Doors: 8pm // Fortunes.: 8.30pm - 9pm // Kelela: 9.30pm - 10.45pm

KELELA
(USA)

With great excitement, Handsome Tours and Frontier Touring present Kelela's return to Melbourne for a headline performance at 170 Russell this January.

With great anticipation, Kelela's debut album emerges as an epic portrait of an artist spanning the past and future of R&B. In her hands, however, the genre knows no boundaries and so Take Me Apart exists as an absolutely singular and fearless addition to a canon of recent classics. From her very earliest work, honesty and vulnerability have been cornerstones of Kelela's art - even when clad in the armor of the avant-garde electronics she so deftly inhabits - and Take Me Apart sees her double down on both the emotional intensity and resonance of her message as well as the sonic seeking she is renowned for.

Expressing an honest vision of how we navigate dissolving ties with each other and yet remain sanguine for the next chance at love, the emotional ricochet is traced across the album's narrative. Take Me Apart stands not only as an intensely personal chronicle, but also a defiant and turbulent statement direct from Kelela; "Despite it being a personal record, the politics of my identity informs how it sounds and how I choose to articulate my vulnerability and strength. I am a black woman, a second-generation Ethiopian-American, who grew up in the 'burbs listening to R&B, Jazz and Bjork. All of it comes out in one way or another."

The process of crafting Take Me Apart embraced the approach of widely collaborative R&B, hip-hop and pop production while roaming a strange and wonderful path. Working with a cast of peers including Arca, Jam City, Kelsey Lu, Terror Danjah, and The xx's Romy Madley-Croft (just to name a few) - Kelela deconstructs many results of their collaborations and builds them back up into pieces of a cohesive whole, effectively orchestrating these multitudes in aid of her singular vision. "It's this tapestry I've knitted together that attracts different types of listeners and challenges them at the same time, often within the same song.