Natural Resonance

"You pronounce it kooch-ka,” says Lowther, enlightening those of us unfamiliar with the role of the caron, the little arrowhead above the c that makes č. “Okay, so my friend Eva, she's from Croatia, and I travelled over there with her for a while, and we'd been friends for ages… and she just started calling me kučka. And I thought it sounded awesome, and it worked.”

This still leaves the semiotic payload of the word ambiguous. Lowther clarifies. “It means bitch, kind of literally female dog,” she adds, laughing. “But kind of endearing as well… like, so, my friend's mum, she's Serb too and she calls me so many different, like… they just swear constantly. She actually calls me vagina, but in Serb. Kitch-ka. And to us it's really gross and weird, but to them it's just normal. So it's not that bad to say kučka… it's endearing.”

Swearing aside, Kučka has already redefined itself in the 18 months since its inception. Originally, Kučka was Lowther's solo project, and the superstructure that crystallised in 2012 – the experimentation, the scratching, the biting, the humming – still very much defines the act's sound. But subsequent to the earlier shiftings and rummagings online, Kučka has blossomed to include Jake Steele (of Injured Ninja) on analog synthesisers and Katie Campbell (of Catlips) on electronic beats. “Jake was already playing with me… [and] I bumped into Katie at uni, and she was just like sitting in the foyer… she was just making noises with her sound machine, and I didn't even know her, I just had a hunch she was cool. She was at WAAPA in the year below me, but doing the same course – composition. I'm really impulsive, when I have an idea I'll just do it straight away, but Jake is quite cautious, which works, because we kind of even each other out,” says Lowther.

Kučka's eponymous debut EP was six tracks of gestation and filtration through Lowther's particular and petite perfectionism. In the wake of the glistening now-three-piece's EP, Kučka have gone from strength to strength. Lowther, Steele and Campbell took the Perth Path to Laneway gong; beating stiff competition (salute to Runner) to perform live on Laneway's Eat Your Own Ears stage ahead of Poliça, Japandroids, and fellow West Coast champions Pond. The internet was paying attention, and weirdo-rapper princeling A$AP Rocky liked what he heard. Lowther's vocals featured on two tracks on A$AP's debut Long.Live.A$AP.

“I'm not currently working on anything with him…” Lowther qualifies, “he just had an album released, and it happened really quickly… [they] got in contact with me and asked if he could sample some vocals from my EP, so I sent some over to him... then [they] got back to me a few weeks later and was like 'A$AP's all good for you to sing on the record too; can you just sing this small fragment', which happened to be the chorus from his, like, first track from his EP. That was pretty crazy, but I didn't know that at the time – I was just like 'sick', and I sent it back, and then a few weeks later A$AP emailed me, and then he said he wanted to Skype, and then he told me that he wanted to do another track where I was doing, like, vocals on it, which ended up on the album too, which is Fashion Killa… so, yeah,” she beams. “It was really early in the morning for me, I just kind of woke up, and I just had this email like 'A$AP wants you to Skype right now… do my hair, put it on, and I was, like, kind of nervous, but he was just so chilled that he kind-of sang through what he wanted me to do, I did it… I dunno, he's nice!“

Besides A$AP, Kučka are set to provide support for alt.rock trio PVT's upcoming WA show and headline Fat Shan's Festivus – a premiere register of home-grown capability in its own right. Lowther's project are also booked to perform at the Qwartz Electronic Music Awards in France ahead of another European tour. Off-stage, the band's traction is self-evident. Channeling the innate creepiness of dolls and other lifeless playthings of early childhood, Perth director Julia Ngeow filmed the debut video for the EP's single, Rewind. For a Perth-made record and a Perth-made video, Rewind is a lucid dream. Certainly, the Kučka EP is distinguished by the soundscape Lowther crafts: the ominous dronings and scratchings meld like the buzz of cicadas into a heatwave. Lowther works into a kind of bleakness seen in the empty, open expanse of old-time electronica oddballs like Aphex Twin and Orb. Nonetheless restless, Lowther evidently has plans to broaden her electronic act into an immersive and interactive experience.

“I really want to get into more interactive music, I just finished my degree and I did like an audio game installation for my final project. I made a multiplayer MIDI controller, so four people play that, and there was a dice you rolled using the Wii remote that was like all connected up to this big screen, and it was in multi-channel surround, and it had live instrumentalists, so you kind of went 'round and played on this controller and controlled the sounds all around,” explains Lowther.

“I kind of set it up like a game show, so I had someone hosting it, and you could walk around the space and… I want to create – biophany is when every kind-of living thing in a fully natural environment, a forest or something, all the animals and the sounds they make all fit on a spectrum,” Lowther details. “All of the animals, say, in an area will have calls and stuff and they all fit together, and there's things like studies showing that places where there are lots of loggings, the sound of the machinery, if it's in a particular frequency spectrum, the animals that use those frequencies actually suffer because they can't get their calls to each other.

“So I found all this out last year because I was just like nerding out; I was just interested in it... So I found that, and then I also thought about what would happen if they kind-of evolved to take on more electronic sounds. So I did a whole bunch of field recordings and then mashed them up with electric buzz… natural field recordings, and then recordings of man-made sounds, and then mashed them together and as you played this game it created this landscape… It's hard to describe without seeing it, and it was in four channels. Yeah, it was just a cool musical experience, although not everyone would call it music.”

Biophany at least seems real enough: apparently the universe resonates at a B flat note 57 octaves below C, although Lowther can't confirm this factoid. “Probably! I don't know what I meant though, when I was recording all these electricty hums they were all at different notes… I don't know, I heard that electricity is a G in Australia maybe. Could be an A… but yeah.” Perhaps we can leave it to Kučka to find out.

Kučka will be playing the following dates:

Sunday 24 March - Fat Shan's Festivus, the Bakery, Perth WA
Saturday 30 March - The Bakery, Perth WA