Kay Rowan (she/her), sometimes known as ‘ghostgirl’, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and all around sad person.
As ghostgirl, Kay has released a number of singles and a full length EP, ‘I’m going out, and I may be some time‘ to broad, critical acclaim, and has performed at prestigious events such as Cambridge Folk Festival back in 2023. She also composes music for stage and screen, has worked on a wide variety of short films, and collaborated with ensembles ranging from Echo Vocal Ensemble and Psappha. Between all of this, she is also writing her first, full-lenth fantasy novel, currently going by the title ‘Project ACOS‘, because she seemingly wasn’t busy enough.
(…) “In January 2024, I set myself the challenge, inspired by Tessa Violet, of writing an entire album within a month. It was going well until it wasn’t, and the laptop that I used to write music on completely imploded in on itself and died. The only recordings I could salvage from the wreckage of that project were these two song files, a version of “cruel blade” that I recorded during a heavy rainstorm in London, and a thick, broody instrumental track called “it’s human, to look back”.I deliberated for a long time about whether I was going to release them at all. But in a sense, they both achieved exactly what the project I had set out on had intended to do: often I can get stuck in my own head, and overwork songs into oblivion by allowing self-doubt to get in the way of the fact that I am proud of them, and had made them because I believe in them. And now, I couldn’t let that happen, because the software I would use to do that had fallen apart beneath me. (…)
(…) ‘I’m going out and I may be some time’ is the debut EP by Kay Rowan, under the moniker of ‘ghostgirl’, and recorded on one microphone, balanced on a desk in a bedroom, in between the sounds of intimate neighbours, dog barking and police cars.“I am just going outside and may be some time” are the ‘reported’ last words of Antarctic explorer Captain Lawrence Edward Grace “Titus” Oates (1880–1912), which he apparently uttered prior to walking into a blizzard and certain death in a bid to save the lives of his fellow explorers.
In her words: ‘The only through-line in the EP wasn’t lyrical or stylistic: it was the desire for it to be a postcard – a “wish you were here!” to my past self, who had to walk out into the snow in the hope of fighting for my continued existence, so they could see what they still had to look forward to. The music is messy because the life I was recording in at the time was messy, but the music has hope, because I wanted to celebrate that I finally found it. If you’re singing a sad song, it’s happy because you lived long enough to sing it.’ (…)
KAY ROWAN / GHOSTGIRL 