Kelly Lee Owens on the album ‘Dreamstate’, opening access in music

Growing up in northern Wales, electronic musician Kelly Lee Owens I didn’t have much immediate access to live music.

“We had a community center, which was probably the closest to having some kind of stage,” he recalls, hours before playing the cardiff date of his Dreamstate tour. “The problem with northern Wales is that you had to go to even go to a club.”

The closest was 30 minutes by car. Her family reduced the money to get a small car for her 18th birthday, so she became the designated driver so that she and her friends go to visit the “independent time” in the place. But since this was 2007, and they only had an hour of “indie” music, which consisted mainly of songs like the Murderers “Mr. Brightside”.

Owens found himself taking the train to Liverpool or Manchester to see more underground acts. “What a pity you have to leave your own country to find places,” she says.

Access is part of a multiple layer fighting to enter the music industry that Owens has been highlighting lately. As someone from a small town, a history of working class and also as a woman in the electronic scene, he felt that much of his early experience was trying to overcome industry surveillance. Now, he says, it is even worse, with so many places that face the closure and general general of the music industry.

“I have experienced firsthand the genuine struggle that is when you come from a place with a lower socioeconomic opportunity or support,” he explains. “I had no financial support on my trip to become a musician and artist, nothing to turn to. So on the way, the places that are the little ones are the litular steps.”

In recent years, Owens has entered the mainstream, after signing with the flourishing Electronic Music Seal DH2, a dirty low footprint founded by George Daniel of 1975. He found himself winning buzzing of sets in the Calderas Partygirl room of Glastonbury and Charli XCX in Ibiza.

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He is currently touring his album 2024 Dreamy stateAnd with access to the greatest stages so far of his career, he offers opportunities for promising DJs to join her. Before his tour, Owens put an open call for local DJs to send him mixtures through DM to be able to choose someone for the opening slot. Owens, their management and a manger of social networks have been going through the “hundreds and hundreds” of the presentations, compiling them on an Excel spreadsheet and choosing someone just before each date to open it.

“There is so much talent out there,” he says with emotion. “Honestly, it has been one of the most energizing things in years for all of us that I have felt like, ‘this is all, man, this is that kind of base shit. This is punk. This is DIY.”

The process also reminded him of the anger he has felt for the growing lack of steps and access the newest artists they have. “There are so many voices that are not known, and many layers for that, and it is irritating to me,” he explains. She remembers her own difficulties as a woman in electronic music, and the more difficult she had to work to be taken seriously in her own scene.

“I had to prove a lot that DJ could,” Owens explains. “I will not name names, but there were larger artists who could pre -preparate a complete DJ in Ableton, match the clues in perfect and beautiful transitions, and appear in the fabric (in London) and touch that. While, as a woman, I felt that if I did, I would only be ridiculed. I had to make sure that I could overcome me properly and that the coincidence would be taken.” ”