Sydney Koke, who has played with infamous Vancouver punks Shearing Pinx and rising rock trio The Courtneys, says she loves all sorts of music—but something keeps pulling her back to the weirder fringes of sound.
"Experimental music is my first love," she says. "My first band was a noise-rock band, and I really love post-punk and garage rock too, but I have to be doing a project that is really experimental or else I don't really feel artistically fulfilled."
Now based in Strasbourg, France, Koke says she had been missing the freedom of experimental music. So she returned her attention to Slaylor Moon, a solo moniker that she first began working under a decade ago. Slaylor Moon once named harsh and mechanical improvised sounds; now, inspired by supportive creative and personal relationships, Koke says she's become more interested in using the project to explore her own voice and the possibilities of songwriting.
She wrote a bunch of new songs last fall—many of them "about being queer and about love between women"—and will be releasing a new Slaylor Moon tape on Maple Death Records later this year. "Instead of this just being an improv thing, which it had been for 10 years, now I have songs and that's really scary," says Koke. "Singing can be so expressive—it's like having a piece of equipment that you can modulate without having to think too much technically."
So far, Koke says, it's been a welcome shift—she's loving her tour to OBEY with fellow experimentalists Maskara and Guttersnipe and is embracing the freedom to make her music as strange as she'd like. "In my project I try to sing as weird as I can—which is not that weird for me yet," she says. "I'll get there eventually...I just have to feel it."
