Kelly Lee Owens was born curious. It’s no surprise then that her spellbinding music – an otherworldly hybrid of dream pop and techno – is underpinned by her restless imagination. Her euphoric new album, the aptly-titled ‘Dreamstate’, finds the Welsh musician and producer once again communing in sound and nourishing not only her soul and spirit, but also those around her. As she explains to Tara Joshi: “Enriching any culture, uplifting any person is like a web – we all benefit from that as societies”…

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When Kelly Lee Owens was a kid, she was known for being a chronic daydreamer. “My mum would call it Kelly’s World,” the Welsh musician, vocalist, producer and DJ laughs. “I don’t know why, necessarily, but I think fantasy for most children is a sort of positive escapism.” She was even awarded a prize for ‘Daydreamer of the Year’ back in high school, unanimously selected by her classmates (incidentally, she was also voted ‘Music Lover of the Year’ – neither of these should be surprising). 

In those days, the artist’s fantasising was at least somewhat down to location. For all that she enjoyed her idyllic-sounding childhood in rural north Wales, as she got older it was easy to feel like real, interesting life was happening elsewhere. “The geography of where I grew up really pushed that curiosity forward,” she adds, noting how her horizons quite literally led her gaze out towards Liverpool; and how living near the mouth of the River Dee made her feel aware of being on the cusp of something bigger.

Maybe that’s why her music has long dwelled in the intersection between techno and dream pop, her innate nature laying roots for the explorative, otherworldly sense of spiritual possibility and wonderment that pulses through her work. She even credits her sound in part to her birth story, conceived in South Africa (“sorry, maybe this is too much information!”) before her parents attempted to travel back to Wales for her delivery. However, it was too late for them to fly, so they embarked on a five-week boat journey. “I feel like I’ve always been journeying,” she muses. “And when it comes to the sound of a boat, and the hum of bass frequencies – I’m obsessed with bass. And those waves travel the furthest, right?”

Given that we’re all in utero for some time, chances are a developing baby might be aware of the sound of an all-encompassing ship engine even before being born. “It would make sense!” she nods. “And people would call my first album ‘sub-aqueous’? I don’t know. I know I’m not the only person, but it’s so soothing to me – I feel so at home when that sound hits.”

As this somewhat meandering, honest conversation might suggest, Kelly Lee Owens is a lot more whimsical and warmer than one might assume of such a revered techno artist. Yes, she’s got chic sunglasses on, and her hair sits in an angular, buoyant bob. Yes, she’s worked with the likes of Jon Hopkins and John Cale, counts Daniel Avery and Charli XCX amongst her mates, spent her teen years hanging out with Foals and the Maccabees in her free time (she tells some surreal stories about driving Yannis Philippakis and co behind their tour van in her little green Ford Ka, blasting music from her car speakers). Yes, she’s done official remixes for Björk, Mount Kimbie, St. Vincent and more. But her presence doesn’t have any of the aloofness you might associate with that world. She is incredibly chatty and exuberant. The only time her guard comes up is when we’re talking about star signs and she says she’ll tell me her Big Three (that’s her Sun, Moon and Rising signs) on the condition that it’s off the record, because that would be “too intimate” for an interview.

Nonetheless, hanging out with her, Owens’ general comfort with candour seems apparent. She talks with verve about everything from English subjugation of the Welsh language (“We couldn’t speak or sing in our own language for hundreds of years! They used to make kids in schools wear a sign around their neck if they were heard speaking Welsh”), to using Limewire to sate her love of Nirvana and Metallica, to why she admires the writing of Seamus Heaney. 

You’d also almost get the impression we were in some quaint little town or village rather than London from the way she moves through the streets, beaming. Our stroll through Broadway Market and into the sunlit greenery of London Fields is peppered with enthused hellos and brief but friendly chats and waves to various people who she bumps into along the way. All of this and we’ve only been there for less than half an hour. 

We’re admittedly not too far from the part of London in which she lives, but more to the point we’re around the corner from where she mixed her new album – which, tellingly, is called ‘Dreamstate’. It means she has shops she likes to pop into in this bit of town, as well as places where she likes to get a smoothie – we stop so she can get a green juice en route, followed by a predictably affable “what would you like, my love?”. While we’re waiting for our orders, Owens explains that building a community and routine in east London is something she has been striving for. It’s a means of countering some of the feelings evoked by existing in a big city. “I’ll just go by myself, take myself out for coffee here, coffee there,” she smiles. “I just love a little chat! Because I think in London, especially, I feel like it’s really important to be seen. Because you can be so anonymous.”

The trait is something she says she learned from her late grandmother Jeanette. “I feel like I take after her,” she laughs. “She knew everyone, walked around the village, walked around the next town – ‘Oh, hi love, hi!’ – there’s no one she didn’t know. I realise I’ve just become my nana, which is great.” 

Jeanette’s name is one which will likely be familiar to anyone who has been following Owens’ work over the years. On her second album, ‘Inner Song’, which dealt with grief in various forms, there’s a song named after her grandmother. The track glimmers with possibility, the synths building up and up like a sense of release.

Fast forward to 2024 and Kelly Lee Owens is getting ready to put out ‘Dreamstate’, which is album number four. Arguably her poppiest, most sonically vast album to date, she draws on her experiences on the road supporting Depeche Mode, playing to some of the biggest crowds of her life. She enlisted the help of Bicep and The Chemical Brothers, as well as George Daniel (of the 1975 and now the new dance label dh2, on which she’s releasing the record), to create an album with “bigger, more epic sounds that would be great in bigger spaces”. At the same time, she wanted to “create intimate moments that felt more vulnerable than anything I’ve ever done”.

In some ways, ‘Dreamstate’ features a similar energy to ‘Jeanette’ in terms of its burgeoning anticipation. It’s shot through with euphoria and elation but there’s a tacit vulnerability in her lithe voice; a buzzing undercurrent of frenzied anxiety; the kind of chaotic freedom of taking chances and jumping head first into the unknown. It’s a feeling which Owens has experienced in some shape or form throughout her life. 

As a teenager, Kelly Lee Owens knew she wanted to work in a way that involved connecting with people. Aged 17, she was working in a nursing home in Wales (“to see if I could deal with death”). Two years later, she moved to Manchester to work as an auxiliary nurse in a cancer hospital. Through all this time, she was increasingly obsessed with music, making friends across the indie scene via Myspace. She took a chance and moved to London, trying her hand at making her own music (first off as the bassist in a band called The History of Apple Pie) while working in record stores such as Pure Groove and interning at labels like XL, all while she figured out her next steps.

She has spoken in the past about how her time looking after the elderly and those cancer patients – hearing all their insights and life advice – was a big factor in her decision to pursue her music dreams. In those late-teen years, she would sometimes drive from Wales or Manchester all the way out to Brighton on a Thursday to catch an indie night. “Maybe sleep in my car, maybe sleep in a cheap hotel with my friends,” she recalls with a grin. Many of the patients she nursed could see her unbridled, exuberant passion for music, and encouraged her to follow that path – because on your deathbed, you’re more likely to regret what you didn’t do than what you did. 

We discuss engaging with the inevitability of death from such a young age, be it in washing the bodies of the newly departed or what she calls “the privilege” of talking people through their last moments. Given that within large swathes of British society, people are pretty closed-off when it comes to talking about death, it feels a relatively unusual thing to have encountered up close and so stark. Has it imbued her with something unique in terms of how she approaches her art? “I feel like it’s cutting a part of yourself off to not even be curious [about death],” she explains. “Because what it’s based in is fear. I think the root of most fears can be linked back to death. If we can’t connect to death, we are always going to be living in fear, which is not being present.” She recalls talking to patients about their near death experiences, and watching as people slipped away. “I just wish we could talk about death in this way and be curious,” she says. “Like anything, curiosity and compassion is the key in the door to everything.”

Though Owens has found undeniable success and acclaim with both her albums and her DJing career, it has not been an easy journey – not least given the barriers of being a woman in many industry spaces, but even more so being from a working class background. Owens explains as we walk towards the park that she did not have readily available financial support, and so was having to work at minimum 45-hour weeks just to make rent and self-fund her musical endeavours. It was only around three years ago that she was able to go full-time with this career, even though she’s been making music for nearly a decade now. 

“I used to think I had to know everything, be everything,” she continues. “And I was so hard on myself, I still am – it’s very much a work in practice. The tenacity and compassion has come in to constantly try to remember to be gentle with myself [because] when there’s been no one backing me and no one sort of saying ‘it’s going to be alright’, it’s quite exhausting to do that. But the curiosity has been the thing that’s allowed me to just keep leaping.”

It was Paris, October 1960. The temperatures were starting to drop as autumn unfurled in the city and the artist Yves Klein was getting ready to produce his latest work. Klein is perhaps best known for creating his own shade of blue – a bright azure which would become known as International Klein Blue, or IKB. Throughout art history, blue has been a coveted colour – the hue of the heavens which was largely expensive and unattainable to capture in its reality. Klein’s creation of a blue paint was a way of capturing that intangible realm. There’s a famous story of him as a student, going to the beach in Nice, in the south of France, with two of his peers. As a way to pass the time, they played a game of divvying the world up between themselves and Klein chose the sky. Supposedly, he then announced: “The blue sky is my first artwork,” raising his hand to symbolically sign the ultramarine that spread out above him.

And so, years later in that month in Paris, Klein’s new work found the artist toying with photography. He was jumping from a window ledge and enlisting a group of friends to hold tarpaulin out beneath to catch him. He jumped out over and over and finally created a trick montage photograph which seemed to show him launching from the building, either about to fall or about to fly (in splicing together various images of the moment, the tarpaulin was removed in the final version of the image). The photograph was called Le Saut dans le Vide – or, in English, Leap into the Void. 

At the end of 2022, a friend sent that same photograph to Kelly Lee Owens. In the aftermath of the Covid lockdowns and a break-up, the artist had been going through a time of turmoil, experiencing lots of changes all at once. To her, the photograph seemed to represent an artist trying to grasp the colour of the sky, leaping in the void in order to do so – and it really spoke to her. “I literally held onto it in a way that saw me through this tumultuous time and I just understood that I had to continue to do this.”

We have found ourselves on a bench in London Fields where Owens would often come to sit when she was making ‘Dreamstate’, listening back to the demos to ponder whether the songs were conveying what she wanted them to. It is typically her process ahead of a record that she’ll fill up an A4 notepad with collated thoughts, themes and lyrics. “I don’t decide these things, they get told to me, I’m the receiver of the information,” she says, gesturing to some higher spiritual collective creative force. This time, she scrawled down notes across three A5 pads. In them, the colour blue and the element of air kept coming up.

“The first album was the element of water,” she lists off. “Then ‘Inner Song’ was earth – ‘Arpeggi’ was me trying to come up through the soil and find myself again. And now I’m in the air. It’s like with healing or whatever you want to call it throughout life,” she says. “I feel like… here’s all of our shit. And hopefully you sort of do this spiral, right? So, you’re above it, higher and higher, and further away from it with more perspective, but it’s always going to be there.”

It’s a shift that feels tangible even in the album artwork. Where her previous records have mainly featured moody, black and white portraiture or photography, ‘Dreamstate’ is technicolour and playful, a coy smile playing on her lips as she stands in a verdant field beneath pale blue skies. But it’s still grounded in a sense of reality, per the electricity pylons zig-zagging behind her. “I don’t believe in detaching from your reality,” she says. “I would never want that.”

Still, ‘Dreamstate’ swirls around with some of the light, new age-y ambience of Madonna’s ‘Ray of Light’ era, Owens’ polished vocal gleaming and ghosting through it all. The artist mentions she has been obsessed with that Madonna record and even met up with William Orbit in the process of making ‘Dreamstate’. Though they didn’t end up collaborating on this particular release due to timelines, she was still grateful to pick his brain about his processes, to hear his stories and find that he, in turn, was interested in hers. 

“So that was a nod from me that I was on the right path when it came to this sort of ‘Ray of Light’ energy,” she reflects. “In moments it’s a bit trance-like – but ‘trance’, ‘euphoria’; think about those words away from music. That’s what I think about. I’m creating my own version of that.”

But beyond that, she says there aren’t really musical touchstones for the album per se. “I think in a way, it’s more about feeling,” she explains. “It was about making something that would bring the most amount of people together and give people inspiration hopefully to rise, find their higher self, rise above their difficulties in a way – at least just emotionally, whether it’s for a moment in time or longer than that and just find perspective and inspiration and be lifted by it.” 

It is interesting talking to Owens, because her approach to dance music feels cerebral and holistic. This might be because her own clubbing experiences were relatively late – when she first came to London, her first big night out was at fabric and even that was only because one of her colleagues and friends at Pure Groove, Daniel Avery, DJed there sometimes and got her a free ticket. She was much more interested in engaging with those sounds in the studio and watching production in action.

“When I made the first record, I still hadn’t really been clubbing,” she says. “It’s interesting. Why am I making – why am I wanting and needing to make – this music that I don’t know anything about in terms of having experience? [Maybe it’s because] it brings loads of people into quite big spaces, coming together.” It comes back to that early desire to connect with people – and that sense she has of some higher power pulling her towards her creative pursuits or, as she puts it: “It’s something other than me.” 

In the years since that fabric debut, heading out to venues like Berghain (“the cathedral of techno”) she has been struck by how dancefloors are vectors for dreaming: “Loads of people there by themselves, in their own world – Kelly’s world – filling up their cup, all in this room, together. It was just so beautiful to watch.”

Bringing people together to dance and connect and cathart in that way now feels like a central tenet of Owens’ goals. She and Caribou recently did a free party at a community centre in north Wales, in part to counter the chronic underfunding of arts and culture in that region of her home country. “It’s important for me, because I think there is so much talent and so many dreams that go unnoticed or are wasted or are not tapped into, simply because of the place you’re born,” she says. “That’s a shame for all of us. Enriching any culture, uplifting any person is like a web – we all benefit from that as societies. I believe in where I come from having the same opportunities as anywhere else.”

Theo Parrish once wrote that: “Escapism has always been an adjective used to describe the dance. That’s an outsider’s view. Solidarity is what it really offers.” He was speaking specifically in light of the dance music scene’s lack of response to the Black Lives Matter movement against US police brutality back in 2016. But still, it’s a quote that holds up as a more general critique of how the dance music world has engaged with politics in recent years. Is that what Owens means when she talks about the collective, weblike possibilities of these spaces?

“I understand that,” she says thoughtfully. “But I think it’s Anaïs Nin who says: ‘‘Escape’, I would banish the word.’ I always say ‘positive escapism’, because it’s the same thing as dreaming.” We have spoken at length about the derogatory connotations of being a daydreamer, particularly in post-industrial revolution Britain; how resting and taking time for yourself and your desires is often framed as a misuse of time. “I come from a working class family, where actually in order to survive on one level financially, you were made to feel like you were a waste of space if you did take that time for yourself,” she says. “A strong work ethic kept us literally alive in a very physical sense. But what about your spirit? What about the soul? What about nourishing that?”

She knows that rampant individualism is not the solution, but she also feels that starting with yourself is important, in order to exist in sustainable ways and be able to help each other. “Taking responsibility and understanding where you come from and what your story is, is powerful,” she says, “And then filling up your cup with the greater good and giving back in mind.” 

As we sit on the sun-dappled bench in London Fields, cyclists whizzing past us, children giggling, people blasting tunes from their speakers, it takes us back to the concept behind ‘Dreamstate’. Against the constraints of capitalism and being glued to phones which compel us to always ‘be on’, this is a record about making time for the dreamers, looking outwards to the blue skies, finding a moment for the beautiful trance-like euphoria of the dance, and learning to nourish yourself so that you can connect and help in something bigger than you. 

Or, as renowned techno daydreamer Kelly Lee Owens puts it, it’s a record “to just celebrate dreaming and the dream state as being a positive thing again”. She concludes: “It’s about coming together, communing in sound.” 

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This article first appeared in the sixth issue of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.

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Lighting: Freddie Stisted. Photographer Assistant: Alex Galloway. Hair: Gordon Chapples. Makeup artist: Faye Bluff. Styling: Julie Velut

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