Summary: Portland’s Natasha Kmeto has been honing her brand of electronic soul for a few years now, breaking through with the smoky r’n’b of 2013’s Crisis. On her new album Inevitable, she takes her music into more dramatic territory; where Crisis was quietly spoken, Inevitable‘s tracks often build to breathless crescendos, her voice riding layer upon layer of electronics. “A lot of Crisis was subtle and quiet, and I wanted to contrast that,” Kmeto recently explained to FACT’s Chris Kelly. “From an emotional perspective, it’s very much the bookend to the storyline of Crisis. What I was going through has a lot to do with me becoming more secure and more confident, and the writing and the sound parallel that.” On Kmeto’s FACT mix, she takes vocal and instrumental stems from both Crisis and Inevitable, plus remixes from friends (there are also appearances from DJ Gigs, Kmeto’s DJ alias), piecing them together in a slow-burning live session that climaxes with the vocal from Crisis’s ‘I Thought You Had a Boyfriend’ and sinks back to earth with a forlorn mix of Inevitable’s ‘Peak’. “My objective”, Kmeto tells us, “was to re-imagine all of this original content in a new way for a different perspective on these tracks. It’s been a while since I complied a mix like this and I had a lot of fun with it.”
