Stranger Cat

BIOGRAPHY

Stranger Cat is vocalist, producer, composer, light artist, video maker, DJ, dancer, and sound healer Cat Martino. Bred in Brooklyn and now calling Miami home, her one woman show masterfully creates live loops using voice, synth and beats, fusing organic and electronic songwriting, and self-made light sculptures to merge music, art and technology, igniting a full sensory experience. Having collaborated with such musical luminaries as with Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten, Son Lux, Lucius, and The Shins (on Saturday Night Live) to name a few. Stranger Cat delivers a range of intricate and soulful experimental art pop.

She was awarded New York Foundations of the Arts (NYFA) Women's Grant (2020) & NYFA/NYC City Corps Grant (2021) as merit to her artistry. Stranger Cat performed at iii Points music festival in Miami (2023), and has performed her unique style of contemporary art pop inside her self-programmed light sculpture installations at Art Basel Miami events 2021-2023. Her voice and songwriting at the center, she is surrounded by keyboards, looping pedals, samples from city and nature sounds, and a multi-media live show including self-made crystalline light sculptures made from sustainable, found materials and her experimental dance videos, using her art as a statement to protect and preserve the environment, and using such elements to yield a full sensory performance experience.

Of the forthcoming new album Slow Jam Love Letters To My Body In Pieces, Cat says: "I wanted to give myself and the listener permission to feel everything - then dance and let it all go - the kind of dance you do alone when no one is looking. I was feeling: show your pain but make it sexy. Make it art.” The backstory here is Cat survived a life threatening accident in 2018 where she was immobilized with her lower body casted in a wheelchair for 5 months, with doctors predicting she would not dance again (she did), and live in pain with cane support (she does not, though manages and keeps close attention to occasional flare ups). “If anything this experience has shown me I am an artist for life, and given me more passion for creating. Life is too short not do what you were born for, and how you want to live out each day, and I aim to inspire others”, says Martino.

Stranger Cat's debut album In the Wilderness was released on Joyful Noise Records, and NPR cites her work "Pairs high-energy production with soaring vocals that sound like a dare to be free," and Noisey/Vice says she, "Hangs in a starry galaxy alongside Kate Bush and Purity Ring." Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Pitchfork, The LA Times, The Boston Herald, and more.

Stranger Cat creates light and sound installations that transport one out of the ordinary world into daydream, fantasy, breath and imagination. She also offers Sonic Sound Baths, using live looped vocals, her original beats, singing bowls and other organic instruments, synths and more, as the YIN side to her higher energy electronic pop. As an experienced yoga teacher, she enjoys sharing the power of healing through sound, merged with the chromo therapy visual aspect of her light sculptures.