The Cradle is the creative vehicle of Brooklyn-born-and-based musician/writer Paco Cathcart. The project began in 2013 with a series of process-as-product style recordings on 4-track cassette. These early tapes are as much explorations of the relationship between artist and her means of production as they are collections of songs: the loose pre-written music was a means to the ends of engaging the sonic possibilities of the tape machine, the room, and the objects immediately present. In the proceeding years, The Cradle has evolved from a deliberately experimental recording project, and the moniker now encompasses more traditional singer-songwriter music where a peculiar poetics and sense of story telling come to the forefront, busted, insular electronic music, soundscape and spoken word, and really just whatever else Cathcart finds himself wanting to do in between, including live performance that ranges from solo guitar and voice to noise-and-movement sets to a groove-oriented, mbira-led full-band incarnation. Despite The Cradle’s ever-expanding oeuvre, the original ethos of spontaneity, reactivity and exploration remains the backbone of Cathcart’s work.