Katsy Pline is the name songwriter Evie Brown chose when she started putting music online. “It started out as a joke on my Facebook page,” Brown said. “I grew up listening to Tammy Wynette, Skeeter Davis and Patsy Cline. I didn’t want to put my real identity out on the net, so I made up a name that would hint at the kind of music I was aiming for.” Brown went on to describe her music style and influences. “Gram Parsons described his sound as Cosmic American Music,” she said. “It was a blend of folk, rock, soul, country and R&B. I was already composing music with sounds based on the experimental music I was hearing in San Francisco. I wanted to make music that was strange and otherworldly, but still grounded in country and Americana. “I tried to incorporate the composers and styles I think of when I hear the word ‘cosmic’—the synth explorations of Suzanne Ciani, the blissful noise of Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, the openness of Pauline Oliveros,” she added. “I took all the music I was into and blended it to make something ecstatically coherent.” Brown put out three albums that combined country with low-key synth effects in the background, including In This Time of Dying, No Peace in the Valley and Incandescent Fire. All the while, she slowly moved in a more speculative direction. “There’s a subgenre people are calling ‘ambient country,’” Brown said. “It incorporates the melancholy and yearning of country music with ambient techniques and electronics. That’s how I came to the instrumental sounds I’m currently working on.” Brown showcased the transcendental sounds she put together on her recently released six-track EP, Devotion. Producer George Cory Todd, who also played bass and synthesizers, helped make it. Brown’s friend Geoff Saba sat in on “Moonrise On Telescope Peak,” the improvisation that closes the record. The set opens with “Against Leviathan.” A sustained mid-range synthesizer chord plays off against the sound of chirping birds and icy notes from Brown that sound like a bluesy pedal steel guitar, highlighted by dub reggae-like effects. “I have a B-Bender guitar,” Brown said. “It has a lever in the body of the instrument that can raise the tone of the B-string a whole step. That makes it sound like a pedal-steel. I use a lot of effects pedals as well, so I can get unexpected sounds out of the fretboard when I play.”  “Midnight Sun Reverie” features a buoyant melody playing over long, ominous synth-chord notes and a marching rhythm created by the throbbing sounds of an electric bass. The melodic line suggests the ghost of Don Helms, who played steel with Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. Midway through, the synthesizer sends out high-pitched waves of spacey ambience, slowly fading into the reverberation, as if a wave is hitting a beach on another planet.    The sound of wind blowing on an open mic introduces “Sugar Pine.” Dark, distorted synth tones lay the foundation for Brown’s simple, chiming melody and a Hawaiian-sounding counter-rhythm. The shimmering synth pulsations slowly descend into loud, dissonant tones, with Brown’s short, sharp melodic bursts dancing through the mix.   “To me, experimental music is about creating otherworldliness, both aesthetically and politically,” Brown said. “I feel a devotion to a new logic of composition, new ways of living together, new ideas of beauty. I like letting the focus be on textural development, rather than harmonic motion.” She added, “I suppose I’m trying to capture the melancholy and beauty of living in an empire in its death throes—fascism ascendant, the dictatorship of capital seemingly undefeatable, queer desire in the metropole—in the idioms and forms of country music.” More insight into Brown’s approach can be heard every Monday morning at 11am, when she hosts Katsy Pline’s Heartbreak Ahead: Country-Western and Esoterica on BFF.fm, an online radio station in San Francisco. “I describe it as ‘exploring the infinite blue,’ the junction of country and western, experimental music and finger-style guitar,” Brown said. She added, “I like a lot of obscure stuff and classic country sounds from the ’30s to early ’70s. The Carter Family, Hank Williams, Slim Whitman. I also feature archival recordings of a different radical writer each week: Diana di Prima, Amiri Baraka, David Wojnarowicz.”  Listen to ‘Devotion’ and other Katsy Pline albums at: katsypline.bandcamp.com.