Laura Lowther’s voice has been heard by thousands and thousands. Higher identified to the world as KUČKA, the UK-born, Australian-raised, and now America-based songstress burst onto the scene in 2013 with an look on A$AP Rocky’s seminal debut album, Lengthy. Reside. ASAP. Since then, her glassy vocals has been heard on a few of the largest and most influential digital tracks of the previous decade, together with collaborations with the likes of Flume, SOPHIE, Machinedrum and Mount Kimbie.
Excessive-profile collaborations and visitor slots initially grabbed followers’ consideration, but it surely’s Lowther ’s personal expertly-crafted electropop productions made them stick round.
“Emotional voyeurism,” she says with a smile. “That’s the method I’ve been utilizing to place all the pieces collectively.” Lowther is chatting with us from a house studio nestled in a leafy suburb of L.A, and that ‘all the pieces’ she’s referring to is her glorious sophomore album, Can You Hear Me Dreaming?.
Serving a kaleidoscope of feelings, tales, and views throughout twelve tracks, the album sees Lowther experimenting with new genres, types, and collaborators, all whereas placing fantasy entrance and centre. “Being an emotional voyeur, I can write from anybody’s perspective – even somebody created from my creativeness.”
That’s a marked departure from her deeply introspective 2021 debut album, Wrestling, which eschewed any high-profile visitor appearances in favour of emotional honesty and full inventive management.
“With Wrestling, I used to be actually strict on myself,” she recollects of her debut album. “I didn’t need to embrace any songs that didn’t really feel 100 per cent true to my very own expertise. I felt prefer it wanted to be very private.”
This time, nonetheless, she says the tenet was ‘no guidelines’.
![KUČKA, photo by Dillon Howl](https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/KUCKA-1-credit-Dillon-Howl@1050x1313.jpg)
“I needed to essentially open up the method and have enjoyable with it,” she says. “Thematically, I wasn’t restricted to my very own private tales, I wrote so much with my spouse and ended up with a bunch of tracks that I actually preferred. At a sure level, I realised ‘OK, that is an album’.”
Taking the idea of ‘emotional voyeurism’ to coronary heart, Lowther says the album accommodates fragments of real-life tales paired with imagined fantasies, and all overlayed by pictures she’d discover and add to a sprawling temper board. “I can form of become bored with myself,” she laughs. “In actual life, a narrative would possibly finish with you going to the grocery store and wrapping up your day, however if you get into that imaginative a part of your mind there’s one million potentialities and the story can go wherever.”
Album opener, Losing Time (til the tip of the world), dispenses with the right here and now in favour of a near-future dystopia. Atop icy synth tones and snappy, minimalist beats, Lowther’s vocals pop out and in like morse code, telling a surprisingly upbeat story of affection amidst an impending apocalypse.
![KUČKA, photo by Dillon Howl](https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/KUCKA-2-credit-Dillon-Howl@1050x1313.jpg)
“I used plenty of gentle synths and protecting them sounding digital was actually vital,” Lowther says of the music’s manufacturing. “I really feel like I’m surrounded by digital issues always, and plenty of the issues I used to be writing about have been filtered by my pc indirectly.”
A cornerstone of that digital aesthetic was the ’00s basic, BLUE II, from Rob Papen. “Again after I first began producing I really had a cracked model of it,” she confesses with fun. “I all the time thought it sounded actually chilly – which was good for this album as a result of I needed the synths to be actually crisp and digital.”
Whereas Lowther’s dwelling studio boasts its fair proportion of analogue gear, she says a lot of it’s used through the writing, somewhat than the manufacturing, part. “I’ve a few synths that I take advantage of to work out chord progressions and concepts,” she says. “My [Sequential] Prophet 600 will get used on a regular basis as a result of it simply instantly sounds good and has a vibe – but it surely doesn’t essentially make it onto the completed observe. The one synth that I just about all the time use is Moog’s Slim Phatty. For sure bass tones, it’s simply one of the best factor.”
![KUČKA, photo by Dillon Howl](https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/KUCKA-3-credit-Dillon-Howl@1050x1313.jpg)
A proudly digital manufacturing fashion helps unify the album’s twelve tracks, however, on the identical time, these songs are defiantly eclectic. “From the start, I didn’t need any guidelines,” states Lowther. “And that basically opened me as much as pull from completely different genres, completely different concepts. I’d be listening to an industrial observe and considering ‘How are these drums made?’ or asking myself ‘What’s it that I actually love about this style? How can I distil it right into a four-bar loop?’”
The outcomes of these experiments span all the pieces from the sunny electro-pop of Cry, Cry, Cry, to the quasi-industrial grit of Gross Physique, to the ’90s RnB inflected, Heavyweight.
“I used a Korg Electribe ER1 drum machine to jot down Heavyweight,” Lowther says of her latest single. “You possibly can hear that the beats are fairly completely different on that one. I discovered a groove after which resampled all the person layers in order that I might mess with it and convey it into the world of the album.”
![KUČKA, photo by Dillon Howl](https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/KUCKA-4-credit-Dillon-Howl@1050x1313.jpg)
Resampling is a core a part of Lowther’s workflow. Moderately than get caught in previous, acquainted patterns, she says she’s all the time in search of the glad accidents that come when studying a brand new piece of software program or {hardware}. “I’m all the time shopping for new plugins,” she admits. “Partly simply so I can have that ‘huh, what does this do?’ feeling. I like to simply fiddle till it’s like ‘Oh shit! Resample that! ’ Then, if I’m being disciplined, I’ll chop it up and put it into my pattern pack folder in Ableton.”
Can You Hear Me Dreaming? might maintain visitor appearances to a minimal, however Lowther did select to incorporate a observe made along with her most frequent collaborator, Flume. “I used to be touring so much with him after I was scripting this document,’ she recollects when requested about their single, One Extra Night time. “We had three or 4 days in New York and I used to be wandering round with that music in my head and I couldn’t work out the place it had come from.” Initially, Lowther says she suspected it was another person’s melody that she’d picked up – however, after digging by her pc she got here up with an previous demo recording.
“Seems it was one thing I’d written for his final album, Palaces, after which we’d each completely forgotten about it. So, we have been in a van driving to the present that night time and I used to be enjoying him the demo on my cellphone going ‘we’ve got to complete this music!’”
![KUČKA, photo by Dillon Howl](https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/KUCKA-5-credit-Dillon-Howl@1050x1313.jpg)
The music’s accompanying video sees Lowther take the a part of a fictional cam lady as gyrating animations and retina-burning color tones flash throughout the display screen. “It was very ‘on the earth’ of the lyrics,” Lowther says with a rueful smile. “We needed to construct out this fictional character and take into consideration who she is likely to be.”
As with all her latest music movies, One Extra Night time was co-directed by Lowther’s spouse, Dillon Howl. Because the launch of 2021’s Wrestling, the pair have labored collectively intently, with Howl offering a visible identification for Lowther’s music. “She understands the undertaking like nobody else might,” says Lowther. “She’s been actively concerned within the concepts and the writing course of.”
Regardless of these years of collaboration, their first musical experiments got here solely lately – as a part of a birthday want. “I used to be asking what she needed to do for her birthday,” Lowther recollects, “She was like, ‘I simply need to write some music. Can we do this? Are you able to produce a music for me?’
“So, she was throwing phrases at me,” Lowther continues. “Sending me tracks she loves, varieties of beats. Then she sat there whereas I used to be producing and wrote out all of those lyrics on her cellphone, jumped on the mic after which did it multi function take. It was actually free-flowing.”
Although that first music has but to see the sunshine of day, Howl’s vocals and lyrics could be heard on two tracks from Lowther’s new album. Credited as PESH, the songs – Communal Reverie, and Gross Physique – trace at an enchanting new musical course for Lowther. Beneath Howl’s hypnotic spoken-word supply, Lowther’s manufacturing takes on a rough-edged distortion not like something we’ve heard from her earlier than.
“She’s a very conceptual thinker, ” Lowther says of her new musical comrade. “She’s bought all these concepts that she describes on this extraordinarily poetic approach. It’s very inspiring, she’s all the time needed to do a musical undertaking centred round these concepts.”
![KUČKA, photo by Dillon Howl](https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/KUCKA-6-credit-Dillon-Howl@1050x1313.jpg)
When requested whether or not we will count on to listen to from the newly established PESH, she rapidly replies within the affirmative. “Now we have a PESH session in the present day! We most likely have six or seven songs that really feel pretty completed for the time being. Half of them are a bit extra dance-y, and a few them are simply bizarre. It’s a bit in every single place, which is cool.”
Having established herself in a notoriously male-dominated trade, Lowther has needed to push again on any variety of gender-based stereotypes over her years within the music enterprise. “It’s fairly jarring when folks come as much as speak to you and say ‘yeah, however who really produced your observe?’” she displays. “I believe for some time I bought a little bit of a chip on my shoulder from these experiences.”
The informal assumption {that a} feminine producer should secretly have a person doing all of the technical work isn’t such a problem for Lowther lately—not as a result of the trade has gotten higher, she factors out—however as a result of she now takes these feedback with the pinch of salt they deserve. “I nonetheless get folks asking these sorts of questions, however I don’t actually care. I believe I’m safer in myself now, and extra assured.”
Lowther is somebody who clearly loves the technical nuts and bolts of music-making. So, we’re curious – does she use any AI instruments in her workflow to hurry up her course of? “I haven’t performed round with it a lot but,” she shrugs. “It’s positively fascinating and there are specific processes you may shortcut. For me, the enjoyable half is beginning one thing recent – however the closing 5 or 10 per cent of ending a observe could be horrible. So, AI that may assist with mixing stuff… I’d most likely love that.”
![KUČKA, photo by Dillon Howl](https://musictech.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/KUCKA-7-credit-Dillon-Howl@1050x1313.jpg)
On the identical time, Lowther has no illusions in regards to the financial influence that some music makers are going through. “I actually really feel for individuals who have devoted their life to creating music for sync and licensing; that’s the primary space of music that’s actually gonna take a success,” she predicts. “I’ve bought associates who work on TV and business stuff and so they take it actually severely – once they get a quick, they’ll spend days attempting to make it good. However already that work is being devalued, the considering is ‘Why would I pay you two grand after I could make it with an AI immediate?’
“However by way of authentic music,” she continues. “I don’t suppose AI is basically a problem. Possibly I’m ignorant, however I believe artists have all the time used new applied sciences and built-in them into their work. If folks can use AI prompts to make music that bangs, that makes folks genuinely excited, then I’m down for that.”
At the very least in Lowther’s personal music, we’re unlikely to see any prompt-generated beats and chords any time quickly. For her, the attract of music is clearly not simply the tip outcome however the inventive act itself. “The entire cause I bought into music was as a result of I actually simply take pleasure in making it,” she says thoughtfully. “I really like the method of it – the hands-on stuff of enjoying keyboard or drumming out some beats, of simply dropping your self for somewhat bit.”
Together with her album solely lately launched, and with exhibits deliberate in Europe and Asia within the coming months, Lowther might be forgiven for taking a little bit of time to decompress. As an alternative, and staying true to kind, she’s diving straight again into writing. “The previous couple of days I’ve been making new music and it feels so nice,” she beams. “Now that the album is out, I’m itching to jot down – it’s time to lock myself within the studio once more.”