Kate Gentile featured on: The Best Contemporary Classical on Bandcamp (May 2023)

Congratulations to Kate on this feature!

Kate Gentile is perhaps best known as a drummer on the more experimental end of New York’s improvised music spectrum, where she’s led her own combos and worked closely with the pianist Matt Mitchell—who shares her knack for complex, serpentine writing—for more than a decade. However, she’s simultaneously developed into an assured composer of dauntingly rigorous music. This new suite, performed with International Contemporary Ensemble, represents the most refined and demanding set of music she’s created yet, a 13-part opus of meticulous imagination and wildly galloping rhythms. Gentile goes all in, naming each piece with words invented for their phonetic and visual pleasure, each consistently evoking science fiction, such as “vlimb” and “shorm.” After recording b i o m e i.i she retroactively went back and developed meanings for all of the new vocabulary.” — Peter Margasak