I am the beauty on a face
The question of all time and space
I am le Chatelier’s case
The proper way to make a vase
Nehedar’s latest work unfurls like a cracked mirror, each shard reflecting artist Emilia Cataldo’s restless intelligence and sly humour – like hearing Liz Phair swap secrets with Tracy Bonham over a midnight snack, while Letters to Cleo crash in from the next room with the chorus. From her New York apartment (half sanctuary, half laboratory), she fashions a set of songs that balance philosophical rigour with unruly play. What begins as an act of home production becomes a symposium of contradictions: sardonic and tender, analytic yet instinctive, deeply personal but shot through with cultural satire.
Enantiodromia opens the door with a wink and a grimace, a carnival of clowns and closets circling into the abyss. Its sense of duality feels lived-in, not academic: the sound of an artist confronting her own doubles and doppelgängers, laughing even as the abyss glares back. That same fascination with equilibrium drives Power Starfish, a paean to imperfection where science and philosophy are bent into rhyme; a sing-song child’s voice offers an effervescent counterweight to Cataldo’s searching tone: domestic chaos turned metaphysical dialogue.
Cataldo thrives in compressing the infinite into the everyday. Do What Makes U U bursts out like a manifesto scrawled on a napkin, over in a blink but etched in memory. Career Day, by contrast, lingers in the hangover of adulthood, a lament for recognition sung while the city scrolls past. Between these poles sits Revenge, Or Lack Thereof, dismantling the morality play of vengeance with wit sharp enough to draw blood and empathy soft enough to stem the flow.
Her satire blooms into the absurd with Coworkers, a sitcom broadcast from a lonely cubicle, where snacks and existential dread share billing. Misery Loves Company trades mockery for stoic independence, a refusal to join the chorus. By the time we arrive at Heard Morality and S.M.U.G., the gloves are off: Cataldo skewers herd instinct and hollow rebellion with a snarl disguised as a grin, her voice both accuser and accomplice.
The record is haunted by the community’s failures and the individual’s fragile stubbornness. Heaven’s Gatekeeping rails against the small cruelties of envy and exclusion, exposing the price of belonging. #1 Fan sketches obsession in intimate strokes, turning the gaze back on the artist herself. Even the briefest interludes —Patience as a whispered plea, Literally Anything as a lullaby —remind us that brevity can sting as much as grandeur.
Nehedar’s collaborations: cello, drums, child, visual sync films, adding texture without diluting the core: Cataldo confronting the paradoxes of living, parenting, aging, and resisting. The songs glow with the strange energy of someone working alone yet speaking to a crowd. What’s left is an album that thinks aloud, jokes bitterly, aches privately, and still finds room to sing. A record of ideas transformed into encounters, where philosophy is not a lecture but a theatre, lived through voice and verse.
Listen to Power Starfish below and order the album here.
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