Kinlaw's Debut Album (via Bayonet) & American Sign Language Lyric Videos

KINLAW RELEASES DEBUT ALBUM THE TIPPING SCALE  TODAY ON BAYONET RECORDS, SHARES AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE LYRIC VIDEOS FOR “BLINDSPOT” AND “PERMISSIONS”

(Credit: Cameron Tidball)

“The NYC-based musician and choreographer makes multimedia art that's tangibly, haptically intimate.” - NPR  “Kinlaw has explored the vulnerability that she looks for in strangers.” - Pitchfork "Between the track’s ethereal instrumentals, introspective lyrics, and Kinlaw’s eerily beautiful interpretative dancing in its accompanying visuals, “Haircut” makes a strong case for entertaining the what-ifs." - MTV "[Permissions] is gorgeously unfolding affirmation that arrives with an equally striking video to match." - The FADER "Kinlaw, the Brooklyn-based choreographer...seems to have endless modes of expression." - them. “If you’ve ever wondered where sound, psychology, and dance intersect, look no further than Kinlaw.” - Brooklyn Magazine, 100 Most Influential Artists Award “By placing microphones on the stage, Kinlaw amplifies the sounds of the choreography itself, adding to the broader soundscape and integrating the movements and interpretations of the performers into the overall composition.” - The Museum of Modern Art “I had never really seen anything quite like it, on this scale, before. I was reminded of the NYC avant-garde arts scene of the 60s and 70s, which was heavy with a lot of performance art and dance, with choreographers like Merce Cunningham collaborating with musicians like John Cage and painters like Robert Rauschenberg to really push their respective genres of the art forward.” - Vice New York-based musician, composer, choreographer, visual artist and educator Kinlaw (she/they) has released her remarkable, avant-goth-pop debut album The Tipping Scale via Bayonet Records today. Known for their solo works and multimedia productions, which have featured as many as 200+ renowned dancers and performers in the NYC area, Kinlaw steps out to showcase their work in a new light on The Tipping Scale. A beautifully crafted record full of ornate flourishes, dancefloor ruminations, and airtight production that overlaps with a refined, artistic compositional sensibility, The Tipping Scale is an electronic, dark-pop masterpiece to move your body to.  Purchase, stream or download The Tipping Scale, out now, HERE.  To celebrate the album’s release, Kinlaw shares today American Sign Language lyric videos for album singles “Blindspot” and “Permissions,” which were created in collaboration with artist and photographer Annabella Mull (she/they), who is hearing with two Deaf parents, and therefore considers ASL their first language. Annabella's mother, Cheree Mull, is a sign language interpreter instructor who worked with Annabella on the translation and guided Kinlaw during the editing process. "I have talked at length about how movement has helped me as a writing tool through the process of The Tipping Scale,” says Kinlaw. “Starting to share this made me constantly consider how others might experience narrative through gesture and movement, too. It was an absolute honor to work on ASL lyric videos with another artist and to break down what is, for me, a lyrical and sonic experience into something so beautifully expressive as sign language."

More on Kinlaw and The Tipping Scale: Kinlaw is a composer, choreographer, and artist focusing on empathic potential and agency developed by performance through audio, dance, and sculptural installation. Throughout these mediums, she studies themes of power, memory, trauma, and connection. Her performances have been featured in institutions like MoMA and MoMA PS1 (video), Pioneer Works, Mana Contemporary, National Sawdust, and Knockdown Center. Kinlaw is releasing her first solo record in 2021 with Bayonet Records.   The Tipping Scale is a gorgeously sung cycle of songs that mix deeply personal lyrics with universal themes; Kinlaw is a smart, conceptual writer, one not afraid to explore deep emotions like loss, regret, and confusion, alongside strength, identity, and change. She explains that The Tipping Scale is an ideal metaphor for the record, the idea of an ever-present slipping in and out of change, and an acceptance of this kind of change. On it, she unravels intimate memories and tries to learn from them. As you listen to her songs and decode her words, you realize she’s not just building songs, she’s also creating a home—where painful thoughts of the past can exist within the present—as well as an entirely new, unflinching universe. This universe she created is not metaphorical—it’s, in fact, very real. Kinlaw, who often works with gesture and movement as a writing tool, found The Tipping Scale unifying her multidisciplinary practice. She found it by building a real world. As she wrote, with the goal of finding human entry points for storytelling that felt authentic and honest to her practice, she often saw the music relating to motion. “I would start with a gesture and let it build into something until a memory attached itself to it,” She explains. “The memory would become a story and the story would reveal itself as something important that needed to be expressed in this album.” This works, too, for the lyrical process, where harder and less smooth gestures would represent consonants, and smooth, flowing movements would become vowels. She found the same thing happening with melodic lines and key changes. This is a record that jolts between the corporeal and the psychological, drawn from a flailing body, anchored by inconvenient truths.

(Album artwork)

Tracklist 1. The Mechanic 2. Two Poets 3. Home 4. There She Is 5. Haircut 6. Potential Control Freak 7. Permissions 8. Oleander 9. Blindspot 10. The Road