Equally informed by the strict conventions of pop and the willful absurdity of performance art, Kingfisher Bluez artist Kristin Witko makes music that is hooky and unsettling, gothic and effervescent. Her LP Zone of Exclusion was released on Kingfisher Bluez on June 28, 2019. It charted in !earshot’s National Top 200 of 2019 and placed #7 on Beatroute’s Best of BC 2019 list.

Kristin is based in Abbotsford, a bedroom community of Vancouver known as British Columbia’s Bible Belt. By the time she started writing songs, she was close to thirty. She’d been married, established a career, and watched her peers have children. But suburban life against the backdrop of disruptive global and personal change nursed strange impulses in this orderly professional. She started expressing those impulses by releasing and performing music—in 2012, in fact, when the Apocalypse finally arrived. (Not with a bang but a whimper.)

Her question was and remains: “Can a person—especially a mature person, especially a working person, especially a woman, especially a queer woman—create a sense of belonging on the earth by publicly manifesting what is alien about themselves?”