Eszter Vida interviews London-based artist Kaeto on her debut mixtape ‘INTRO’ as she navigates us through her songwriting process, working on its visuals collaboratively and infusing different genres, as well as touring the UK with The Last Dinner Party.

O2 Academy Leeds, early autumn. The eclipsed sun sets over the tranquil sky. The air begins to bite you, turning colder by the second. The wind pulses intrusively in your hair, and the streetlights prematurely beam into the colours of a certain je ne sais quoi, only comparable to a scene from Blade Runner. Wearing my heavy blue headphones, Bob Dylan-style leather jacket with hands mimicking his Freewheelin’ album cover, I am shuffling down the hill from Hyde Park towards the city centre, until a little old me finds herself in the dressing room of O2 Academy. It was one crazy alternative way of pre-ing for the recently Mercury-nominated The Last Dinner Party’s headline tour, sharing an ephemerally short quarter of an hour with the opening act, Kaeto.

As Brat Summer fades into a distant dream, your playlists may be looking for something slightly more ambient, something more sombre, as we approach the colder months. Enter ‘Sad Girl Autumn’, a phenomenon brought to life by our generation’s self-indulgent collaging of itself through Pinterest boards and Instagram posts, but mostly for the obsessive purpose of repurposing and recycling the cultures of the past. There’s a heavy sense of this feeling attached to Kaeto’s debut mixtape INTRO, an all-embracing example of collaging and feeling through music.

The rising London-based artist recollects her memories of her school years and growing up in Leeds, using the internet as an outlet to share her passion for music before moving down to the big city, aged only 15. ‘I spent a lot of time singing in school productions and uploading videos of myself singing to YouTube’. The formative years of an artist, especially today, showcase the different experimentations of style and changes from childhood influences. ‘I did a Kelly Clarkson cover where I was moving my hands, and then everyone at school found it’. A generation defined by social media, what feels like the apocalyptic death to identity as a teenager expressing herself so early on, has since built the foundations of Kaeto’s genre-fluid style combined with elusive performance art at her live shows.

Creativity and freedom of expression becomes the core of her musical ventures, one that is aided in connecting with your surroundings. ‘We would write a lot on the rooftop amongst all these sunsets and colours in the sky.’ She says this, as she shows me souvenir snapshots of Sevillian lilac skies that acted as a studio space during her mixtape recording process earlier this year. The geographical landscape and music swiftly blend to form her aesthetic, illuminating the euphoric imagery of joy and self-reflective memory. Thanks to the intricate layers of soaring synths and low droning, there’s an element of cinema attached to the reeling quality of her songs, echoing the personal moment of an introspective train ride. ‘There’s a thing that happens to your brain when you look closely at something and disengage on a creative loop. We came away from that trip with so many more ideas than we would really, because you write in a studio.’

Both the music and visuals feel inherently interconnected, and Kaeto cites her collaborative partners who help capture her visual ideas. ‘I’ve ended up with a lot of friends who are talented cinematographers.’ This is just another layer to the importance of being part of a particular supportive hub of musicians, as she recounts the opportunity of being able to make endlessly content, amalgamating into a sort of musical treasure chest because of this networking. She speaks less about the opportunity to tour with The Last Dinner Party and more on the gratitude and excitement of forming friendship with lead singer, Abigail Morris, through the sheer coincidence of rehearsing at the same establishment. ‘First time we met we were both rehearsing in Premises, and we knew we were both going on tour together, so we sent each other messages like ‘Yay, you at Premises today?’ and we grabbed lunch together.’

Quintessential is this theme of the personal and emotion, both conveyed in her new release INTRO; a raw, expressive take on trip-hop, electronic and dance music that was born from the idea of solely making music, without thinking about making an album. Albums and the releasing of music has changed, and the music of our generation has held this collaging status, specifically as her take on genre aligns with the idea that ‘the way we consume music is no longer genre bound.’ It’s almost as if her music’s intention is achieving this boundaryless feeling, not by design. She quotes the greats like Caroline Polachek and David Byrne (Talking Heads) on how album artwork used to signal genre and how music develops in the space it is played for. So where and how exactly would you listen to Kaeto’s music if we were to apply her personal philosophy?

‘Music is a communication of emotion, and so it’s by virtue that’s what music is to me, it’s how I feel.’ The opening track ‘U R Mine’ felt very Fiona Apple in a way, the bright reverberating pianos open with a dramatic, yearnful tone to her mixtape. A lover of unusual voices, if you tried fusing the of trip-hop and shoegaze you would only be cracking the surface of her sound. We discussed our love for the latter genre as she cited some of the artists, who we both gushed over. ‘Slowdive. Anything 90s shoegaze or like The Cranberries, The Sundays, that’s my shit.’ Her vocals always feel very soft, free and playful like they do in these genres, yet she doesn’t leave you with a predictable take, with the production style being also comparable to the likes of Portishead. The mixtape later flourishes into tracks like ‘KISS ME’ and ‘CARRY YOU’ that showcase more duality and flirtation, closing with the grandiosity of a dance track like ‘YOMM’. There is a lot of heart and heavy inward introspection, but also with the desire to party and enjoy youth. She comments on this duality and the purpose of making music; ‘It’s how I enjoy myself, it’s how I indulge in my morbid sadness, it’s definitely the lens through which I experience the world.’ Feeling through music becomes intangible. ‘Sometimes a song or a sound has encapsulated how you feel in a way that there are no words attached.’ There’s no overthinking when you are being authentically yourself, something we can marvel at with Kaeto’s ethereal stage presence and bold, individualist identity as an artist.

With the recent resurgence to dance music, Kaeto’s mixtape couldn’t arrive in a timelier fashion as an alterantive, adding to the wave by infusing electronica, bedroom-pop and eclectic lo-fi sounds that you couldn’t pin down to one lonely genre as the outcome of her writing process. ‘I would love to do more concept storytelling, but at the moment the way that I write doesn’t really call for that, because I very much write what comes from my subconscious.’ There’s clearly more to come. Afterall, an INTRO is foundational to the other parts to accompany an artist’s story beyond the ephemeral horizon she has begun to paint in hypnotic colours, reeling us into her world of nostalgia and writings of self-exploration.