Ky Vöss - Space Cadet - Debut Album
Ky Vöss's debut album, Space Cadet, is now available on vinyl for the first time. This collectable vinyl pressing is limited to only 100 copies. Make sure to snag a copy before they are gone forever!
Initially conceived as an EP, after four songs, the tracks just kept coming. Ky Vöss was able to produce and record the entire eight-song album in their home studio in only five months.
Ky Vöss's take on synthpop, darkwave, and dream pop is quite unique and is compared to Grimes, Charli XCX, and FKA twigs.
Click here for our interview with dream pop artist Ky Vöss.
Links to Ky's other albums:
Ky Vöss on Start The Beat with Sikes
Ky Vöss Audio Setup:
I produce everything in logic. I started in Ableton, and a lot of the tracks that I'm making for this next album were created in Ableton initially, but I lost the project files due to a computer crashed. So I use logic now.
Everything is in logic initially, and then I load all of that onto an SP404 to perform on. And I also use a Nord drum for beats and live showmanship stuff. So I load everything onto there, and that's how I perform.
I have limited hardware. I've restarted my life a million fucking times, and it's hard to maintain a degree of gear when you only exist with a backpack for extended periods, and so I'm pretty minimal. But I prefer that limitation, it's helpful for me.
Ky Vöss Music Background:
I started playing the violin when I was five. That became pretty serious, not career, I was like five, but through high school. I was practicing nonstop. I was homeschooled, so I was able to practice like literally fucking constantly. It changed year to year depending on my life, but I usually practiced between three to six hours a day or something fucking bat shit crazy like that. It was pretty wild.
I was in several symphonies. I started getting into composition when I was 13 or so, and I started writing for more orchestral kind of like pieces, like quartets, like piano trios, and I loved it. I wanted to write movie soundtracks for a bit. That was my goal, movie soundtracks. And then I heard the halo soundtrack. I had never played halo, and I was like okay, fuck that, I'm going to make video game soundtracks. Obviously, that hasn't happened yet.
I also didn't jump directly from that to electronic music and dream pop. Some weird life stuff happened, and I ended up in a punk band for a while, and that was fun. It wasn't like my passion, but I was playing the violin, so it was like a transition. I was also doing some yell singing.
I started my own project after realizing that I was allowed to do that. I played guitar and bass in that one, and it was really fun. Then my life was uprooted, I didn't have band members, and I also don't want any band members. I asked myself, how can I do this without anybody else? And it was oh, I have a computer. Ha, I'm going to be a producer, and now I'm here.
Ky Vöss Story:
I was born in LA, and when I was eight years old, my parents were like, fuck this big city life, we're going to look for like the perfect church. We've got a family of 18 right now, that makes sense right? So let's sell our house and buy a trailer and live in that while we travel America looking for the perfect church. So they did. And we did that for a year, and they found the perfect church in the middle of nowhere Texas. And so that's where I spent most of my childhood, and they're still there.
My parents were just super religious. I had a really weird childhood. I wouldn't change it though, I've always felt kind of not human. Like I'm not human. It gave me an odd outlook into life as a normal person. And so when I became my own person.
When I became my own person, I kind of faked everything about myself, I entered the world, and I was Hey, what's up? I'm Ky, I'm cool, drugs right, sex, am I right? I wasn't faking anything drastic, but everything about my demeanor was entirely fabricated.
I found this weird middle ground of being a normal person, and then I swung drastically past that. So I went from, I don't know, long denim skirts and pants underneath just in case. The long hair and church every Sunday. I went from that to the exact fucking opposite of that; there was no middle ground, it was like...Yeah, Here I am.
I kind of did what my parents did and was like well, fuck this shit. I just started driving out of Austin, and my car broke down in Pittsburgh. That was two years ago last month. I started recording Space Cadet somewhere near Raleigh, North Carolina. I wanted a new identity, and I associate what you do with who you.
Some of the songs that are on Space Cadet are reworked songs that I made way back when I was first learning how to produce. Almost every song so far that I have on my new album is a reworking of an old song, for nostalgia reasons.
I had been messing around with Space Cadet for a long time, but my laptop crashed in the Spring of 2018, right after I'd finished. So that delayed everything a lot. I didn't start working on Space Cadet as like a complete project until December of 2018, so not even a year ago. And I didn't play my first show with that project until February, so it's all quite new actually.
I started taking shows before I had any music to perform or any way to perform it because that's how I live my life. It's just like, cool deadline, I'll have something done. I will play for three people, but I will have something done. So a lot of the songs that I have released I wrote because my set was only 10 minutes. I was oh, I'm throwing another song on there. I'll write something really quick. And then I played it, and that felt good to play I'm going to use that. Which is why, I don't know, set deadlines, do some shit. I'm such a big fan of just forcing yourself to do things.
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