KETRACELL MUSICAL DUO PERFORMING IN WILLITS
Ketracell, an emerging electro-acoustic musical duo based in Willits, will be performing at the Shanachie Pub on Saturday, July 24 at 8 p.m.
For longtime friends and musical partners, Kyle Madrigal and Lincoln Andrews, Ketracell is the most recent of innovative projects where they are combining acoustic and electronic instruments into an experimental performance piece with sounds from another realm. Madrigal and Andrews would call their sound an “organic electronica” because the sound that Ketracell creates is more of a modern fusion, collecting facets of electronic and acoustic instruments such as guitar, bass and drums.
“This is the sound of now,” a fan had shared with Madrigal at one of their first intimate performances.
Madrigal and Andrews reflect back on 10 years of playing together within various bands and projects, with emphasis on their spirited interest in jamming or
polishing the skills of improv.
In earlier years, the duo had taken creative flight from sounds in their environment, recording their musical response and listening each week to notice the way that they had played and using that to progress as they continued for several months using the same method.
“When I first met Kyle, jamming became a place for me to express and learn and mess around and not having to be nervous, it was my outlet to come and jam. We were just going to play with instruments and let it flow,” shares Andrews.
“There was no discussion of what we were about to play, it was just like something would happen, like we’d hear a faucet start dripping and it would inspire someone to start playing with that or maybe an owl would go off, or just the sound of our breath would be just enough inspiration to start working with that,” says Madrigal.
With the space of the new project, the group envisions fusing the two components of machine-like precision and human
imperfections to basically characterize like musical cyborgs.
During some of the first Ketracell performances they performed sets lasting up to three to four hours. At one show, Madrigal notes having been inspired by an audience member with a rainbow hula hoop rod that had motivated a guitar rhythm and then had become a spoken word movement during the song, where he had a narration about being an alien species coming
to this place for the first time.
The name for the group, “Ketracell,” was inspired from the popular ‘80s sci-fi series “Star Trek,” where Ketracelwhite was a powerful and addictive substance that was programmed into the genetic needs of Jem’hadar species and played a continual theme throughout the show. The need for Ketracelwhite was symbolic of the need for music in one’s life.