A few years ago I wrote about The Pastry Heros, a side-project of Catherine Cooper and Adam Cooper who were in the superb early 90s band Alison’s Halo. But there are other projects they were on, after relocating to Chicago from Tempe, AZ, in the late 90s. One of them is Kitten Factor for sure.

As I mentioned int The Pastry Heros post, Catherine and Adam were on Insta as well, and maybe that’s the project that is more known after Alison’s; Halo.

Kitten Factor added a third member other than the Coopers, it was David Rogers who had been also in Alison’s Halo and Insta, as well as in Half String.

The first thing wee know about them is that there is a 7-song demo. This demo CDR had the following songs: “Brittle (Pop Mix)”, “Brittle (Rock Mix)”, “Dissolve”, “The Pastry Hero”, “Far”, “Mexico Sometimes” and “Jetpacks for Julian”. My curiosity is picked up by the song “The Pastry Hero”. Maybe it was this song that inspired the future project of the same name? Also worth mentioning that “Far” is a live recording done in Tucson, Arizona.

The band’s first release was a 7″ on the Rainbow Quartz International label (RQTZ015) in 1998. This record that had a simple white sleeve and was pressed in pink vinyl had two songs, “Sparkle” on the A side and “Nite Lite” on the B side.

It seems this record was cancelled because of a mistake on the printing of the labels, so the “Sparkle” was labeled as “Nite Lite” and vice versa. So it is a bit harder to come by. What happened after was that the remaining copies were sold through the band’s website and also some came as a bonus disc with the band’s following release, the “Surround EP”.

The “Surround EP” came out in 1999. It was released by the always reliable Sunday Records (SUNDAY 045). This time around we got three songs, “Surround” on the A side and “Dim” and “Leave Me Be!” on the B side. The last song was a cover of The Zombies.

On this record we get details on what each member played. David Rogers played bass on the first two tracks. Nick Pasco played drums on “Leave Me Be!”. Ben Currier on drums on “Surround” and “Dim”.  All other instruments,  were played between Catherine and Adam. The songs were recorded and mixed at Jetpack Studios.

The only appearance on compilations by Kitten Factor was on the superb compilation “Popular World” that was released on CD by Sky Blue Records (001). On this record the band contributed the song “Brittle”.

And just to give a little service to the public, you can find a few copies still of the “Surround EP” on Bandcamp. There we also find a small review by The Big Takeover that confirms that the band hailed from Chicago.

Any other details we should know about Kitten Factor? Did they play live at all?

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Listen
Kitten Factor – Dim