Cindergarden

Electronic, darkwave-trip. Haunting female vocals. Deep bass and lush synths. Similar artist include Portishead, Switchblade Symphony, Depeche Mode, Android Lust, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Collide, and Birthday Massacre.

Cindergarden is the brainchild of singer, songwriter, and producer Jaymie Valentine. Drawn to music since she was a toddler, Valentine grew up writing songs and studied jazz in college. Inspired by self-driven female songwriters like Tori Amos and Kate Bush and discovering that working solo was much more efficient than a full band arrangement as an environment for expressing her own artistic vision, she created Cindergarden and released her debut album on her own Looking Glass Records label in 2006.

Entitled Underground Light Machine, the album brought together elements of gothic, trip-hop, and electro with a distinctive aesthetic that owed more to antique china dolls—one reviewer compared Cindergarden's sound to Rasputina with keyboards instead of cellos—than the apocalyptic leather and spikes imagery usually associated with industrial music. Underground Light Machine highlighted Valentine's talents both as a singer, as evidenced by the sweetly sad melodies of "Dying Kind," and as a producer, with tracks ranging from dance-friendly synthpop ("Ubiquitous") to quieter, more atmospheric darkwave offerings like "Wasteland," which "evokes Victorian ghost children languishing in dusty attics" (Matthew Johnson, Grave Concerns). Darkly whimsical cover art by painter Allison Meierding helped tie together the album's sound to Cindergarden's industrial-gone-Victorian aesthetic, and the album garnered both critical acclaim and widespread club and radio play, with tracks featured at such institutions as seminal L.A. steampunk institution Malediction Society.

Valentine followed Cindergarden's debut with The ULM Remixes. Released in February 2008, this eight-track digital download is less a typical remix collection than a complete, if condensed, reinterpretation of the entire Underground Light Machine album. Featuring a wide range of contributors ranging from Valentine's friends in the Los Angeles musicians' community (System Syn, In Vaein, The Tleilaxu Music Machine) to some of her own musical inspirations (Neuroticfish, Penal Colony, Babyland's Dan Gatto), the EP moves from melancholy synthpop to hard-edged IDM, breakcore, and industrial eclecticism and back again while retaining the unique moods of its source material.

At the same time, Valentine was also completing Cindergarden's sophomore full-length, The Clandestine Experiment. Drastically different from Underground Light Machine, the new album has a much slicker, more professional sound to it, though wavering bent tones on "Genesis" and tinnily tinkling harpsichords on "Mire" confirm Valentine's fondness for vintage electronics and spooky antique atmospheres. Valentine describes her own role recording the album as that of a mad scientist, and indeed there's a much more experimental mood in play. Tracks range from gothic trip-hop ("Sacrament") to aggressive goth/industrial in the vein of Diva Destruction and The Razor Skyline ("Alibi") to dense, darkly cinematic soundscapes in the vein of latter-day Skinny Puppy ("The Clandestine Experiment"). The Clandestine Experiment also features guest performances from Clint Carney of System Syn (Valentine is also System Syn's live keyboardist) and live Cindergarden drummer Nick Liberatore. Diverse enough for both club-play and quieter, more intimate occasions, The Clandestine Experiment will appeal to fans of industrial and goth alike.