Welcome to the Dreamstate: An Interview of Kelly Lee Owens

Kelly Lee Owens for her album Dreamstate, blue sky and green grass with portrait

Album cover for Dreamstate
Image courtesy of Huxley
Photo credit: Samuel Bradley


interview by Mia Milosevic


Dreamstate breathes life into the experience of being human through electronic synths, poetic sonics, and an adeptness to color purportedly infused in our ether. Pioneering the electronic sound alongside revolutionaries such as Björk, Kelly Lee Owens has emerged as a maestra of techno. Tactfully and seamlessly blending drum and bass into a Berlinesque rave set, Owens punches the ceiling of what many understand electronic music to be. Her urge to go higher lays at the core of her latest album, which elementally fuses the concept of air into its resonance. Owens’ embrace of what it truly means to dream underpins the emotive beats which transcend her audience. 

Dreamstate is out on Friday, October 18th via dh2/Dirty Hit.

MIA MILOSEVIC: First of all, congratulations on the upcoming release of your album.

KELLY LEE OWENS: It's still a mad feeling. It doesn't matter how many times you do it, it's like a child and the child's gonna go out into the world by itself for the first time. It's exciting. And it's nerve-racking. Creating something from nothing takes a huge amount of life force energy, as it should.

MILOSEVIC: Tell me about the title of the album, Dreamstate.

LEE OWENS: Well, it's an interesting one because I wrote the songs first, and I came up with the name and the title last, but then I found a photo of me last summer in Wales when I was playing with the Chemical Brothers, sitting on a graffiti wall that says “dreamstate.” So somewhere that must have really gone in. I was a daydreamer, my mom used to call it “Kelly's World.” I didn't know that until recently. It's always been a thing that's potentially deemed as a derogatory term. She's always daydreaming. But actually, it's so important. I just feel we're at this strange time in history with technology, so to be grounded and to dream with oneself is more important than ever. Also, to come into spaces with others and be able to transcend while you're awake is definitely what I'm interested in.

MILOSEVIC: I see that for electronic music, and especially with your music. I love the idea of your work kind of fighting the urban edge of techno, because you bring a lot of humanness to it. 

LEE OWENS: I think it's about accepting both the light and the dark edges of yourself. There's this Murakami quote, which I always butcher, and it just basically says that when you're feeling high and good, go to the highest, furthest point. I often think of this album as the element of air. For me, every single album I have is a different element. But this one elementally is air, so there's lots of themes of higher rise.

MILOSEVIC: What’s your attraction to electronic music over other genres? 

LEE OWENS: It was such a visceral moment when it happened, actually. It was during the Drone Logic sessions with Daniel Avery and I was in this incredible studio called Strong Rooms in Shoreditch, which is still there. I think what's interesting about that place is that lots of different types of music have been made there. The Spice Girls made their first album there. I grew up in the '90s, so I was like, oh my God! They used to practice their moves in the courtyard, apparently. And then there was a little old me, this girl from this village in Wales, witnessing synths and electronic production in action. I very quickly wanted to be a part of it because it was so tangible and visceral and totally an extension of yourself and your soul. I think it's Björk that says if there's no soul in the music, that's because you haven't put it there. Dance music can be cold or emotionless, some of it. I mean, it's so, so vast these days. But for me it was about fusing that emotional nuance and experience in there. I could create a song, but just in a different way than traditionally. I don't come from a traditional background in terms of reading or writing music, so that was never really gonna be a path for me. I just literally fell in love with the frequencies, the resonances, the sounds, the tangibility, and have been literally obsessed ever since.

MILOSEVIC: That's so cool. I do feel like there's a new advent of electronic music where it is becoming more and more emotional. Like with your music, with Fred again’s music, which I feel is blowing up for some of the same reasons, it’s electronic music with a very emotional aspect to it. 

LEE OWENS: Totally. I think that it's people's storytelling. As time moves and electronic music has been around for a while, people can experiment in new ways. There's so much interesting electronic music now. It's not just one thing, which I personally love. I'm not a purist about it, but then there's certain things that will always make me tick—like anything that has an acid synth line on it. 

 

Image courtesy of Huxley
Photo credit: Samuel Bradley

 

MILOSEVIC: Can you talk about the production of Dreamstate? I loved what you said about the making of the album being a collaborative experience, but also about how dreaming is generally synonymous with solitude.

LEE OWENS: It sort of started coming to me in 2022. The feeling comes first, the shapes and the sonic qualities that I think I want. They come early and I have notepads and I just write down the feelings and the colors. And it was actually brat green! This is 2022. So this is the thing, you're never alone in this. It's like we're all tapping into something collective and we all create our own versions of what's needed. I knew it was about a collective experience. And then going on tour with Depeche Mode in 2023 informed me again. I was inspired by the juxtaposition of anthemic moments, and then also super raw, vulnerable, intimate moments that actually Depeche Mode was so good at encapsulating.

MILOSEVIC: It’s crazy that you had the brat green color written down in your notes more than two years ago.

LEE OWENS: It's crazy because it just kept coming to me. I think it's Rick Rubin that says art is all there in the ether. And it’s just about who captures it and in what way. I've seen that recently, where there's this collective consciousness with artists. My cover for Dreamstate, it had to be blue. The amount of covers that have come out that have blue backgrounds! I just see these patterns and it's so interesting to me. I always bring it back to the Yves Klein photograph of him, a leap into the void where he's reaching for the color blue and he’s jumping off a wall to reach for this dream of capturing this perfect blue for the International Klein Blue. He's taking a leap of faith doing it. I found out that there were actually people Photoshopped out of that image who were there to catch him. And that's what every artist and person needs—community. You never do anything alone. It’s about the heights that you have to go to and the dreams that you have to at least try to reach for. 

MILOSEVIC: It's like capturing the dreamstate.

LEE OWENS: That’s a good way of putting it.

MILOSEVIC: So the process is collaborative, but I’m fascinated by the idea of dreaming being something one does in solitude.

LEE OWENS: I did that for like a year and a half before I made a sound. That’s the notepad for me. That was me keeping the channel open and being with myself and being in nature or wherever. If an idea or a thought or texture came to me, I committed to writing that down and figuring out what it was. It's so important to create that space for yourself. Otherwise nothing can come through, no truth can be accessed. I'm talking about a very deep truth of something that's beyond yourself, that is collective. You can't truly know what that is for yourself if you're just on social media being told and sold what your dreams are and what you should do. It's harder than ever to not be literally influenced, as we know.

We're at such a strange point in history where we could easily go down a very dark path. We know that at least in the western world, mental health is a huge issue, and so to be proud of dreaming and daydreaming feels important. So for me, dreaming brings life to this experience of being human. 

MILOSEVIC: I think that’s so interesting in the context of music, since music is this universal thing, but it mostly speaks to individual experience. 

LEE OWENS: I’d say that's the ideal. I remember going to Berghain, I only went once, I played in the cantina next door, did a live show, and then I got escorted into Berghain, which apparently never happens. The guy on door was like, “Kelly?,” and I was like, oh my God, here we go. It was what felt like a cathedral of techno. What I always remember was that there were some groups of people, but a lot of people went alone. So they were alone together. They were in their own world dancing, not even looking up sometimes, for like hours. And yet, they were with their people through sound. That's really what inspired me. That was a long time ago, but it just stuck with me. I think that's a form of the dreamstate as far as I'm concerned.

 

Image courtesy of Huxley
Photo credit: Samuel Bradley

 

MILOSEVIC: I would love to talk about your upcoming tour and what you have planned for the show.

LEE OWENS: We actually get to create a world and build something where people step into a room, it's really gonna be Welcome to the Dreamstate. There's gonna be lots of spoken words and poems that open up the space. I'm really excited to present that world to people creating new visuals, it's still just gonna be me on stage. I still feel like that is where I'm at right now. I think playing with Depeche Mode gave me the confidence to continue to do that. It's gonna be very much a journey with those punctuations of emotive vulnerability, which I've never done before.

MILOSEVIC: I know that you started out working in a cancer treatment hospital. Do you think that your attraction to electronic music is tied to that in a way? I’m just thinking about transcendence in electronic music and the way that you describe it. 

LEE OWENS: I used to think that it was so opposite to have done auxiliary nursing, working in cancer hospitals and also a nursing home before that. Being around death and medicine, and then I go and do music, people were like, “oh God, that's different.” When the pandemic happened, I was getting messaged by doctors and nurses saying how “Inner Song” was helping them through one of the most difficult times of their life. That was a full circle moment for me. What I loved about that job as auxiliary nurse was I could physically help people in the moment, it was an instant exchange of care. After my shift would end I’d sit there with patients who were dying, who had no one—I was 18 at the time. The more I've created music and just as a music fan, as a music lover, as an obsessor of music, I know what it does for people. You hope that your music can affect people in that way. It's not up to you to know if it does or not. Yoko Ono said something about doing good work and how it ripples eternally. It's not for you to determine how good it is or what it will do or not, but your job is to stay open and keep creating.

Designing Exit Strategies: An Interview with Composer and Musician Holly Herndon

photograph by Maria Louceiro

Many people are quick to label San Francisco based musician and composer Holly Herndon a “futuristic” artist, but the truth of the matter is that she may actually be more present than many other artists that are working in electronic music genre. Present in the sense of her intentions and her use of the tools of our time. It is the music of the future imagined ten or fifteen years ago when composers were still primitively discovering and harnessing the power that computers can offer in terms of the construction of music. Moreover, Herndon is coming to the electronic music genre with a scholarly background and a deep understanding about the processes of music – after leaving Tennessee for the Berlin club scene where she immersed herself in the sounds of that culture, she received her degree from Mills College in Oakland. She studied under the likes of John Bischoff, James Fei, Maggi Payne, and Fred Frith. This year, Herndon saw the release of Platorm on the 4AD label. It is her second official album and it is being lauded by critics across the board. Autre was lucky enough to catch up with Herndon for a convo – she discusses the state of club music, her early experiences as a choir girl growing up in the South, and her blurring of the line between academia and pop music. 

Joe McKee: Tell me about the new record. I’d like to get an idea of what’s evolved, what’s changed, what direction it’s gone—musically, thematically, lyrically.

Holly Herndon: It’s always weird to summarize your own music. But I would say that it makes sense on this trajectory that went from Movement to “Chorus” to where it is now. If you follow that trajectory, you’ll end up somewhere that makes sense for this new record. I think one of the biggest aesthetic changes is that it’s involved other people. Movement was me being a weirdo in a room with no windows. It was a very isolated exercise. Whereas this has been very collaborative, which has been really good and healthy.

JM: What brought you to that point? Was it purely that getting too insular was starting to drive you a little bit mad? Or was it that you were feeling you needed to shake things up creatively?

HH: There’s some of that. But there’s also some of the navel gazing-ness that comes with working insularly. That was bothering me, in general, about music—specifically dance music. I felt like there was a lot of inward-reflection, where right now in our world we need more outward-reflection. There’s been a lot of escapism in the club in the last several years. I think escapism has a place, but right now, what we need is people designing exit strategies instead of partaking in escapist hedonism.

JM: And finding solutions?

HH: Yes, but it’s not “solutions” as in “solutionism.” In the Bay Area, that’s a problem with tech. People are very solution-oriented. With tech, you can solve any problem. I think it’s great when people are problem-solving, don’t get me wrong. But there’s also a problem with solutionism as a whole, when you think that you can solve any problem. This leads me to [an] interesting thinker, Benedict Singleton. He talks about building a platform of new ways for people to communicate with each other. He’s a designer by practice, so a lot of that comes out of the fact that you can never design the perfect future. You can never foresee all of the ways in which the world is going to change. You’ll design for the perfect future, but then something will be invented that changes the game entirely. You have to start over. You have to think in an entirely different way. So instead of trying to design this perfect solution, it’s more important to design platforms to communicate in interesting, new ways. Then, it’s like a petri dish. People can come up with their own solutions to new problems as they arise.

JM: Can you give any examples?

HH: One example for that would be Twitter. It’s kind of a cheesy example, but Twitter was originally designed to be an internal communication messaging board for quick messages inside of a company. Now, it’s become a platform for all kinds of different things. It’s a platform for people to talk about race issues, anything. Twitter has become its own beast—there’s no longer that little, internal communication. It was never designed to be a platform for these specific things. But it was designed in a way for people to communicate. 

JM: Let me reign you in and ask, where does that come into play in the record and the collaborative element?

HH: I started thinking about how I felt that a lot of club world was navel-gazing, insular, and escapist. I started to ask, How can music be an agency? How can music be important, and invited to the table to talk about important things, not just escapism or entertainment? I started looking to people who are thinking about these same things, but maybe in a different discipline. That’s how I started working with Metahaven.

JM: Tell me a little bit about Metahaven. Have you collaborated with them again on this record?

HH: I’ve been working with them a lot throughout the past year. Mostly just epic, long email exchanges. We did the video, and we’re working on some other stuff. They designed the cover for the record. I was interested in them as a design collective because this is exactly how they’ve approached their practices over the past couple of years: They said, “We’re really good designers. We have a great aesthetic eye. But we also care about all these other things. How can we use design as a force for good, or a force to talk about other things that we care a lot about?” If you look into some of their work, you’ll see really good examples of what I’m talking about. Some of the books that they’ve published and some of the projects that they’ve done are very much aligned with what I’m talking about. That’s why I was so drawn to working with them.

JM:  I’m curious as to how you got to this point creatively. Your upbringing—everything that I’ve read, it seems to begin in Berlin. Forgive me for not digging that deep; I like to keep a little mystery. But prior to Berlin, how did you find yourself composing music, particularly on a laptop? Did it begin at a young age? Did you come from a music family? What instigated this long, complex, in-depth journey that you’ve had with composition?

HH: My earliest musical experiences were in the church. I was in the church choir. I was also in the school choir and the state choir. That’s where I learned how to read music. I also took guitar lessons at the church. I grew up in the South, so a lot of life outside of school is church-involved. But I also started making weird, cut-up radio shows—not a real radio show, but a recording on a cassette. I started doing that when I was really young with my best friend—fifth grade. Ten or eleven.  Really young—we were playing with dolls. We had this radio show, which was so insane—I don’t know why we came up with it. But now that I’m thinking back on it, it was probably a weird response to the neo-con radio stuff that we were exposed to. But we had this radio show called “Women’s Radio.” I did not grow up in a feminist situation. We would do fake interviews with Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton.

JM: That sounds quite advanced for a ten or eleven year old, I must say.

HH: We didn’t know what we were saying. Madeleine Albright was a serious thinker—we were not bringing her to light at all.

JM: I was climbing trees and bumping into things at that age, so its very impressive that you were doing those things.

HH: I seriously think if you listened to it now, you wouldn’t be impressed, [but] I started messing around with recording over stuff—in a super-simplified way. That’s my earliest memory of sampling.

JM: Bridging the gap between then and now, can you give me a little dot-point form of how you found yourself in Berlin in that club scene world? And then coming to a point of exploring the academic angle?

HH: When I was in East Tennessee, I knew that the local German teacher arranged exchange programs if you learned German. I really wanted to get out of East Tennessee and go to Berlin. This is before I knew what “Berlin” meant, naturally. I didn’t know it as an electronic music site or anything like that. I just knew that it was far, far away.

"I loved Tennessee, obviously. But at that age, it’s like, 'Get me the fuck out!' I learned German and did this exchange. Through that, I met a German guy, and I fell in love with him. He was a club kid, so I was initiated into that world. We broke up." 

JM: You wanted to get the hell out of Tennessee?

HH: I loved Tennessee, obviously. But at that age, it’s like, “Get me the fuck out!” I learned German and did this exchange. Through that, I met a German guy, and I fell in love with him. He was a club kid, so I was initiated into that world. We broke up.

JM: Do you feel like you got stuck in the club scene?

HH: It’s like anyone who explores music. I feel like people get really stuck on the club part, and that’s probably because it was the first thing that I did. But I was also involved in other scenes in Berlin. I was always going to new music concerts. I was never fully satisfied with one thing. I was always trying to check other things out.

JM: Then what did you do?

HH: Then, I wanted to formally study. I was always trying to make stuff myself, and it never really sounded the way I wanted it to sound. I applied to a program in Berlin and to Mills. I got into both programs, but I decided to go to Mills because it seemed like a better fit. Fortunately it was a really good fit. That’s when I got exposed to the more academic side. But Mills is a very unusual place for the academy. It’s super hippie, super laid-back. I wouldn’t have been able to go to a more traditional program. Mills is a pretty special place for that. And I had never considered doing a doctoral program. I had never even thought about it. But then, when I was at Mills, that was something people were talking about. I didn’t even realize it was an option. Then, I started to learn more about the DIY computer music history in the Bay Area. I learned about CCRMA [Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics] which is here in Palo Alto. It’s like a rabbit hole—you uncover one thing, then you uncover the next thing.

JM: It seems that the more you dig into the music composition, sound art world, everything seems to be under the cover of darkness. The more you dig, it’s incredible what’s revealed. I’ve been having chats with a few people of late, and I find it incredible. The support group, the size of this scene—it is really not exposed in a big way. It’s a massive undercurrent, internationally, which I’ve only learned about in the last few months.

HH: As part of my program, we teach. I was able to introduce new curriculum, which is awesome. So I’m able to teach my own class—the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music Post-1980. A lot of programs stop their pedagogy, the repertoire they cover in the 70s. The 60s and 70s was the heyday of electronic music, and no one wants to talk about the digital 80s. This musicologist PhD student and I designed this program together. Even though it doesn’t sound like a lot of time--1980-2015—it’s so hard to cover everything we care about. It was this huge timespan; we keep running out of time in all of our lectures. That’s the wonderful thing about music—you can always be learning about something new.   

JM: Now, maybe, more so than ever. It’s endless, the amount of music that’s being created and released. It’s impossible to keep up.

HH: It is impossible. But that’s one of the purposes of the class. It’s not about learning the history, necessarily. The history is important, but it’s not about having a photographic memory. It’s more about having the skills to be able to make an aesthetic judgment on something—why you like something, or why you don’t like something.

JM: That’s a very good point.

HH: When something is released after the students have come out of the class, I want them to be able to listen to it and make up their own minds. I want them to be able to argue why they think it is or is not good, to know its history.

JM: On a completely different note, can you tell me about your time learning with Fred Frith? I’m a fan of his work.

HH: Oh, that seems like ages ago! Fred is an awesome composition teacher. Stylistically, we’re very different. There are some composition professors who impose their sound on you. And then there are those really great ones who don’t impose their sound or even their aesthetic on you. Instead, they try to give you the tools to be able to better shape your own work, or think about your work in different ways. He was one of those in the latter category.

JM: I dare say there are some parallels between your work and his. Despite his being more acoustic-based, I can see parallels.

HH: Just the whole improv thing—that’s a huge deal at Mills. They have a program for improvisation. I wasn’t in that program, but it’s so small that people from different programs are all together. People were improvising all over the place. I was in his improvisation ensemble when I was there. I don’t improvise in the same way—I don’t do free improv now. But having that experience definitely has impacted my studio and performance practices.

JM: I’m curious how that affects your composition, too. Being from an academic background, your job is to dissect and intellectualize your work. Where do you draw the line between the cerebral and the visceral? Is there an element of chance in your compositions? I was speaking with Jonathan Bepler about this; improvisation is a huge part of his composition. How does that come into play when you’re dealing with things like computers and software?

HH: I think it depends on for whom I’m writing. If I’m writing for myself, a lot of it comes out of studio improvisation, setting up the system and then improvising with it. If I’m writing for someone else, I make a conscious decision on how much freedom I want the player to have within the composition. I wrote a soprano solo last year, and I gave her, basically, chords and rhythms to play with. But I gave her great flexibility as to how she wanted to order the. It totally depends on for whom I’m writing, what the point of the piece is, what the performer/composer dynamic is.

JM: But did you find—in the case of writing this record—that there were moments of chance and improvisation? 

HH: Of course! That’s what noodling around in the studio is, eventually. Its not always, and then I’m going to do this. It’s like, this part works, I’m going to try out this thing and see what it sounds like next to it or on top of it. That’s improvising, too. A lot of it is setting up a vocal or percussion system, letting it run, playing within it, and then picking out the good parts. A lot of the percussion parts are written that way.

JM: When you’re creating these on the laptop, in a fairly academic realm, you’re really blurring the lines between the worlds of academia, club music, electronic music, and pop music. What is the pull-push relationship there? Is there much thought that goes into it? Or is it a natural inclination to tie all of these worlds together?

HH: I think it’s something that I have been wanting to do for a long time but didn’t know how. I felt like that was a burden that I was placing on myself—and maybe the academy was, lightly, but not overtly. You can hear that in Movement. It’s almost like each track is in a different genre. It’s contained—this track is like this, this track is like that. That was still my brain separating things. I don’t want to feel like I want to do something for one context and something different for another context. But I feel like that’s imposed on me sometimes, too, because I can work in different scenarios. I’ve had festival organizers ask me to play their festival but not play any beats. That was really strange—why is there this divide? Especially when it’s considered a divide between a low-brow and high-brow thing. The album definitely has tracks that clearly belong somewhere. If you needed to categorize the tracks, they would clearly be in a different category than other tracks. But I think I’m getting better at blending all of my interests more seamlessly.

Click here to download Platform in multiple formats. Holly Herndon will also be making a number of appearances, including Mississippi Studios in Portland, Oregon on July 30 (buy tickets here). Visit her website for more tour dates.  Interview by Joe McKee. Intro text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram for updates: @AUTREMAGAZINE