Can't is Jessica Rylan, a Boston-based instrument inventor, electronics hobbyist and vocalist who makes some of the most unarmoured and awkwardly intimate noise music ever knowingly purchased by power-electronics fans.
Sonically, Rylan shares a similar hand-carved space to the early work of Voice Crack members Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang, taking their whole concept of "cracked everyday electronics" to very personal ends, with synthesizers that sound almost as if they were home-baked lending an evocative layer of dissonance to her otherwise unaccompanied folk songs and nursery rhymes. Rylan uses this kind of base melodic material in a way that's as ambiguous and disconcerting as Jandek's trilogy of a capella recordings, working little-girl showtunes and desperate, whispered reveries into alternately distressing and endearing forms.
It'd be far too easy to simply describe what Rylan does in terms of "feminising" noise, regardless of just how necessary that may be. Rather, Rylan uses noise as a way of clearing enough space and prociding enough high-colume cover to fully let her guard down. The result is a revelatory marriage of avant garde form and intuitive, almost diarist-style, folk documentation.
- David Keenan, The Wire