreams” says Monika. “It is not pleasant necessarily, but since I’m in this altered dream state the visions aren’t threatening nor obtrusive to me. It’s almost calming because I know I can’t be harmed by them. I suppose that plays a large role in at least my contributions to this music... everything is either an ascent or descent, a morphing, fearful but calming entity.”
Already garnering high acclaim in Seattle by KEXP and The Stranger, with the latter’s Dave Segal writing, “I Was Made To Be Like Her stands as one of the most distinctively tenebrous and beautiful rock records likely to come out of Seattle in 2017”, Zen Mother is entering a rarified territory within the Pacific Northwest that can only continue to expand.
In addition to the release of their debut LP, Zen Mother beat out 40 Northwest musicians to win the Cue Northwest Music Residency, a partnership between Northwest Film Forum and Brick Lane Records. The residency involves a commission to create and perform a live soundtrack for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult surrealist/existential film The Holy Mountain in 2017, as part of the NWFF’s Puget Soundtrack program.
The judges for the competition were producer and engineer Erik Blood, KEXP’s Sharlese Metcalf, Seattle Weekly’s Kelton Sears, and Susan Laughlin Wood of the Seattle Composers Alliance.