“Are you dreaming? No. Are you dreaming? No.”
Laura Jane Lowther, AKA Kučka, is explaining how to induce a lucid dream – a dream in which you are aware you are dreaming.
“You set an alarm on your phone every hour asking, ‘Are you dreaming?’ When you’re used to that action you might dream about checking it. Apparently. ‘Are you dreaming?’ ‘Yes…’”
Not that Lowther needs to play these mind games on herself. The WA producer and vocalist has always been conscious of her unconsciousness.
“You know when you’re in a dream and you know you’re in a dream so you can do whatever you want and go anywhere? No? Ever since I was a kid, that’s what I thought dreaming was. I only realised a couple of years ago that it’s not normal!
“I genuinely believe that something in your brain is triggered there. That point just before you wake up. Maybe it’s the freedom from consciousness – like your ideas aren’t being filtered so much.”
This rare ability goes some way towards explaining the transcendent and ethereal quality of Lowther’s songs, seven shimmering examples of which are present on the second Kučka EP, Unconditional. Featuring synthesisers, found sounds, electronic soundscapes and astral vocals, the release is experimental and avant-garde, but anchored to pop sensibilities.
“It’s coming from a pop perspective, referencing it as a genre,” explains Lowther, whose vocals feature on A$AP Rocky’s debut album Long.Live.A$AP. “It’s a lot more structured than the music I wrote previously. The tracks have all got vocals. They’re quite short, compared to my other stuff. For me, this is pop!
“Some have got silly lyrics. On ‘Honey’ the chorus is, ‘Because your body tastes like honey,’ which I wrote when I was drunk and it stuck. Other parts are pretty dark. A track called ‘Recovery’ gets pretty deep, which I like. I think all together they make sense.”
Capturing the essence of pop proved a challenge for Lowther, who by her own admission is usually “pretty experimental”.
“Pop is harder to write. You don’t want to make it cheesy and you don’t want to make it cliché and fall into those traps. I can write a drone track and have it meander around and there’s interesting parts, but if you’ve got limitations, it’s really hard.”
But she seems to have cracked it. ‘Unconditional’ was the most played song on triple j Unearthed last year and Kučka recently scooped Best Single, Best Electronic Act and Best Experimental Act at the West Australian Music Awards.
The name, by the way, is Serb-Croatian for ‘female dog’ – an affectionate nickname given to Lowther by a travelling buddy. The line on the C is called a haček, and the pronunciation? “It’s Kučka as in ‘butch car’,” she explains, “but with less emphasis on the car. Like that Ka car?”
Growing up in Liverpool, England, Lowther was raised on “regular commercial radio pop – Destiny’s Child, TLC, rap”, plus her parents’ favourites, the likes of David Bowie, Lauryn Hill and Radiohead. After moving to Australia in her early teens, she played guitar in high school bands before discovering the endless possibilities of electronic music.
“I remember listening to an album by Beck and in between tracks he’s got these synthesisers noodling,” she says, before launching into a full-blown synth impression. “I was always intrigued by those sounds. How do you make them? I found Ableton and was like, ‘Ah, this is amazing.’ I started messing around. It was much more experimental at first – mainly because I didn’t know what I was doing! I love how rich the textures you can get are. You can do whatever from track to track. You’re not limited.”
The Unconditional EP is the result of Lowther’s somewhat obsessive perfectionism. Working digitally allows for unlimited edits – a blessing and a curse. “I’m always tweaking, constantly,” she says. “I add and take away as necessary. Tracks I’ve been working on for weeks I’ll suddenly think are terrible and I’ll start fresh. I find it easy to delete things.
“It’s a bit much sometimes. I’ve got so many tracks that will never see the light of day because I can’t get one particular thing sounding right.”
The EP serves up a diverse suite of electronic sounds – and junk. “In Perth, every area has a week where you put all your junk out on the verge,” she explains. “A friend and I went out and gathered stuff that we thought would sound good, went back to my garage and set up mics.
“There’s metal shelves being hit, random stuff. I have my own sample library, thousands of noises. The sounds might be buried in the mix but they add depth. It’s trash!”
Performing live, Lowther is joined by Katie Campbell, AKA Catlips, and Jake Steele (brother of Little Birdy’s Katy and Empire Of The Sun’s Luke). Already firm favourites on Perth’s fertile electronica scene, they are finding new fans wherever they go.
“It doesn’t matter how successful it gets,” Lowther says. “Famous people I’ve met can seem like they’re really successful and they’re struggling, or you can think they’re killing it but they don’t seem happy. I would just like to make music and be happy.”
It’s been something of a dream come true for Kučka so far. Here’s hoping it’s one from which Lowther need never wake up
Kučka plays OutsideIn Festival 2015 at Manning House on Saturday September 26. Unconditional is out Friday August 14 through Midnight Feature/Inertia.
