As art school side projects go, Kitty Craft has to be one of my favourites. As the nom de plume of Pamela Valfer, Kitty Craft sounds like a very twee name, and in this case names don’t lie—they just bend the truth a bit. Like a less quirky, more dreamy Solex, Kitty Craft trades in drum machine breaks and samples, but with a twee-pop sensibility. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s Valfer’s girlish vocals on top of the whole thing. The whole enterprise is delightfully free of self-consciousness, and Kitty Craft’s first album proudly proclaims on the package exactly what you get: Beats and Breaks from the Flower Patch.

This is music made for the light breeze of a gorgeous spring afternoon. Back when I was in university I seriously contemplated making a music video for “Half Court Press”; it would’ve been filled with little kids riding big wheel tricycles and flying kites, and guys playing basketball in the park, and all that good stuff. (This is a good time to mention that I lived next to a park. I probably could’ve just aimed a camera out the window in April.) Most of Kitty Craft’s catalog sounds roughly the same; Catskills is more of the same with better production, and since 2000 the project has mostly run out of steam—an EP mysteriously appeared a couple of years ago, but apparently no one noticed. But what Kitty Craft lacks in variety, it makes up for in purity of intent: no grand statements, no pretension to importance, just the smell of freshly cut grass wafting through the open window, captured and pressed onto vinyl.