Los Angeles-based musician and creative technologist August Kamp (she/her) continues to redefine the edges of electronic pop with her new single ‘Un(familia)rity’, a deeply evocative follow-up to her shimmering groove-driven track ‘Sugarize’. The song blends intricate sound design with emotional depth, unfolding as both an introspection and an inquiry, a study of humanity through the lens of the machines we build and the systems that bind us.
Kamp, a trans artist whose multidisciplinary work bridges sound, technology, and visual art, lives and creates in an off-grid botanical garden, her tiny home studio filled with humming machines, vintage encyclopedia clippings, and Polaroids of imagined worlds. This environment mirrors her creative ethos: a belief that nature and technology are not opposites, but reflections of the same living system.
On ‘Un(familia)rity’, August fuses organic and algorithmic textures to produce what she describes as a “book of I-Spy for your ears.” Layers of harmonies and glimmering synths create an atmosphere of synthetic nostalgia, simultaneously intimate and uncanny, yet grounded by a core of unfiltered sincerity that grows more luminous as the track progresses. It feels like a petri dish and cross contamination of the most experimental side of Bon Iver, blended with the pop leaning side of Oneohtrix Point Never.
She shares “It’s a song about humanity and our desire to understand each other and be understood by each other. And it’s ultimately about the machines that we created and how they could bring us together, and they often do bring us together, but that they also very often serve to keep us apart.”
The single marks another evolution in Kamp’s ever-expanding discography, which spans six years, four EPs, and ten albums. Her upcoming full-length project, ‘reconnecting.everything’, is set for release on November 7th, and promises to further explore her signature blend of experimental electro-pop and emotional storytelling.
With ‘Un(familia)rity’, August Kamp once again proves herself a vital new voice in modern electronic music, a creator deeply attuned to the circuitry of both emotion and innovation.
Q&A
Do you feel LA influences your writing?
absolutely – i think it’s always one or two layers down in terms of what i’m talking about in my lyrics. LA is a really good place to observe the overlap between spaces that are “too dirty” (by which i mean, genuinely neglected) and places that are “too clean” (by which i mean, the nature has been eradicated except for where it’s been permitted to stay).
living specifically in northeast LA sorta feels like there’s always something really good happening a few meters away from something really bad. in my neighborhood, there’s these massive luxury homes just a few hundred feet up the hill from an encampment of unhoused folks – these people are neighbors, literally. but the people in the homes go to such great lengths trying to avoid reckoning with that reality.
housing is an incredibly important issue to me, and LA is such a prime example of every way our species has strayed from the light in that regard. the people who live safely in the big comfortable homes are the ones who complain about feeling scared. the people with everything to lose are the ones seen as “dangerous”, when in reality – they experience orders of magnitude MORE danger than their neighbors up the hill.
the people in the houses overwhelmingly oppose the development of new housing (especially apartment buildings, or anything affordable) and yet they will complain to the police about feeling “uncomfortable” walking past the encampments. occasionally the police will come and tear the encampments down. i don’t think anyone seems to understand that they’re having their neighbors houses torn apart.
if anything is uncomfortable, it’s having one’s house destroyed.
my song un(familia)rity, and indeed my entire forthcoming album, are both very very much about this type of juxtaposition.
Talk about your botanical garden/studio, that sounds really interesting.
it is ! it’s beautiful. it’s a safe place to be, and to create, and to grow. more than i could ever ask for. i have a tinyhome studio which i will attach some images of.
the garden is a multi-level plot of land that my family bought a few years ago with the last of our money, we could only afford it because it was a dirt lot.
actually – according to the city of la – it’s still just a “dirt lot”. i’ll attach a picture or two of the garden itself, just to illustrate how silly that classification is.
my mother was the first to live here. she built a tiny home (which is illegal to do oneself, because LA’s building codes are unimaginably prohibitive) and soon after, we built one for me too. we’re almost done setting up a third tinyhouse for my grandma to live in.
if we had gotten these structures permitted, it would have cost $325,000 dollars just to build the concrete foundation the city requires. we opted to do it ourselves, and each of our tinyhome structures cost just around $15,000.
my mom also spent years salvaging plants from the side of the road, as well as having some given to her by kind neighbors. these days, the parcel is happy and green and full of color and life.
living here feels like almost an ideological middle ground between the encampments down the hill and the houses farther up it. we don’t have grid-electricity or hot water, but we do have solar power, and we do have cold water and a small stove with which to heat it.
it feels like existing on the edge of two adjacent worlds that constantly collide, and my music is an exploration of those collisions.
Would you call yourself something like a techno-humanist, with the way nature and technology find balance in your music?
i like that term ! i really haven’t found much existing language for my system of belief to be honest.
i see the world how i do, and i describe things as i see them – but i eventually deviate from every system of thought i find use in.
i believe in what i feel is true, and oftentimes that feeling of truth fails to be classifiable.
a tree is a type of machine, a computer is a type of plant. a human is certainly both.
everything is a person.
How layered is your production, and would you consider your recordings ‘maximalist’? The music has a lot of depth while still sounding clear.
in the case of un(familia)rity, it’s absolutely extremely layered. my personal strategy with music production is to just keep doing things until i have genuinely lost track of what’s going on. there’s something very freeing in that – because i can stop judging the song by the pieces that make it up – it’s more like an ecosystem at that point.
once i lose track, i can observe the song exactly how i would observe any other piece of nature. i love being out in the world because there’s no way to keep track of all the moving pieces. you have to accept it as a whole system that extends farther than you can see as an individual.
there’s something very romantic about that, to me. it’s less ego-stained. i would never look at a bluebird and subsequently perseverate about what color it should be. why would i ? its nature. it is exactly what it is. i don’t like to apply that type of arrogance to my music either. it is what it is, and it will be whatever it will be.
sometimes i get very lucky, and a song will grow into its mature form and i’ll feel it say to me “put me down now, i am done growing. i have become what i am”. that happened with all of the songs on this forthcoming album, and that’s why it’s finally coming out now 🙂
Your quote about the music talks about the “machines we created” as humans, are these also societal or social machinations you’re referring to?
i hadn’t really thought about that ! i’m inclined towards a big YES. we have automated almost everything in this world, including ourselves. i don’t necessarily see that as an outright bad thing in principal – the world has been self-automating for billions of years – but i do think humans are a uniquely irresponsible organism in our approach.
capitalism totally screws up the balance of value in the world. i think if we used our human gift for automating things in a way that disavowed capitalism, we could see the world heal at a rate that is completely unheard of.
part of why i am so unwilling to dismiss AI (as many other artists do) is because i adamantly reject the notion of someone good abandoning a potentially useful tool just because someone bad has also used it.
i want to use computers to heal the earth, and i think we genuinely can. i think pretending that we can’t is lazy, and misguided. i understand it’s frustrating to see such a powerful technology used for capitalism, but i feel the same way about how music is used for capitalism. or art. or fruit. or animals.
capitalism has everything good enslaved, but that doesn’t mean that those things are appropriate scapegoats for our anger at their enslaver. a cow doesn’t support the beef industry because it wants to. it is being forced to. i see computers, tools and AI the exact same way.
targeting anything other than the root cause of all this pain seems like it just keeps the world ailing for the sake of feeling right about something, or worse – for the sake of excusing our urge to lash out at each other. it’s time to be more strategic than that.
-Your discography is deep, is writing and creating just a part of who you are?
hehe yeah honestly, i have been extremely prolific at everything i have ever done for my entire life, but music is the poster-child of that tendency.
my catalog of songs is like a diary i can revisit for the simple sensory joy of hearing each entry again. music is powerful in that way – it helps me keep the time as my life unfolds. it’s like having thousands of little time-capsules containing the sense-memory essence of exactly how i felt at different moments throughout my life.
Lastly, talk about your upcoming LP. What are you most interested or excited about?
reconnecting.everything is like my version of the voyager’s golden record. i think in any other interview setting id be giving a long answer to this question – but given how inspired ive felt answering all of these so far, im inclined to politely ask that we chat again about this closer to the record coming out in early november.
these questions have been really wonderful invitations to all kinds of new growth in my mind, so i’d honestly love to dive into the full album track by track if you guys would be open to that in a couple weeks.
thanks again so so much for the time and the questions.
LINKS:
https://www.instagram.com/august.kamp
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3KJuH3NPiNzXP39VpP8zH4
https://youtube.com/@augustkamp