KELLY LEE OWENS
“Many of my patients encouraged me to pursue music when I worked at Christie’s Cancer Hospital in Manchester,” says Kelly Lee Owens. “Hearing perspectives from people coming to the end of their lives really made me reconsider what was important.”
Shapeshifting electronic musician and songwriter Kelly Lee Owens’ life was very different before she immersed herself in the hardware and wires of the studio. Formerly a nurse, it’s clear from her startlingly accomplished 2017 debut and last year’s euphoric Luminous Spaces/Luminous Beings – a collaboration with fellow sonic traveller Jon Hopkins – that her career pivot from medicine to techno has paid off. “The hospital was an amazing place to work,” she says. “But when I was taking paid leave, I’d fill the time by helping out bands and working at festivals, making sure I was as involved in music as I could be. A lot of the patients I worked with said, ‘If you love music, why don’t you do it?’ so I took their advice.”
Her much-anticipated sophomore album , set to be unveiled in August – its May release has been postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis – is a testament to the potential encouraged by her patients. Kelly’s shadowy sound may have a liquid-cool demeanour but beneath it lies a beating heart that smudges the lines between the dancefloor and dream-pop. “I like to leave the mistakes in there,” she says of her approach to music-making. “You can probably hear it on the record when, at certain moments, it gets quite wonky. But I
