For nearly a decade now, Noah Kardos-Fein has been making post-industrial / neo-no wave music under the name YVETTE, building a distinct and arresting repertoire along the way. To fully appreciate YVETTE’s latest release How The Garden Grows is to place it in context of the journey charted by Kardos-Fein.
How The Garden Grows is an intense, kinetic space where animosity is soothed by moments of beauty, and beauty is sharpened into a metallic spearpoint by animosity. “I wanted to see what new limits I could push myself and my instruments to,” Kardos-Fein explains. “I wanted to see how closely I might be able to capture to tape the physicality of a live experience with the clarity of a studio recording.”

For all of its energy, the album concludes with eight minutes of beat-less atmosphere in the form of “Intermission,” a reflective piece of inertia that serves to contrast the utter dismay that precedes it. It’s the only track that Kardos-Fein performed by himself, a droning, improvisational piece he recorded when everyone else had left the room. One of the last things you hear, accidentally picked up by the mic as the instrumental drifts into oblivion, is the sound of his bandmate opening and closing the studio door, leaving Kardos-Fein to carry on as YVETTE alone. It’s a surprisingly prescient sonic farewell for an intensely unconventional album. The droning fades, and the listener is left feeling slightly uneasy, wondering what comes next.