Biography
Natasha Kmeto grew up in Sacramento, CA. Both of her parents are musicians, and there was always music on in the house. Motown, funk, jazz, latin jazz, pop, classic rock… she sang along and absorbed everything. Her dad started her on piano and guitar when she was very young, and at 15 she joined her parent's cover band and started gigging around Sacramento. She devoured her older brother's prodigious hip-hop collection, and together they discovered electronic music.
After high school Natasha started working on original music and ended up fronting Downboy, an ambitious rock/funk/everything else band. For three years they played gig after gig around California and Nevada, and released an eponymous CD. Already Natasha's need to push the envelope was evident: she constructed tense, jazz-inflected melodies and used live vocal effects. The band added a sampler and began to add a hip-hop/neo-soul element to their music that featured her vocals more prominently. But as the momentum began to build, the band fell apart.
For the next year Natasha put her own music on hold, singing with a choral group and working on keyboards. Then she took the plunge and enrolled in the keyboard program at the Musician's Institute in Hollywood. The plan was to improve her keyboard skills and start a solo career, so she devoted herself to keyboards and music theory and sang for fun. Always looking to learn and expand her vocabulary, she played keys and sang backup for singer/songwriter Mike Stocksdale, sang backup for several modern R & B bands, and won competitions with her blues band. Throughout school she worked on her own songs, and when she graduated she began work on a new career as a singer/songwriter.
As time went on, it became evident that LA was not the place that Natasha wanted to be. Portland, Oregon has a reputation as an art friendly city with a bustling local music scene, so she took a chance and moved 1000 miles north. In 2008 she released her first EP, 9. A bold and unabashedly artistic piece of work, 9 finds Natasha all but abandoning her traditional influences and conservatory training to create brilliant new music. Somewhere between left-field hip-hop, modern R & B and experimental electronic music, 9 shows Natasha's dedication to art that is relevant and relentlessly original.
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