Chloe Kae's Next Move
Kllo's 2-step evangelist steps off the treadmill
Like many musicians, Chloe Kaul did not have a great 2020. Having spent her late teens circumnavigating the globe as the frontwoman of cult favourite electronic outfit, Kllo, Chloe was all set to move to Los Angeles and take her solo career (as Chloe Kae) to the next level when she suddenly found herself grounded.
That’s hard enough for the average person, harder still when you consider that at one point, Chloe toured the whole world twice in a single year. “My mental health was just so bad,” she says of the pandemic’s impact on her personally. “So many things ended and changed and just knowing that I planned that trip for three years…” Instead, Chloe was locked down in Melbourne and faced the new reality of trying to create music alone.
Let’s just say she didn’t love it.
"Because I was just indoors constantly by myself, I had no inspiration," she says. "And when you start getting used to using a computer, and you start buying all the plugins and things, you kind of forget to use all the authentic sounding things, because it's just easier. It's in front of you. And I think lacking that spark and also sitting at the laptop doing it, it's just too grim."
Because I was just indoors constantly by myself, I had no inspiration. I think lacking that spark and also sitting at the laptop doing it, it's just too grim.
Chloe spent two nights at Micah, in the Kyneton region of Victoria, which provided a much-needed diversion from the monotonous blue light of her screen. It also exposed her to different sounds that inspired her track ‘Untempered’.
“It's nice to deep-dive into the nuances,” says Chloe, on finding new ways to interact with the wilderness. “Well, mostly all the insects. I didn't really think about, say, that crickets, or the tempo that they would chirp or whatever it is that they do?” But the onset of evening helped Chloe change tack. “They were really loud. And there was just this one point of the night when they were, like, really killing it on the beat!"
Darkness proved to be fundamental to Chloe’s understanding of nature sounds. “I went around and I mostly did it at night. I feel like that's when nature was the most active,” she says. “I would play with [tree] bark and things just to get some texture. And the trees. Every tree had a specific sound. I never really thought about that!”
Chloe also spent time at the neighbouring Turpin Falls, a natural amphitheatre and swimming spot where she recorded echoing voices and splashes that made it into her final track. As someone who admits she’s almost never out of reception, she enjoyed the chance to reset away from the rest of the world to ruminate on something new.
“I need to work on my mindfulness, but I don't really take in too much in my city life,” she laughs. “I wouldn't [normally] look that deeply into things [field sounds] like that. And I think like, you know, Burial's one of my favourite artists and all of his stuff is clearly just his own recordings of nature and he goes around and just wrecks it all and it just adds so much to a song."
Chloe’s nature experience has influenced her writing, a more ambient exploration that moves in a different direction from her previous work. “Probably overall, it's a little grungier,” she says of her new solo writing. “I think Kllo's very clean, and everything's quite purposeful. Whereas this is a little less so. I think it's just a little bit rough around the edges.”
Cheers for logging off and getting a bit scruffy with us, Chloe.
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