“Creative inspiration is often like vapor, appearing and dissipating quickly” says Vicky Mettler, aka Kee Avil, an artist who has already made waves with her first two albums (‘Crease’ from 2022 and ‘Spine’ from 2024), and whose two-year release tempo seems to continue with this year’s Vapor.
The idea of inspiration as vapour might be the reason Mettler decided to originally release her new album song by song, as a form of a sonic diary – essentially, capture the moment the idea appears and recorded; it disappears. Yet, instead of making this album a collection of disparate ideas that came at the spur of the moment, there is a backbone here, a basic concept/idea that becomes audible when Vapor got its release as a collection of songs/compositions.
Whether that was conscious or not, it seems that Mettler was searching for that elusive combination of noise and melody – where is that balance (if it exists) between melody and noise and how do you create music that combines the two in a set that really works both for the artist and the listener.
As both individual songs/compositions and as a collection, the eight pieces of music that comprise Vapor tell us that Mettler, Kee Avil, has the right sense of when to let melody rule and when it needs to give space to some creative noise.
