Elektrochemie
Raised in a poor suburb outside Sydney and the youngest of four girls, Caitlin Devlin has experienced a caterpillar to butterfly-like transformation, outgrowing her white trash, god-fearing roots and morphing into one of electronic music’s most enigmatic artists.
Her father left the family when she was just one and to escape the poorness, violence and organised crime that surrounded her, Caitlin packed her bags at the age of 15. She sought release through music, among other things and started writing songs on guitar, performing in folk clubs and later in a rock band.
This interest didn’t last long though: one night, while performing on stage, she said: “What the fuck am I doing in a rock band? I don't even like this music”, followed by her exit from Sydney’s rock scene.
Something more important had caught Caitlin’s attention: she’d moved to Melbourne and developed an interest in the repetitive, instrumental music she heard in some of Melbourne's edgier bars and clubs and decided to learn how to make electronic music herself. Caitlin hired a studio and a technician to teach her Cubase and how to work a sampler: one of her first demos impressed German techno DJ/producer Thomas Schumacher.
Caitlin subsequently moved to Germany, the European home of electronic music, a place where she felt she could channel all of her energy and emotions into music. Working together in a blacked out basement all night, fusing human creativity with technological capabilities, once this unstoppable chemical process started, it was only a matter of time before Caitlin and Thomas created Elektrochemie.
Releases like ‘Don’t Go’ and ‘Pleasure Seeker’ capture the eerie duality that Caitlin has created: on one hand, she reveals her vulnerable side, singing that she ‘won’t entertain the thought of being alone’, but just as she has lulled her audience into a sense of security, she slips into predator mode to crank out the cranium-stomping rhythms.
The latest Elektrochemie release, ‘Mucky Star’, sees Caitlin’s coquettish vocals seduce the listener as razor-sharp percussion and a throbbing groove increases in intensity. Just as she wins your heart, she rips it, still beating, from your chest - like being caressed by an iron fist wrapped in a velvet glove.
With an album’s worth of electronic vignettes due in September, Elektrochemie will be playing a few selected gigs before its release. What can the audience expect? The main attraction will be Caitlin’s performance: “I use a lot of vocal effects,” she says. “Sometimes I go a bit nuts, it really depends on how the people are feeling me and me them. In the worst case, I'm a bomb in danger of having my button pushed, in the best case I'm a lamb who's longing to be corrupted by the big bad wolf in me.”
