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Self-starter

PRIVATE PRACTICE: “I listened to 14th-century choral music,” says Dienel (with bandmate Shawn Creeden). “I wrote songs by beatboxing into a loop pedal. And I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing.”

So, after spending a few years moving back and forth between Boston and NYC, keeping multiple jobs and tiny apartments for the sake of being in the thick of things, Casey Dienel (who plays Great Scott on Wednesday) eventually came to her sensitive senses and vamoosed to Portland, Oregon, to regain her creative composure, as well as obtain some space. Her friends thought this was a stupid idea — but two years later, her rent is still cheap, if someone asks what she does, she can say “musician” instead of “barista,” and sometimes, the beauty of Mount Hood pushing itself through a thick ceiling of sunlit clouds compels her to pull off to the side of the road and just sit there and stare. She’s always 20 minutes from “deep dark nowhere,” where forests of white bark stretch as far as she can see — and she’s loving it. “It’s inextricable, I respond to the environment that I’m in. I’m like a sponge.”

This change of scenery certainly played a part in Dienel’s own proverbial push through the clouds, the newly released Kairos (Dead Oceans). Her third album (and second under her assumed moniker of White Hinterland), it was recorded entirely at home in her newly ample free time. But more pertinent to Kairos’s unique, well, kairos is its spirit of self-reliance.

“I was really ignorant,” she tells me while pulling her cat from a windowsill. “I didn’t know what mics did what, or how to properly record a piano, or how to sing into a microphone the right way.” With no budget, no deadline, and no expectations, Dienel picked up a copy of Digital Performer, learned some basic drum programming, and schooled herself on mic placement — or as she puts it, “I did enough to make myself good enough for the ideas. A lot of times, my imagination is ahead of my skill set at first. But that’s what dreaming is — you kind of have to imagine yourself outside of what you’re capable of doing. I feel like my job as a writer is to get these ideas there.”