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I first met Kerry Maguire, aka Wish Lash, when I was looking for a live sound engineer for an event I was throwing in Brooklyn several years ago. I later found out that she’s also an electronic musician who creates powerful analog rhythmic soundscapes. Currently working between Calgary, Alberta, and Austin, Texas, she’s produced three recordings in the past several years, released independently on her label Glow Code: Altar of Doubt (2018), Chaos Choir (2020), and True Deciever (2021).
To promote her debut full-length, I created an album write-up as well as a new artist bio.
Wish Lash: True Deceiver (2021)
True Deceiver is Wish Lash’s first full length, recorded during a residency at Calgary’s National Music Centre in 2019. Created using the NMC’s collection of vintage synthesizers, the album combines analog generated sound and software synthesis, crafting stratified textures of digital and hardware production. Warm, spacious layers of low, droning synths mingle with airy beats and hushed vocal melodies, conjuring a charged, melancholic atmosphere. Showcasing the sonic depth of analog sound design and expanding upon the somnolent vocals and hypnotic rhythms of 2018’s Altar of Doubt, as well as the instrumental electronica of last year’s Chaos Choir, True Deceiver is an expansive new step in Wish Lash’s evolving artistic approach. The release exudes a hazy, seraphic allure exemplified by the eerie, dynamic “Fast Boy,” a sonic enclosure of deep kick drums and breathy vocals summoning a pleasurable, dark idyll. Ghostly processed vocals float over stripped-down, dry kicks on “Strange Country,” followed by the quietly anthemic “Cyberromantics,” driven by bass arpeggios and sibylline vocals. “Neon Milk” is ambrosial and darkly urgent, propelled by syncopated rhythms and shadowy atmospherics. The enveloping presence and hushed beats that lend True Deceiver its cohesive sound is typified by “Lonely Among The Sleepers,” with its murmuring vocals and mesmeric percussion. Dreamy, halcyon, and stimulating, this debut album is a leap forward for Wish Lash, consolidating a unique musical sensibility that is both restorative and transporting.
Wish Lash: Artist Biography
With a background in visual art, radio and sound engineering, Wish Lash conjoins ambient energetic textures into techno scaffolding, building spacious and menacing sonic environments that coalesce into driving, atmospheric dancefloor tracks. Her live performances fuse computer-based technologies with digital and analog hardware, weaving improvisational arrangements with live vocal performance and effects processing. A skilled recording engineer and producer, she sculpts sounds through synthesis and sampling, using digital and analog synthesizers along with Ableton Live, Max for Live and MaxMSP to steer her ever-evolving live performances toward greater cohesion and fluency. Having studied visual arts at Alberta College of Art and Design, she is influenced by sound design and field recording artists as well as the interaction of the human voice with electronically produced sounds, blurring the boundary between nature and synthesis. Her ongoing experimentation is distilled in the self-released Chaos Choir (2020), a collection of no-frills techno tracks soaked in ethereal textures. In 2019, she was Artist in Residence at National Music Centre, where she recorded her latest release True Deceiver using the NMC’s famed collection of vintage synthesizers, and taught a production workshop for femme and non-binary artists. Wish Lash’s rising prominence in the Canadian music scene is evident in accolades including features in press outlets such as Calgary Herald, New Feeling, and Sled Island, and placements in the !earshot charts in the National Electronic Top 10 and National Top 50 overall. Her 2018 release Altar of Doubt was 2018’s most played record on Calgary’s community radio station, CJSW 90.9 FM. She has shared stages with Tim Hecker, Shabazz Palaces, Ouri, and My Nu Leng, and has toured across Canada and Northern Europe. She currently works between Calgary, Alberta and Austin, Texas.