Katherine Christi Evans: Stella Lucente
Lucente Stella – Katherine Christie Evans Bends Time Into Sound
by Jack Rush
Music often serves as a portal to memory, a way of revisiting moments long gone. But with Lucente Stella (Shining Star), Katherine Christie Evans isn’t transporting listeners back to their own past—she’s collapsing centuries themselves. Drawing from a medieval love song preserved in the 1400s Codex Rossi, Evans fuses an ancient melodic fragment with a sound world that could only exist in the present. The result is not nostalgia, but temporal alchemy.
Her operatic vocal lines rise with the devotional purity of early choral music, yet they’re carried through a modern, fractured landscape: overdriven guitars growl beneath them, analogue drums pulse with Kraftwerk-like precision, and ambient textures swirl like restless spirits. What begins as something reverent and liturgical grows darker and more experimental as the track unfolds, almost cracking open under the pressure of its own ambition.
Lucente Stella feels suspended between ages—part hymn, part alt-rock incantation, part electronic fever dream. It honours its medieval source with seriousness and care while refusing to treat it as relic; instead, Evans reanimates it, surrounding its melody with shadowed atmospherics and future-facing production. The piece doesn’t merely bridge time—it folds it, blurring the edges until the past and future occupy the same sonic breath.
If adventurous artistry still means anything, this is the benchmark. Few artists are willing—or able—to leap across centuries, rewire genres, and build new sound languages in the process. Evans, who records, mixes, and produces everything herself, makes the impossible sound inevitable.
Biography
Katherine Christie Evans (she/they) is a DIY queer, nonbinary sound engineer, producer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist from Romford, UK. Their influences span medieval and Renaissance repertoire, IDM, shoegaze, and alternative rock, shaping a style rooted in experimentation and narrative-driven sound design.
Evans records, mixes, and produces all of her own work. Her interpretation of the medieval song Puis Qu’en Oubli—performed on gittern—was selected by Sara Mohr-Pietsch for BBC Radio 3’s Night Tracks, highlighting her ability to bring historical music into renewed emotional focus.
Lucente Stella continues this trajectory, inspired by an anonymous 15th-century Italian love song from the Codex Rossi. With virtuosic vocal writing layered over immersive guitars, analogue electronic percussion, and atmospheric design, the track reimagines a tale of distant, impossible love through a contemporary, genre-defying lens.
The release is accompanied by a striking music video from renowned Italian multimedia artist Thomas Tokamu, whose technological visual language further bridges the medieval into the modern day.
Have a listen and connect with Katherine Christi Evans:
