New Year. New Music. New Favorites. ChinaShop handpicks the Women to Watch in 2011. Don’t sleep…

NAME: Kate Simko
LOCATION: Chicago
RECORD LABEL: Hello? Repeat
WEAPON OF CHOICE: Juno 106

Patient, passionate and informed by a classical sensibility attenuated from studying masters like Erik Satie and Philip Glass, Kate Simko is about to make some serious sound waves with the release of her debut full-length, Lights Out. Steeped in a Midwestern scene that preached a multitude of styles throughout a number of cities, Simko’s music is fueled by a desire to pull apart the structure of traditional house and techno to reveal its raw emotion, whether it’s the South American flare of “Flight Into BA” or the beatless drone of “Machine’s Mantra.” An adept film scorer, she also provided the exhilarating, perfectly paced soundtrack to 2008′s award-winning independent documentary, The Atom Smashers, which you can purchase digitally through Ghostly International.

WHAT’S NOW: Her Mind On You EP, featuring remixes from Tevo Howard and Daze Maxim, is out now. You can also hear a few mixes on her SoundCloud.

WHAT’S NEXT: Her debut album, Lights Out, comes out June 13.

IN HER OWN WORDS
“More than once or twice you get the comment, ‘Well you’re classically trained, why don’t you show off that you can be virtuosic?’ But sometimes the whole point of learning everything is so you can develop you own taste. One of my favorite classical composers is Erik Satie, who is very minimal but beautiful. You don’t have to be playing eight notes at a time to make beautiful music, but it’s not that he wasn’t capable of that. I like clean music. I like music that tells a story with less by choice. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you want to do it all the time, or that you should.”