Sin Clair’s “Affirmations #2” is a considered exercise in heady, deconstructed club

Formerly part of The Ninth Wave and now playing keys for The Horrors, Kidd operates in a mode far from gothic pop when alone. “Affirmations #2” is a slice of esoteric deconstructed club produced with a sound collagist sensibility similar to james K and Tirzah. Her chopped-up vocal processing, a nod to Burial, sounds percussive as she voices near-intelligible phrases. However, a song like the accompanying lyric-driven and piano-heavy “Exhale” is its origin. Kidd begins writing on the piano, then tears those songs apart upon returning after a few months, but still harnesses how it’s “incredibly real, highlighting the impurities of the creaks in the piano,” as she describes. “My songwriting process comes from the amalgamation of these two things, which sounds like it should be absolutely horrible, but sometimes it yields really good results.” This artful synthesis of organic instrumentation and mechanical computer music shows great promise; only those who witnessed her rare live performances had initially heard them. Now, four years later, Kidd is revealing her sonic world untethered from genre limitations, with these two earlier works from an upcoming larger project showing what’s to...