Teeming with mini handbags, fur-detailed coats, baggy jeans and scarves, Kitty Craft fans lined up around The Vermont Hollywood in reds and blacks and blues and purples. After a 20-year hiatus, Pamela Valfer, under the alias Kitty Craft, returned to the stage on Nov. 20 for a brand-new audience of young fans.
The line outside the venue resembled a fashion show more than anything else, with numerous fans standing around sharing joints and cigarettes as they awaited admission. With opening acts from Cryogeyser, lor2mg and social media sensation DJ Irene Lee, concertgoers had plenty of time to amble about the venue in their Mary Janes and Doc Martens — buying merch and ordering drinks from the bar.
Plenty of heads dotted among the crowd sported yellow-and-black-striped Kitty Craft beanies reminiscent of the “Beetlejuice” sandworms, as they swayed back and forth to the music. Valfer herself wore a t-shirt that read, “DRINK WATER / LOVE CATS / FIGHT RACISM.” Her set was backed by experimental animation films spanning from the ‘30s and ‘40s through the ‘60s and ‘70s. With flowers and moving shapes, the show transformed from mere performance to an immersive experience.
Kitty Craft’s first two EPs, “It’s Stupid” and “I Got Rulez,” were released on cassette in 1994 and 1997, respectively. With a stripped-down sound, her music is easily categorized as DIY. Valfer suspects that the resurgence of interest in her music has a lot to do with how it was recorded.
“I think that the way that it was recorded has a very familiar, or, what’s the word I’m looking for, nostalgic [feel], because it’s from a record, so there’s a warmth there in the sampling and things of that nature,” she said in an interview with New University. “It’s an unquantifiable familiarity, and perhaps it brings a warmth from the past, which I think people are craving.”
Her sound became a bit more intricate with the release of her first full-length albums, “Beats and Breaks from the Flower Patch,” in 1998 and the subsequent “Catskills” in 2000. She began working with a sampler, letting her songs become fuller without losing the crackling depth of sound.
Valfer begins her process with the music, and once the song is complete, she references a book of thoughts and poetry phrases to piece together the lyrics of the song. Though many Kitty Craft songs sound quite upbeat with dreamy synths and looping beats, many of Valfer’s lyrics are melancholy.
“Just looking backwards, I think a lot of my writing is kind of about where I’m at in that moment. There’s a lot of my perspective on things,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll kind of extend beyond that a little bit and think about larger subjects, but it tends to be me-centered.”
Valfer came up with the name Kitty Craft more out of necessity than on purpose. While hand-making cassette tapes to send out, she began cutting out the words of 1950s magazines and found “craft” and “kitty” separately. When she put them together, the name stuck.
“Right now, the zeitgeist of the cat thing seems to be really big,” she said. “They’re awesome, and people who know — if you know, you know. So I think they’re great energy antennas. I don’t know; I’ve just always been a cat person, so it just kind of made sense. And I think the music I was making at the time had a sort of kind of sweetness about it, so it just felt right.”
Valfer stepped away from the music scene in the early 2000s to focus on visual art, teaching at institutions including Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Otis College of Art and Design and Chaffey College. Once she was encouraged to release her music that was not online, momentum picked up from there. In 2020, she released “Lost Tapes,” a 30-minute collection of previously unreleased songs.
In her absence, the music industry has changed quite a bit. Though she acknowledges that digital platforms need to make improvements in the realm of artist royalties, she also recognizes that digital music is way more hospitable for a DIY way of thinking.
“There’s this direct-to-people route that just wasn’t there, right?” she said. “It can all be done from your couch, and you can still have a really active back-and-forth with fans and people, and you can control your masters — and a lot more. If you’re industrious, you don’t have to sign away your life. I think it’s a lot more user-friendly.”
The newfound public interest in her music has reinvigorated her passion for live performance and songwriting, inviting her to explore this side of herself once again. Valfer plans to continue touring with Kitty Craft into next fall and summer, and more of her ethereal music should be in store in a future nearer than 20 years from now.
Lillian Dunn is the 2024-2025 Arts & Entertainment Editor. She can be reached at lbdunn@uci.edu.
Edited by Alaina Retodo and Jaheem Conley
