Part 1

Name: Leucrocuta
Nationality: Canadian
Occupation: Producer, composer
Current release: Leucrocuta's Chasity Platinum: Dead Scream is out April 14th, 2023 via Grimalkin.
Recommendations: I love this one song by Christina - “What’s a Girl to Do”. It really captures what it is like to be young and your life is a total disaster. Terrible sexual encounters, accidental horror show drug trips, and being totally lost in every way. It just means so much sometimes to look across time and see someone else who felt the same way. Also the production is so fun! Those bombastic reverse samples. so neat. I’m so sad this artist died of COVID. I wish I could have seen her perform.
Also this gorgeous music video by Joyful Joyful for their song “Oh Jubilation”. It just breaks my heart everytime I watch it. I love the simplicity of the long drone shot that moves slowly down on the dancer.

If you enjoyed this Leucrocuta interview and would like to know more about their music, visit them on Instagram, and Facebook.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I started playing music at around age 9 - I was a classical clarinettist for around 14 years.

I developed physical injuries from practising and stress, which is common in music education, and couldn’t practice and play any more in that intense way. Looking back, I also had some untreated dips into psychosis as a result of stress and isolation. I can say with some confidence that films like Whiplash while fictional, also have some basis in reality haha.

I started recording strange little clarinet loops and poetry using my laptop mic in the practice rooms at school as a way to express myself, and then I took some night courses in music production. I started to become interested in sampling, synthesizers, and sound design. And then I went to grad school in music tech and once again had some mental health problems that eventually led to me dropping out.

I think I always loved being inside sound - I used to get completely distracted during orchestral practice and performance, just listening to the music all around me. I would miss my cues. I would have teenage fantasies of fighting aliens and saving my crushes. It’s why I love electronic music and immersive sound design ... it’s basically fantasy world building.

The artists I admired in electronic music were Wendy Carlos, Tomita, Yellow Magic Orchestra ... and in the classical music world, I loved Poulenc, Penderecki, Britten, film scores by Toru Takemitsu, Susumu Hirosawa, and Wojciech Kilar ... some more eclectic artists / composers: Kati Agocs, Kevin Blechdom. And Adult, Boards of Canada, AIR, & Aphex Twin.

[Read our Jean-Benoît Dunckel of Air interview]

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

When I listen to music, I sometimes feel analytical - trying to understand what makes the music work, name the different parts in terms of arrangement, sound design, melody and harmony, rhythm … but sometimes it feels better to just lose oneself in the feeling and fantasy.

I confess sometimes I feel a reluctance to engage in new music and will listen over and over again to favourites, but usually when I do listen to something new, I am rewarded by the joy of communion, sharing someone else's dreams and ideas. It is immediately inspiring and I want to go and try to make things!

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

I’ve never had to search for my voice ... haha. I can’t escape it even when I try.

I’m not the kind of producer or composer who can be flexible and make anything in any style. I will for better or worse always sound like myself, and to try to be someone else usually ends in disaster … but sometimes at least an interesting disaster! I have a soul that has probably been the same since I was a child. I can learn new things, but I can’t end up sounding like or being another person.

I'm unsure that I’ve really had a breakthrough. I’ve only ever been myself, and even when I think I’ve progressed, I go back and listen to or read through something I’ve written, and realise that my sense of improvement and progress was kind of made up. I realise that what I made before was actually pretty good, and that I was being too hard on myself. It’s like when you look at an old photo of yourself, from a time when you thought you were really ugly, and all you see is a sweet little baby plum who just wanted to be loved.

I guess one breakthrough I maybe had was realising that I could improve my voice through practice. I used to believe that you either had a good voice, or a bad one, and I unfortunately had just been dealt a bad voice. But you can improve! I may never be Mariah Carey, but I can grow in terms of timbre, expression, and range.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

Hahaha ... I love this question, because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about it. I just said above that my identity is fixed, my ‘voice’ is fixed.

However I also simultaneously feel that about every five years or so I become a completely different person. My hair, my clothes, my interests, my entire sense of self changes. In fact, my memory is incredibly poor, so I basically ‘eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind’ myself every few years. If I know you for more than 3-5 years, I will completely forget how we met. Even for my closest friends. Even for my partners.

I think people in the psychological community might call it BPD, or maybe some other kind of trauma thing … I don’t know enough about that, but it has occurred to me. I think a lot of artists have something like this going on - they aren’t just reinventing themselves for attention, they are compelled to, and sometimes it is a great source of creativity, and sometimes it seems to eat them alive.

I’m also always somewhere in the middle: bi/pan, non-binary, interested in sex and then completely disinterested. In flux. I think the world has demanded fixed-ness, and I’ve never been able to fulfil that need. So I guess that is a part of my music making as well. Poor memory, poor sense of self, a companionship with technologies that hold my fluid sense of identity and memory, and busted body and mind.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

I work intuitively. An analytical approach has never really worked, most likely because of my poor memory. I instead build up longer term muscle memory, and an aesthetic sense through a cumulative, slow drip of experience.

I enter into a dissociative flow state and allow these demons and spirits to enter my body and mind, and then I write and perform.

Lately I’ve been interested in the power of music and sound as a place to express the ‘worst’ parts of myself. My anger, my frustration, my selfish pettiness. In kink terms, maybe I’m a ‘brat’, and I need to express these things and still have someone care for me. In the past I have felt a pressure to be some kind of ‘good person’, probably based around some kind of protestant christian understanding of a ‘person’ and ‘goodness’. Let’s be real, I’ll never get anywhere if I cannot be honest about my own heart.

So, on this recent album I made sequences and patterns, improvised on them, and thought about the sources, the power, the usefulness of my ‘ugly’ emotions and expressions of my personality.

I’m also interested in texture, and space. Mundane spaces like the grocery store. A modern large chain grocery store is an amazing heaven and hellscape. Maybe it’s purgatory. I don’t know. All your needs are completely laid out for you with what sometimes feels like incredible menace. Suffering hidden from view, a product paradise with perfectly tuned pop vocals piped in singing about sex and love affairs over piles of fruit and cold cuts. It’s also a place where you buy food to feed yourself and those you love.

Everytime I’m in a grocery store, my mind goes sideways. I listen to the pop music, and the sounds of cash registers, and I hear demonic voices, chittering and crooning. Harpies. Specifically … like the harpies from that Harry Hausen movie that attacked Phineus of Thrace, punished by Zeus to sit before a feast everyday that the harpies would steal away from him before he could ever eat enough to be satisfied.

Basically ‘banal’ spaces in ‘Canadian / North American’ culture that are actually crossing points of current mythologies and iconographies and capitalistic violence, as well as a site of basic human needs and tenderness. The grocery store is a fascinating, wonderful, and horrible space.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I don’t think any music is ‘timeless’ - I think all aspects of a piece of music - its format, the arrangement, the tools and technologies used to make it, the spaces where it is heard … are very rooted in a place, a time, and in the values of the people who make and listen to it. And what we save and archive from the past reflects current interests and values, for better or for worse.

I don’t think music is just an isolated consumable object, i.e. three minutes or less of digital samples. It is the culture and everything around it. It is the experience of making it, of playing it, of listening to it in a community, the preservation of it, its artefacts and writings about it.

I think ‘innovation’ can often be a way of working through pain and alienation. You feel like you literally CANNOT bear to write the same way, because it represents a world that feels unbearable. For me, personally, trying to make ‘new’ sounds is a way to make peace but also break from a sonic world that at times feels joyful, but at others feels intolerable.