KRISTINA MOORE OF KOLEZANKA
On the eve of her debut release Kristina Moore a.k.a. koleżanki shares with us her experiences from her youngest days to the here and now. As we tease through her formative years and discover the fascinating life she has led, these facets provide an insight into her patchwork life, musical journey and debut record Place Is.
One of the earliest musical memories for Kristina came from her grandfather's polka club. Surrounded by traditional Polish music and western music was where it all begin. Reminiscing about this fledgling musical experience, Kristina comments that “I was at my partner’s mom’s house recently and she was showing us a collection of these big, bluesy piano ballads his sister wrote when she was in high school. While listening, I thought about the kind of music I was writing in middle school and high school and realized playing like that would have never crossed my mind when I was younger writing on piano. I was mostly writing waltzes or things in 3/4, and I suppose that could be attributed to growing up with the Pulaski Club the way I did. I really don’t know if I thought much about if it was different or weird” as is so true of living within two cultures and the confluences both can have, directly or indirectly.
Another early experience and musical influence for Kristina was at a young age joining a choir at her local Catholic church where she fell in love with the larger than life hymns. What was it about singing hymns that ignited something in her that resonated so strongly? “I don’t know…it just felt right? It felt good to sing that way, and sing those things, like it was where my voice felt most at home. I was a kid in the adult choir singing with moms and football coaches and the mail person, all who had these incredible voices that were their secrets to reveal only on Sundays. It felt transcendent to fill an entire cathedral to its seams with only ten human voices. And honestly, listen to “Miserere Mei, Deus” performed by the choir of New College, Oxford and then tell me you don’t at least kind of get it.”
From this time to her teenage years Kristina was never far from the artistic realm. In her high school years Kristina found great freedom in theatre and it was at this time she started her first band. This exchange and crossover between the two creative fields greatly contributed to the eventual unfolding of Kristina’s musical journey and ultimately her career. “I had quite a tumultuous time between the ages of 13-16, and had retracted not only from music but from myself entirely. Also, I was encouraged to play guitar in a punk band by a close friend when I was in seventh grade, and although he was very supportive the other bandmates kicked me out simply because they didn’t want a girl in the band (which seems so laughable now). Then the high school band I had joined operated similarly in that there were a lot of gendered expectations of me being the “singer”, or the ornament of a performance. Theater encouraged me to come back to myself and to rediscover the breadth of my own possibilities. I felt like I was creating in my own right again. It reminded me of the feeling of sitting at an instrument when I was ten or eleven and letting a moment happen without exterior pressure or expectation. Theater also allowed me a healthy avenue to access and express emotions, something I had not been able to do for a long time. After high school, I went on to play in accordion and autoharp in my friends folk punk band and felt for the first time like I was able to be a player in equity. So if anything, theater brought me back full circle to a place as a musician that felt pure and safe and mine again.”
At the age of 20, having never lived outside of her parent’s home Kristina moved to Omaha Nebraska with her partner and it was during this time Kristina began writing songs and honing in on the craft of song writing. Her partner “had just graduated from The Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences and after much debate between places like Portland and LA (where he was from), he finally landed on trying for an internship in Omaha with an engineer from Saddle Creek Records. I just wanted so badly to leave and be somewhere new, so I left with him and we lived alone in downtown Omaha a few blocks from the Old Market. With his internship and our multiple jobs, we barely saw each other, and eventually we broke up and I lived alone for the first time in my life. All of this alone time coupled with acclimating to a new scene with new people (and new climate) instilled a bravery in myself. I think what I really honed in on during this time was a clear sense of who I was. I went through some hard times in Omaha that definitely drove me back to Phoenix after a year, but I returned with a new hunger for possibility.”
Armed with this knowledge and relocating back to Phoenix Kristina really set about performing and exploring the local live scene. “Coming home and navigating the scene by myself felt like the next step towards a self- assuredness that I was going to do what I wanted to do how I wanted to do it no matter what. I mean I spent the first couple years back alternating between an autoharp, ukulele, a Juno G synth, and accordion (and sometimes beating on a suitcase in different variations of my first project) all in one set; people probably either thought it was fun and cool or absolutely ridiculous, but I made the decision to not think too much on it because that was how I felt was best to express whatever I was trying to express. I still try to hold that close today - to have the courage to make what I want and do it in the way that I want to without hesitation. These moments and explorations in sound and performance stuck with Kristina as she divulges “I am admittedly painfully nostalgic, but I feel like my whole time as part of the Phoenix music scene was an important moment, and provided me with the lesson of how essential community is. It’s quintessential to my personal ethos as a musician.”
It was during this period in her musical life in Phoenix that Kristina took on the moniker koleżanki. As she elaborates on its outward meaning and that of its personal significance. “When I started playing early on in Phoenix as a solo artist, there were maybe four or five other well-known women making music adjacent to mine. It seemed like people were always comparing or pitting us against each other. It was as if there could only be one of us, or that we were somehow all the same even though we were making vastly different music. I met more and more musicians who weren’t cis men, and felt encouraged and supported by them. Around this time, I was moving forward from a project called Foreign Language that I had with two other women very close to me, and embarking on something new with guitar, an instrument I had just picked up. I was writing a lot about my relationships with other women and non-cis men, my relationship with my own body, and what exploring a self meant when one must trudge through unwarranted societal assigning and designations. I thought of the word “colleague”, or “comrade”, and decided on the word “koleżanka” because I felt like it most accurately expressed the feeling to me. Friendship and knowing people in the polish language is more thoroughly expressed than in English, in my opinion. All of these people encouraging and supporting me, lifting each other up against a patriarchal framework a music scene is always built upon, those were my koleżanki.”
Set for her next adventure Kristina joined and ultimately toured with New York outfit Triathalon. A move that was set in motion many years earlier. “I had been touring and playing my own music long before Triathalon. In fact, I met them back in 2016 when they were on tour, and they came out to see one of the first koleżanka shows I had ever played. I think I have always been clumsy and nonchalant about actually releasing things I made. The emotional processing of making something and the reciprocity of playing live was always more important to me than if anyone outside of Phoenix ever heard it. Touring with Triathlon definitely inspired me. I have been lucky enough to play with some amazing bands over the years, with styles that challenge my own preferences and reformat the way I write music. But in retrospect, I think being in Triathalon only further encouraged me to distract myself from my own work and continue to swagger around the action of actually committing to it. It wasn’t until after the decision was made that Triathalon would continue as a trio that I found myself waking up in the dead of winter pre-pandemic 2020 realizing “ I’m in New York City with nothing else going on now, maybe I should stop being a baby and finally make a full koleżanka record.”
A debut album can be a brief snap shot in time with a narrow period in one’s life bookend between just several months or years and other times a debut record is the distillation of a lifetime and all that has preceded it. For Kristina with a pandemic breathing down her neck and heretofore scattered assortment of ideas, demos and instruments, it was somewhere in the middle of that debut spectrum that the record fell as she explains “I think everything I am and everything I make must be a mosaic of previous iterations of me and previous work. To ask questions about “place” requires a previous notion of what “place” was. In one regard, this record does focus on about a two and a half year span where I was touring and traveling between cities almost constantly. But I also think this record is more sonically fully realized than anything I’ve done before, and more explorative and cathartic in ways I’ve never operated. That amalgamation feels like a continuation of a musical journey that has a past, present, and future.”
Speaking of the record and in particular on the topic of instrumentation, the album features so many wonderful tracks such as Vegan Sushi with its swirling keys and delicate vocals, In A Meeting with its Casio tones, cascading drum breaks and 7th St/7th Ave with its sharp guitar and osculating vocals. Sharing her insights and detailing her technical approach to it all, Kristina describes how she constructed the songs on the record which harks back to some of her earliest days. “I think a lot of my thought process in creating a song is like creating a choir - everything feels like a voice to me, fitting in its right place. I like to think about space a lot and how it’s just as important to leave space as it is to fill it. I guess a song in my head looks a certain way, and sometimes as I am making it more parts of it are revealed that I didn’t expect to see. Sometimes I can see the whole thing and it’s just about putting it on paper so to speak. I did really try to push myself with tones this time. If I was using mods that made me uncomfortable, I would try to push it further and see if I could find something outside of my normal comfort zone.” Although as Kristina humbly points out “the thing that brought all these ideas to fruition was working with Ark Calkins. They have been a player in koleżanka since its inception, and they’re really patient with the unhelpful and awkward ways I try to communicate ideas. We spent about a week together finishing these songs up right before the pandemic, and I would play through some bass ideas or try to mouth a beat and they would translate it into something amazing. They really took the reins a lot with bass and drum parts, and that transformed so much on this record. The cascading live drums in “In a Meeting" was all them. I remember getting that file back after bucking a first drum take (we were writing remotely between states sending things back and forth) and just being floored. I’ve historically been stubborn in wanting to write or produce every part of something I was making, and it was the best lesson to relinquish some control and allow someone I trust to help me create something.”
Asked as to whether lyrically there is a common denominator throughout the record and if each track is communicating a common message, Kristina simply states “I suppose “place”, as the record title acknowledges. “What is a place and what is a home” - a question from the song “B2YP”. I almost called the record “Place is a mantra” from the lyric in the song “7th st/7th Ave”, “place is a mantra repeated ’til a voice is tired’. The record is a study on defining “place” and “space” in stasis and in motion. I guess there are a lot of themes of locomotion; wandering, walking, running, moving. Unintentional to be frank, but poignant to the themes of place and space while in movement.” On the verge of the records release and upon reflection of where does Place Is sit in terms of the original vision for it and what was ultimately laid down on tape, Kristina clarifies the question by saying “I truly think we did well in capturing what Arkie and I had in mind, and what we created in our own demos. When we both respectively went into the studio (we recorded drums and bass apart from everything else because the pandemic made it impossible to travel), we used the demos we made as a checklist and tried to repeat as much as we could from them. We made a point to stick to the demos as much as possible. One thing that did change was the presence of more grit and harshness in the guitar tones used. Upon first listen, a friend remarked that he thought I should push myself a bit more out of my comfort zone. My go-to tone work felt too soft and subdued for these newer songs. I went back in and overdubbed some of the guitars with the engineer and found some new sonic arena that really brightened and bolded things.”
What Kristina has delivered in the shape of her debut record is a summation of all that has preceded her and through personal growth, hard fought battles and an unwavering ability, Place Is becomes the kind of album that should be worn as a badge of honor. A personal diary and thought bubble that has now been shared with the world and through its pages, is a record that is hugely relatable for many people and is sonically an artwork to be celebrated and admired.
