Name: Kanga
Nationality: American
Occupation: Producer, songwriter, vocalist
Current release: Kanga's new album Under Glass is out now on Artoffact.

If you enjoyed this interview with Kanga, visit her official website. She is also on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. For an even deeper dive into her thoughts and concepts, read our earlier Kanga interview. We also recently spoke to her about her new album Under Glass.



Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and then becomes increasingly professionalised. How important is playfulness for you today and if it is important, how do, concretely, you retain it?

Playfulness is incredibly important, and I find that I really have to keep an eye on myself to prevent losing that when I’m in “work mode”.

The thing about being a professional artist, and this is maybe a controversial opinion, but you have to sit down and work even if you’re not inspired. It’s like a muscle, you have to use it. And maybe your best work won’t ever come from those more laborious writing sessions, but it’s the same as with any other activity. A football player is never going to win a game without showing up for practice on days that they don’t feel like it.

For me, and I know for others as well, it’s really hard to sit down and work if you’re not feeling inspired, but I think it helps condition you to have the creative muscle memory you need when you do have that stroke of inspiration. That being said, if you’re too mechanical about anything you will lose that playfulness that I think makes great art resonate. A lot of the greatest works in history rely more on playfulness than technical ability. When it’s all technical the audience can pick up on the sterility and that’s no fun.

So for me, it’s all about balance. A lot of it is work and work isn’t fun. But there’s no point to it if you can’t enter into that playtime.

You've said that “most of my creative time is spent working on things that I either throw away or abandon.” You share some of these things with your community - what are these things you make but discard and how important is the time invested even if they never end up on any piece?

I think this ties into my previous remarks a bit. A lot of the things I create are like sketches that I just sit down and do to prevent my creative muscles from atrophying. And sometimes I’ll come back to them and think, “hey this was actually really cool” and I’ll regret not pushing it forward. But a lot of the time it’s also just me playing around with something that doesn’t really lead anywhere but it was fun in the meantime.

I think also, as an artist, you need to create for yourself without the intention of showing it to anyone. You can get kind of stuck if you’re constantly in a place where you need to have your work validated by other people. Being an artist is hard enough because it’s basically 95% rejection and begging people to pay attention to you.

So I think it’s important to make things you are proud of that don’t tap into that anxiety of needing others to approve of it.

The Novation Peak and the Electron Digitakt seem to have been at the heart of your studio for a while now. What makes them such a good foundation for your music and why do they work together so well?

I mostly use them live quite simply because they’re fun to play. Because I don’t have a band behind me I need to do something interesting and engaging for the audience to see so I break down some of the elements of certain songs so that I can play or trigger them live. It just makes it a bit more interesting to perform, to be honest.

The digitakt is great because I use it as a sampler and trigger certain parts of my tracks. I literally will go into a track, remove some of the samples, and reload them into the digitakt so I can trigger them live. Sometimes I’ll make something new from scratch like some bass sounds that add a little extra push to the tracks.

The peak is also great because it works really well for melodic parts as well as arpeggiated synth and/or baselines. I can make a nice synth patch that goes well with ‘Home’ …



while also being able to program some strong bass heavy arps for tracks like ‘Violence’ and ‘Waiting’.



The Peak offers some amazing sound sculpting possibilities, but many of its inbuilt sounds are already great out of the box. Do you find using presets lazy? How do your sculpt sounds to fit your creative goals?

I don’t find using presets lazy but I think their true benefit is by giving you a solid start off point for making your own sounds.

I’m not a hardware purist so I really don’t care what most people do. For me, personally, I try to get the sounds as close to what I have on the record so some patches are completely made from scratch (mostly the basslines) where as the more melodic patches have some beautiful starting points from the bank.

The Digitakt, curiously, has a lot of critics, many claiming that the MPC Live offers superior features, others preferring the quirkiness of the Octatrack. What, to you, are the benefits of the Digitakt?

Honest to God, I just really like how the buttons feel. It’s very easy for me to play onstage where the lights are flashing and it’s hard to see.

Other samplers are great because they light up but I’m not really spending much time looking at the buttons (especially for songs like ‘Say Goodbye’ where I have my hands wrapped around the digitakt the whole time and I’m just playing from memory).



I like the clack the buttons make when I push them. It’s really not that deep for me haha.

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

Definitely. I always feel sort of self conscious about all the things I could have done differently and that gives me some momentum to start writing again. I feel like it takes me a while to be able to go back and listen to an album after it’s been released. But having some distance allows me to appreciate it again.

I think artists have this never ending urge to create so unfortunately that sort of implies that nothing you do will ever be fully satisfying. I’ve had to learn to live with that dissatisfaction and use it to continue creating, instead of falling into a pit of insecurity.

I mean that still happens, but I’m more aware of it now.

You recently mentioned that a tagging/categorisation mistake on Spotify cost you many listeners. Outside of the larger implications of artists' reliance on streaming and huge music aggregators, how do you feel that your music, heartfelt and created from a deeply personal place, finds its way to the audience through statistical analyses, machine filters and algorithms?

Honestly, I have no idea. I feel pretty pessimistic about my music’s ability to find a home with a wider audience since most listeners discover new music by what’s “fed to them”.

The way that I think of it, though, and maybe this will help other artists with their “listeners anxiety”, is that the number of people who listen to my music do so intentionally by looking me up, adding me to their collections, and visiting my catalog on their own. It would be great to have a million listeners on Spotify but I think people forget that a lot of those listens come from people passively listening to a track that’s being fed to them on some editorial playlist or from the recommended algorithm.

That would be nice, of course, because every musician wants to land in front of as many people as possible, but I think it’s also important to look at HOW people are listening to your music. There’s hope for all of us, we just have to recalibrate our definition of success.

I am so eternally grateful for every single person who is compelled to put me on and listen to my work. I don’t take any of that for granted.