Kelly Lee Owens: ‘My patients were my career advisers’

Music can soothe the soul, but Kelly Lee Owens’s techno pop appears to have an especially balm-like quality. Her eponymous debut album came out in March, and while she didn’t have any specific intentions for it – “I had the Yoko Ono mindset, which is just to put good work out into the world and let it do its thing” – she didn’t anticipate the response it received. Perhaps it was the Tibetan singing bowls sampled on the song CBM. Or the meditative, 10-minute closing track inspired by gong baths. Or Owens’s soothing coo, which ripples trippily throughout the album. Fans would message her on Instagram telling her: “Your music has healed me.”

That revelation could sound pretentious, but Welsh-born Owens, 29, operates on a sweetly spiritual plane.Throughout our interview, there is talk of natal charts and the age of Aquarius, but also of how lazy festival promoters need to step outside their “boys’ club” and book more women. She’s pleased about the response to her record because for a time she felt guilty about leaving her job as an auxiliary nurse in a cancer ward in Manchester to pursue music. It was, however, her patients who encouraged her to quit. “They were kind of like my career advisers,” she says. “They had this unique perspective, of having their lives threatened by something out of their control, so I respected all of their words of advice.”

When Owens moved to London in 2009 she had a spell in Sonic Youth-ish indie band the History of Apple Pie. But while working in various record shops she met the mentors who would help shape her sound: electronic producers Daniel Avery, James Greenwood (aka Ghost Culture) and Erol Alkan. Avery invited her to collaborate on his breakthrough 2013 album Drone Logic, and through those sessions she developed a taste for techno. It was Alkan who suggested she should make her own, which she did, on Avery’s analogue synth collection (unsurprisingly, their music shares a certain kinetic warmth and rhythmic buoyancy).

Owens says the resulting album is the sound of “discovering who I was as a producer and a musician”, pulsing between romantic techno, acid, shoegaze and ambient atmospherics. She performs it live with an energy you hope she’ll bottle and give to brittle lads with laptops. For a time she had a backing band, but she now says: “People who don’t know I produce might presume I just sing. I wanted to take full control and show people that I am the author of my creation, so now I do it solo. It’s been very empowering.”

Two years ago, Björk gave an interview in which she corrected the assumption that she didn’t produce her music, and Owens is similarly keen to underline her role in the studio.

“There’s the perception that there aren’t many examples of women who are fully doing it themselves, so I thought, if I write, produce, arrange and perform my music then that’s my protection, you can’t attack me.”

She says she feels “more confident now in myself and my abilities”, though she still wrestles with self-doubt. “I think we all do, I see this in a lot of women. Maybe it’s this deep patriarchal energy we’ve had to deal with for thousands of years.” Greenwood engineered the album but even though “he sat in the studio with me and pushed the buttons I wanted to be pushed, I questioned myself. Am I really [producing], if I’m not touching the mouse? If I’m not going in and doing the thing that I need doing [physically] does that mean that I’m not really creating it? But no, I am, 100%. Of course James would suggest stuff, but I have to give myself the credit.” It’s why, like Björk, she contributed a photo of herself at the controls to the blog Visibility, which was set up to show the number of women working behind the mixing desk. And why she’s “definitely going to document my time [in the studio] more, for my second album. I don’t understand why men think women aren’t capable of that.”

So it must feel gratifying that the Icelandic pop powerhouse included Owens’s track Anxi on a recent Mixmag DJ mix, featuring subversive musings from Norwegian artist Jenny Hval such as “what is soft dick rock?” atop an elastic bass line.

“It’s the cherry on the top of this year,” says Owens. Could a joint DJ set be on the cards next? “Can you imagine? That would be amazing,” she says, although she already has greater ambitions. “I want to remix [Björk’s] stuff because I think she needs more females to be remixing her work. More women need to do that for each other. The possibilities are endless.”

• Kelly Lee Owens’s self-titled debut album is released by Smalltown Supersound. Her cover of Aaliyah’s More Than a Woman is available to download now and on vinyl from 8 December