Los Angeles-based artist and creative technologist August Kamp (she/her) returns with ‘Sugarize’, a striking new single that cements her place as one of indie electronica’s most distinctive voices.
Over the past six years, Kamp has quietly built an extraordinary catalogue of 10 albums and 4 EPs, each project merging emotional storytelling with meticulous sound design. From her off-grid studio, she crafts music that blurs the lines between human and machine, technology and nature.
‘Sugarize’ captures that ethos in sharp focus. Built on shimmering synths and groove-driven rhythms, the track is rich with sonic quirks and unexpected textures, revealing new details with every listen. Its sleek, layered production nods to contemporary innovators like Mk.gee, but the sound remains unmistakably Kamp: bold, immersive, and original.
We had the opportunity to sit down with August to learn all about the process behind ‘sugarize’, what makes them tick and much more here at Music Crowns. Enjoy!
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Hey August, welcome to Music Crowns! How are you doing?
i’m doing quite well !! thanks so much for having me 🙂
Sum up ‘Sugarize’ for us in three words!
punchy, clever, turbulent
Can you walk us through how the song came together and what inspired its sound?
I made sugarize back in 2023, and I was listening to a lot of sam gellaitry around that time – i can tell that was definitely informing my decision-making with drums quite a bit.
Every song of mine starts as an experiment or a cluster of experiments, and with sugarize, I was mostly toying around with sidechain compression, drum pacing, and trying to branch out timbrally into types of instrumentation that felt like they differed substantially from my usual moves.
I tend to get really bored and distractible if I spend too long in the same area with regard to my sound. So, I was especially enamored with the idea of trying to incorporate some audio of live-instrumentation into my palette (given that i can’t play any instruments aside from keys). i knew i wanted to lean into a composition that was front-heavy with the drums – almost in a way that one might expect from a purely synth-powered or electropop song.
What was the recording and writing process like?
I’m pretty sure the first asset that I locked in when creating this song was the bass. It was a splice loop, and I’m typically much more partial to synthetic bass in my music, so hearing a good old-fashioned electric-bass riff that properly inspired me was a little bit surprising and disarming.
Following that, the next thing I layered on was that uncanny sort of whistling synth, which was initially a loop of a more recognizably synthesizer-ish sound, but I added a lot of reverb, pitched it an octave up, and then reversed it – i started to hear this subtle “whistling” in the overtones, so i compressed it in a way that accentuated that whistling sound that I was starting to notice.
drums followed, and i sidechained everything to the kick, which really made the “shape” of the groove a lot easier to discern as i wrote and recorded the vocals.
i usually just mumble until i find the flow that agrees most with the beat, then i try to build the words in a way that fits that flow. i almost never write a song before i’ve heard the instrumental. i like to put the song in charge of itself as quickly as possible, then i just try to support the sound however i can. that usually leads to lyrics i like.
How has your creative vision evolved over that time?
this is an interesting question, id be inclined to say im more beholden to short term in-the-moment creative visions, but i almost never envision a whole track at once.
if i do, it changes immensely in the time im actually making the song – i try not to let the initial creative vision boss me around very much. the early “vision” belongs to a version of me who is from the past, technically; a version of me who knows LESS about the beat/song than this me, here in the present. i like to allow present-tense-me to call the shots
i work like this pretty frequently, where I will bring an asset into the fray, like a loop or a sound or a synthesizer patch, and I’ll have one idea in my head when I start tinkering, but then by the time it fits into place, it’s frequently taken an entirely different shape or form to what I initially envisioned.
I think this is one of my favorite parts of making music. It reminds me of building with Lego as a child. It’s less about telling the pieces what to be, and more about finding room for the pieces you like, and then observing what it turns into at the end of that process.
Do you think there’s a “core” element that ties all your music together?
honestly i think it’s gotta be experimentation. i always tell people that i struggle to perform my music live for the exact same reason i struggle to record a cover of someone else’s song: i cannot play a song that already exists. i am shockingly terrible at it, for some reason. and that logic scales both upwards and downwards in my process.
i struggle to reuse presets, samples, even whole arrangement styles, because doing something that has already been done is categorically tiresome to me – i can’t get my brain interested. i figure i prolly lose out on some ability to achieve a cohesive aesthetic because of this, but i much prefer to look at every album as a compilation of things i learned throughout the time of making it. the aesthetic of a given record is more of an emergent property that appears only when the songs start to stack up and once i start arranging them and toying with the tracklist.
in fact, i’ll typically make half the songs for an album, start arranging the pieces to get a sense of what comes next or what is missing, and then i’ll make the cover art based how my synesthesia reacts to the “feel” of those first few songs. then i make the other songs using the cover art as a reference point for the aesthetic.
it’s like using the album cover as a mood board or “lookbook” for the songs themselves. that’s one of the reasons i so enjoy my work being asynchronous and entirely self-contained – anything informs everything.
Was writing this song cathartic for you in any way?
absolutely. i used to struggle to talk about “numbing out” in my music because i struggled to find a rhetorical angle that felt sufficiently under-explored. i don’t like talking about things in the same ways i’ve heard others talk about them, so it really forced me to interrogate and analyze the ways i specially tend to *escape*.
the first 2/3rds of the song is a rumination on that idea. it’s almost like .. drinking sugar water. and the beat switch at the end serves as a way to sort of “dunk” the viewer into that feeling for a sec.
How does your home studio influence your songwriting and production choices?
i think any music anyone makes is (wether they know it or not) a product of the place it was recorded. the more i made my space/studio into a reflection of me, the more i became able to dig into my feelings about things. the idea of curating the overall sensory environment is just such a big deal to me.
Anyone who has ever made music with me will recognize this analogy – but I don’t think I’ve said it in an interview yet, so this is a good opportunity.
I view making music as going for a dive in a submarine. You can say what part of the ocean you’re going to dive into, and you can say what day you’ll go, and you can say what time of day you’ll go, and set all these other components about the way you shape that environment – but at the end of the day, you can’t really say what type of fish you’re going to see until you’re there in the water. and you’ll see whatever fish it is that you’ll see. It’s not quite a predictable or predetermined thing, but it is sculptable, and you can steer it to some extent.
I think my studio has slowly become a testament to this idea, and a physical embodiment of that concept.
And finally, what’s next for August Kamp for the rest of 2025?
sugarize is the first single of a record I am releasing in November. I think you’re the first publication I’m actually mentioning this to, now that I think of it. The record is called reconnecting.everything, and it is comprised of eight songs that I made over the last six years. 6 years is a way, way longer period of time than I have ever taken to make an album. So, it’s got a very particular set of characteristics that arise from just how long it’s been in the oven.
working on projects asynchronously is lovely because in those last 6 years i’ve actually released 10 albums and 4 EPs. i guess that’s what happens when someone loves making music but also gets near-zero satisfaction by playing songs that already exist, LOL.
i kinda have to use restraint with releasing things too, because i sometimes worry that people will be put-off by the immensity of my backlog. i fear people saying things like “she’s rushing them out the door” or whatever, because i do release quite a lot of music – but i only release projects when they’re truly done, and still they pile up.
i have a LOT of unreleased music that will have been ready to go for years by the time it releases, but this album (reconnecting.everything) really wasn’t done until a month or so ago. it’s been really interesting and odd to have a record take so long to finish. each of the tracks is from a different era of my sound, but they all feel perfect together. it feels like they have been waiting for each other – and some of them waited a very long time.
