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Karen Gwyer discovered electronic music lying in bed, late at night, unsure of exactly what she was hearing. She was a teenager in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and though she didnât know it back in the early 1990s, she had the good fortune to live within broadcast radius of a major musical revolution: Detroit techno. The radio that her musician parents had given her when she was a little girl was tuned to WCBNâs âCrush Collision,â a weekly showcase of underground techno and house, much of it emanating from right there in the Midwest. Unlike most radio shows, electronic beats would roll on interrupted, anonymous and impervious to scrutiny. A ballerina since childhood, Gwyer instinctively understood that this was dance music, but she was too young to understand what nightclubs or warehouses or raves might be like; she could only imagine them.

Decades later, her own music has a similar effect. It leaves you without obvious reference points. The rhythms and textures are recognizable as techno, but her rough-hewn tracks stand at armâs length from the rest of the genre, at odds with most club musicâs loop-centric functionalism; they sometimes feel like a series of coded messages. This isnât music for crowds on autopilot. It is an invitation to sweat, to scowl, to grin maniacally; it is both body music and head music, and it invites you to travel deep inside yourself. There is an urgency to her work that you donât often find in club culture.

Her path to making music was a roundabout one. In New York, where she had moved for art school in 1995, she forgot about techno for a while; after university, she had to start working in order to pay off student loans. âI lost the focus,â she says over Skype from her home in London. âI was just going to bars and having brunch all the time, as you do.â Eventually she got married and moved to the UK, where she fell in with a crowd at the fringes of electronic musicâs avant-gardeââJapanese dudes who would sit and play one note,â she jokes.

She soon found herself onstage at an experimental music festival as part of a group of people improvising on kitchen appliances. âThe guy who was organizing the festival came up and said, âNice to meet you, Iâve just started a band and itâs all guys. Weâre looking for a girl, would you like to be in my band?ââ she recalls. âAnd I said, âWell, Iâm having a massive crisis, my marriage is breaking down, why not? What should I play?â He was like, âGo out and buy a synthesizer.â So I did. And that is how I started making electronic music.â While she liked being in a band, what she really liked was coming home, locking herself in a room, and learning her way around her synths and the music-production software Logic. âAt that point, life was really, really difficult, and I needed an escape,â she says. Slowly, one thing led to another. Her first marriage ended; her music progressed in what she calls a âvery mellow and amateurishâ fashion; she met a guy at Honest Jonâs record store, a cornerstone of the cityâs experimental scene, whom she married and had two kids with. Somewhere along the line, her music became a proper career. âMy god,â she says, âI would give an arm if I had been able to just start doing this from the beginning and not had all those shitty jobs and that shitty marriage, and to have not wasted all that time.â Still, she admits, thereâs no second-guessing paths not taken. âWould I have even had the confidence to keep going if Iâd started off in my 20s? Probably not, because I was a bit of a wallflower.â

Not anymore. Today, Gwyer is as driven an artist as youâll encounter. In the past five years, she has developed a reputation as a fierce live performer, and her new album, Rembo, due out next month, marks a major step forward. It is fuller and more enveloping than her previous recorded work, with big, severe drum grooves that grab you forcefully by the lapels, and layer upon layer of synthesizers that conjure an illusory sense of space. As club music, it offers a not-so-gentle rebuke to the conservatism inherent in so many actual nightclubs.

In part, itâs parenthood that has made her artistic perspective possible. As any clubber-turned-new-parent surely knows, staying out to catch a midnight set is largely incompatible with the care and feeding of sleepless infants; thatâs all the more true when it comes to playing one of those wee-hours sets, and catching a plane home the next day. But Gwyer says thereâs a distinct upside to the life of a techno mom too: It gives her the freedom to create the music she wants to hear. âIâm not going out all the time and hearing things that influence me that much. So Iâm probably making what youâd describe as weird musicâbut I donât feel itâs particularly weird.â Pitchfork: How was the making of Rembo different compared to your previous records?

Karen Gwyer: The expectations. Maybe that was good, because it forced me to up my game. I thought, Shit, Iâve put a lot into this, I canât let it slide now. Iâve found something that I love doing, Iâve got to make it happen. Â

This is actually the second iteration of this album. I finished the first version over a year ago, and it was meant to come out on a different label, and it took a long time to figure out that it wasnât going to happen. I got really upset because I felt like so much time had been wasted. The good thing was that Benji [Roth, aka Semtek] from [UK label] Donât Be Afraid kept pestering me, and I figured it was worth me sitting back down and taking it more seriously. All my other recordings have been done in a more kind ofâI wouldnât say âflippant,â but I just did them, and they were there. I didnât necessarily choose the right labels. I dropped the ball a bit. So for the first time ever, I really tried. I had a chat with myself, like, OK, these are the things that I have let myself down with in the past, like production quality and capturing the energy of the live performance. So I tried my absolute best.

But it was really hard. This past year and a half have unequivocally been the hardest, emotionally and physically, of my entire life. My younger son was born with some health issues. We tried and failed in a really horrible manner to buy a house in London. Loads and loads of really rotten things have happened. The good thing is I managed to do some decent work.

Is making music an emotional outlet for you?

Definitely. Lately itâs been an outlet from a lot of stress. Even if Iâm tired and have no desire to get on a plane and go play, the minute I get there, I just realize that I absolutely needed to do it. For my own sanity. I need to have that challenge and meet some new people and talk about something and be out of my comfort zone. So not only making music, but playing music has been an incredible release of stress and frustration in the last couple of years.

Do you think itâs harder for techno moms than techno dads when it comes to making music and traveling for gigs?

Absolutely. My husband is incredible and heâs happy to help out. But there is no denying that I am the one who bears the burden of the well-being and daily maintenance of our children. Part of that is because he has the job; it would be difficult if I had a full-time job. But thereâs no way in hell I was going to go back and do what I was doing before. I was burned out, like, I just kind of hate people and offices. Iâd had enough. But the motherâyouâre the first point of call. All sorts of silly little things: You know that he had beans yesterday and heâs having beans again. All that. Itâs an incredible amount of work that you donât get much thanks for. Itâs more than a full-time job. From the minute I wake up until 9 p.m., Iâm at work.

When did you find the time to make the album?

A combination of working really late into the night, until I would basically just keel over, and also just getting angry and resentful and saying to my husband in a fit of rage, âYou need to take the kids away from me for at least four hours today.â And I did the whole thing in, cumulatively, probably about a week. Not even.Â

I was talking to this woman who has a child who came to photograph me not too long ago. We both agreed that as soon as you become a parent, or at least a mother, and you have creative work that you want to do, you can no longer waste a single second of your time. You sit down to work and you have to come up with a winner. You canât sit down and do any work that you will potentially throw away. If you do, youâll go to bed upset that youâve wasted your time. I mean, to do the album I had to sit down and make tracks and they had to go on the album. People contact me, like, âDo you have anything extra for a compilation?â No. I have not done any music other than what is on this album. Which makes me sound like a bit of a freak, but thatâs the reality, isnât it? You cannot waste your time. You canât take any particular risks. You have to know what youâre going to do and you have to sit down and do it.Â

Your track titles on the new album have a real sense of humor to them. They seem to be sets of questions and answers: âWhy Is There a Long Line in Front of the Factory?â and Â âThe Workers Are on Strikeâ; âDid You Hear the Owls Last Night?â and âYes, But I Didnât Know They Were Owls.â

I really enjoy seeing people think too hard about the titlesânot because Iâm trying to be evil or sadistic. Itâs just that, for me, the titles are completely not the point. Iâm like, âJust listen to the bloody music!â It makes me really uncomfortable to come up with a layer of meaning to add to the music. That feels wrongâlike Iâm going to influence people in a way that may or may not be helpful in listening to the music. But I realized that people get really into track titles, so I thought, Iâll just give them a little extra something to chew on.

It drives me nuts to see the norm for track titles in dance music. Itâs just so bloody boring! Just shoot yourself in the face. I feel like saying to people, âHave a little fun with this!â Because people take it very seriously, donât they; I had some guy in France write a whole article dissecting my titles. Itâs really funny. The one about the owls at the end of the albumâI mean, I made that piece of music long before I called it anything to do with owls. And this guy very sweetly and sincerely said, âI really hear the owls in there.â Like, no, man. Thereâs no owl.
