Kate Simko
Lost In Time EP
Eklo

Words by Carl Ritger

It’s easy to get caught up in the details when speaking about Kate Simko. Yes, she is a woman playing – and most definitely succeeding – in a generally male-dominated scene. Yes, she is a classically trained pianist who discovered electronic music and saw the veritable light. Looking past the back-story can be equally difficult for both critics and listeners, but at the end of the day it’s Simko’s music that needs to speak for itself. At her best, Simko manages to occupy a fine balance between the sort of creeping minimal techno that Richie Hawtin refined with his revered output under the Plastikman moniker and the fuzzy, blissed out tech house of vintage Kompakt. Unfortunately, her latest 12" for the Paris-based Eklo imprint, Lost In Time, simply fails to raise the bar Simko has set for herself.

After charging onto the scene in 2008 with the release of the nearly flawless She Said EP on Spectral Sound, Simko quickly followed up with a flurry of similarly excellent singles, but quality control is an elusive and fickle beast. Thankfully Lost In Time doesn’t miss the mark entirely, it’s more like two steps sideways and a little shuffle to the back. The eponymous a-side cut is a rather by-the-numbers Simko jam. All of the rhythmic elements are in place, but she fails to inject it with enough funk to really get it off the ground, instead opting to cycle through a few different patterns and using the atmospherics in the background to draw the listener in. It’s not necessarily bad, but it’s hardly her finest moment, and the dOP mix on the flip doesn’t do much to invigorate it.

Thankfully, "Pastis," buried at the end of the b-side, steals the show. Simko bumps the BPM up ever so slightly, but it does wonders for the track. From a purely rhythmic perspective, "Pastis" is beautifully programmed, with a flurry of hand percussion cycling above a restrained house template; but what really sets this cut a couple notches above the a-side is the fact that Simko beefs up the arrangement with a pronounced melodic element, centering the hook around a simple – yet deadly effective – chord progression that nods to both Simko’s Chicago heritage and her well-documented love of South American music. Here’s to hoping Simko can pull a few tracks like "Pastis" out of her sleeve for the next EP.