Ecstatics Make the Engine

Instruments of Flight is an electronic musician currently based in Northern California, she produces tracks that are suffused with a halcyon, west-coast sensibility. The sound, like the artist, is suspended somewhere between southern California suburbia and cosmopolitan leanings. It’s the sound of British new wave half-remembered from a childhood spent in Long Beach. Or maybe it’s the house-fueled soundtrack of the Castro, transplanted to the lonely stretches of beach north of Santa Cruz. 

Born to a tenor and oboe player IOF was definitely subjected to piano lessons growing up.  She's played a variety of other instruments as well but always favored effects laden instrumentation.  4AD, Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel are cited as deeply influential to the point of being unable to separate the sounds from the experience of growing up.  As a producer, she brings to the studio a discriminating ear and an uncompromising approach to sound quality. The music she grew up listening to on iconic LA stations, such as KCRW and KROQ, kindled what became an obsession with sound design and synthesis. The elements of pop, dance, and ambient will be immediately familiar to anyone with an ear for electronica, no instrument or source is off limits though clearly favoring synthetic sources she also draws from found sound and field recordings.   Instruments of Flight reworks them and fashions them into something evocatively different.  It’s as if you’re hearing things you thought you knew, only to discover that they sound somehow better filtered through salt air and Pacific sunsets.