Biography
Sometimes known simply as NV, the retro-electronic project of Kate Shilonosova—the vocalist in Russian post-punk outfit Glintshake—emerged in the mid-2010s, nodding toward Japanese city pop alongside musique concrète.
Raised in Kazan on the Volga, roughly 500 miles east of Moscow, Shilonosova relocated to the capital in 2011 at age 22 and launched Glintshake the next year. That quartet pursued the raw, dissonant yet melodic early indie-rock approach associated with Sonic Youth and its peers. Her parallel work under the Kate NV alias pursued a contrasting strain of experimentation. The 2013 debut EP Pink Jungle, released on Moscow’s Apr Music under this electronic guise, favored a more direct, club-oriented path than her later NV recordings. From that point, her activities with Glintshake and as Kate NV advanced on separate tracks. While the guitar group secured modest domestic traction, Shilonosova simultaneously broadened her perspective at Tokyo’s 2014 Red Bull Music Academy. The sleek Japanese electronic music of the 1980s particularly drew her attention, the style later anthologized on Light in the Attic’s Pacific Breeze compilations.
Those sounds shaped her first album, 2016’s Binasu, which cultivated an overseas cult following. The set of kinetic, digital soundscapes—evoking Moscow’s elektrichka overground railway—appeared first on cassette via the New York/Ohio label Orange Milk before receiving a vinyl edition the following year on Paris’ Mind Records. Recorded in her Moscow apartment, 2018’s для FOR advanced her experimental leanings by interleaving a dizzying array of urban samples with restrained synthetic textures. Issued as her debut on Brooklyn’s RVNG Intl., the album reached a wider audience than its predecessor. July 2018 brought her Kate NV remix of “Keep It Out,” a track from Lavender by Nandi Rose Plunkett’s Half Waif. The third Kate NV album, Room for the Moon, surfaced in summer 2020 and drew deep inspiration from Russian conceptualist artist Viktor Pivovarov. For that release Shilonosova reportedly revisited material first sketched for Binasu, now overlaying new melodies that aligned more fittingly where earlier attempts had fallen short.
Raised in Kazan on the Volga, roughly 500 miles east of Moscow, Shilonosova relocated to the capital in 2011 at age 22 and launched Glintshake the next year. That quartet pursued the raw, dissonant yet melodic early indie-rock approach associated with Sonic Youth and its peers. Her parallel work under the Kate NV alias pursued a contrasting strain of experimentation. The 2013 debut EP Pink Jungle, released on Moscow’s Apr Music under this electronic guise, favored a more direct, club-oriented path than her later NV recordings. From that point, her activities with Glintshake and as Kate NV advanced on separate tracks. While the guitar group secured modest domestic traction, Shilonosova simultaneously broadened her perspective at Tokyo’s 2014 Red Bull Music Academy. The sleek Japanese electronic music of the 1980s particularly drew her attention, the style later anthologized on Light in the Attic’s Pacific Breeze compilations.
Those sounds shaped her first album, 2016’s Binasu, which cultivated an overseas cult following. The set of kinetic, digital soundscapes—evoking Moscow’s elektrichka overground railway—appeared first on cassette via the New York/Ohio label Orange Milk before receiving a vinyl edition the following year on Paris’ Mind Records. Recorded in her Moscow apartment, 2018’s для FOR advanced her experimental leanings by interleaving a dizzying array of urban samples with restrained synthetic textures. Issued as her debut on Brooklyn’s RVNG Intl., the album reached a wider audience than its predecessor. July 2018 brought her Kate NV remix of “Keep It Out,” a track from Lavender by Nandi Rose Plunkett’s Half Waif. The third Kate NV album, Room for the Moon, surfaced in summer 2020 and drew deep inspiration from Russian conceptualist artist Viktor Pivovarov. For that release Shilonosova reportedly revisited material first sketched for Binasu, now overlaying new melodies that aligned more fittingly where earlier attempts had fallen short.
Albums
Singles
Live
