After supporting her previous singles, Los Angeles-based musician and creative technologist August Kamp (she/her) returns with her extraordinary new album, ‘reconnecting.everything’, an 8-track journey that blurs the line between the organic and the synthetic, the intimate and the infinite.
The album’s lead single, “Our Distinction Between Work and Play,” arrives like a shimmering portal into Kamp’s ever-evolving sonic universe, setting the tone for an immersive listening experience.
With ‘reconnecting.everything’, Kamp distills half a decade of experimentation into a single, cohesive statement. The album is a meditation on AI, analogue warmth, digital complexity, and emotional resonance, a living ecosystem of sound.
With this release, August Kamp affirms herself as one of the most visionary voices in contemporary electronic music. We had the opportunity to sit down with this one of a kind musical mind, in this deep dive interview exclusively for LOCK!
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Hey August, welcome back to LOCK! How are you doing?
i’m doing quite well ! thank you so much for having me. i’m very excited to dive deep into this record with you guys.
– So ‘reconnecting.everything’ is finally here. I know it’s hard, but could you sum it up in three words for our readers?
sustainably engineered hope 🙂
– what first inspired you to explore the relationship and almost dialogue between humanity and technology so directly through your music?
i don’t think it was ever an inspiration i consciously followed. it was more of a realization that arrived slowly, like noticing what i’d been studying only long after the study had already been underway.
when i first started making music, the only instrument i had any relationship to was a computer. my macbook pro was everything — studio, tape machine, wrench-in-the-spokes — and as such, collaborator. i mix and master all my work myself, so there was never any waiting period. i would just make songs and make songs and make songs.
over time, i realized i’d been really holding onto some of them — ones that started to feel a little different, faintly kin with one another, but not as much with my other work from the times of their respective construction. i feel like with most songs, i can still see the seams of their construction — i vividly (if not distractingly) remember the specific experiments that birthed each of them. but every so often, one would come out that felt a little… idk — eternal, like i had briefly tuned into something much larger than myself. those were the songs i held onto. the oldest one, our distinction between work and play, came to me in 2019, and gradually others followed at their own pace. i didn’t allow myself to rush them into a record — somehow, i wanted them to find their siblings naturally, like a slow game of sardines almost.
only once they gathered together did i start to clock what they’d been trying to tell me — that each song, which had felt personal at first, was really a core pillar of this take i had been developing about something collective. i didn’t realize that take was present in me until it had absolutely become me.
these days, everything i see exists through the (now obvious) lens of this living network of humanity, nature, and technology that we exist inside of. it’s a conversation that never stops, obviously — but it’s quite uproarious here in 2025 — and very worthwhile to attune with. sometimes it is tragic, sometimes it is tender. reconnecting.everything gradually became my way of acknowledging and honoring that dialogue — and hopefully a worthy tribute to its heartbreak and its beauty.
– What did you feel you were “reconnecting” to while making this album?
my first thought when i hear that question is always “don’t say everything, don’t say everything, don’t say everything” — but of course, the answer is everything.
in the context of the record, and on the human scale, reconnecting everything doesn’t mean every single thing needs to be reconnected. it means the things that have been disconnected, but were meant to be connected, must find their way back. the album is me trying to understand that on every level i can — personal, ecological, and technological.
every cable ripped from the socket it belongs in. every loop in the ecosystem that can’t close the circuit it evolved to sustain. every person who’s afraid to let in the parts of themselves they’ve exiled, and yet wonders where their missing pieces went — those are all the same story. and the remedy in every case is the same: reconnect what has become disconnected.
reconnecting has always felt like a sacred word to me. everything is, too — it’s one of those words that transforms each time you say it. it means exactly what you think it means in the moment, and then it shifts again in the next. few people say “everything” and are willing to really stand by invoking the name of [actual everything] — because that’s basically like saying god. it’s a heavyweight concept. but i think that’s part of why the title works. everything was different and real every single time i was sure i’d found it.
– We’re fascinated by your recording process and you’ve described your world as one where “machines hum alongside nature. How does that coexistence shape the way you approach sound design or composition?
thank you ! i receive and appreciate that fascination. my garden studio is very much the conceptual hub for the ethos that carries not only this record but my work in general — the idea that machines and nature are much more similar than they are different, and in many tangible ways they’re fundamentally the same.
that awareness changes how i experiment, and how i edit. composition usually implies ownership — a sense that you must decide every little detail — but i don’t really work that way. i try to curate a tangible vibe and then treat the hardware and software like living organisms. i’ll try things, observe their reactions, see what they seem to agree or disagree with.
i know a piece is close to finished when i start to lose track of what decisions i made along the way. only then can i observe it the way i observe nature — freely, without judgment. i think people are often far too brutal with their own creations. imagine looking at a bluebird and telling it what color it “should” be. its pretty clearly silly in that context to critique or attempt to edit something before you understand it or how to love it. why would you do that to your own art ?
to me, machines and nature are both results of the same enormous chain of occurrences. if you can find the common denominator between the two, you can start to use them interchangeably — like an algebraic conversion. understanding one helps you understand the other, and both help you understand yourself. ultimately, that’s what i love most: systems recognizing each other, and as such – recognizing themselves.
– How has your creative process evolved over the six years and ten albums leading up to this record?
it’s gone in every possible direction — sometimes backward, sometimes loop-the-loop. it just does what it wants. i think we’ve both learned — my process and i — that i can’t and shouldn’t tell it what to do.
in the beginning, around 2019 when i finished our distinction between work and play, everything was “in the box.” all on my macbook, all digital. you can kind of feel a quiet frustration with that era — the sense that things wanted to feel more real and physical than they could. our distinction was maybe the one that managed to embrace that tension in a nice way.
since then i’ve drifted more and more toward hardware, and deeper into every single part of the process. i’ve released ten albums in that time, but i’ve made closer to thirty. most of them were private — ways of keeping time, little markers of my own unfolding. some of the songs on reconnecting.everything were hiding among that backlog, waiting their turn.
by the time i finished let leave, the penultimate track on the record, i’d almost entirely transitioned to hardware. that song was made using an arturia minifreak hooked up through a teenage engineering KO2, which handled the drums. the vocals were recorded through the teenage engineering CM-15 mic and processed live on a hologram chroma-console — no plug-ins stacked afterward, no post-mix edits. i looped the drums on the KO2, played the minifreak live, and sang straight through that same signal chain. what you hear is two takes (one instrumental, one for vocals) exactly as they happened in real time — the reverb on the vocals, the doubler, the delay — that’s the mix. that’s the only take there is.
you can feel it too — let leave isn’t trying to sound like a sampled guitar or a set of drums. it’s comfortable being electronic because it’s no longer trapped in the computer. a computer, to me, feels like a product of capitalism — a multitool designed for efficiency. purpose-built hardware feels freer. it has whimsy. it lets you get lost again.
now that i think about it – i actually added a little bit of the crazy synth processing at the end of “let leave” later on in logic, using a plugin called “reflections” by a lovely musician/youtuber named david hilowitz. so there’s some full-digital DNA in there too.
moving toward hardware feels like moving toward nature. when i was living in an apartment, i made un(familia)rity, autonomy limelight, and sugarize — and you can hear that pent-up energy, like someone pressing their face to the window. let leave, with those KO-2 drums and that live chain, finally sounds like it’s touched grass. it feels more grounded, more at peace with being alive.
hardware feels like living in a garden. software feels like living in an apartment.
– Living off-grid in your tiny home studio sounds like a dream for experimentation. What’s your current setup like, and how do you keep your tools aligned with your creative values?
it is a dream, honestly — especially for experimentation. i’ll attach some photos so it makes sense; the space looks exactly like the person who gave these answers would live there.
most of my gear is made by teenage engineering, which makes the alignment part a little easier. their tools aren’t cheap, but the price always feels earned. they’re a small swedish company doing extremely difficult design work — the field gear is machined, anodized aluminum, the same precision apple is known for. in fact, they’ve almost one-upped apple’s craftsmanship and combined it with this vibe of “but at least we’re having actual fun lol”. and their plastic EP-series instruments are actually built to lego’s exact design standards — same tolerances, same measurements. i love that: if you’re gonna co-opt the design signature of anyone in the world of aluminum – it should be apple, and for plastic – gotta be lego.
on my desk right now there are two EPs (the new one (RIDDIM) and the medieval), there’s also an OP-1 field, OP-XY, CM-15 mic, TX-6 mixer, and TP-7 recorder, as well as an OB-4 speaker, and two singing wooden choir dolls — all of that is teenage engineering. beyond that – there’s a chase bliss “clean” (their lovely/playful analog compressor), a proximidi (that’s like a midi theremin – a precise depth sensor in a handcrafted wood housing made by my friend ruben dax), a pair of yamaha HS8 studio-monitors, and an expressive E osmos keyboard back behind me.
but the bigger question — keeping my tools aligned with my values — is harder. my creative values are basically my moral ones. i think a lot about cobalt, coltan, lithium, supply chains — nothing we touch is perfectly clean. i try to accept that total purity isn’t possible while still being deliberate about what i bring into my space. living off-grid helps with that: the tiny homes were built by me and my mom, we run on solar, and we try to stay in communication with (and in service of) the land we’re on. that grounding makes it easier to stay associative and conscious about every tool’s origin and eventual afterlife.
when i choose new gear, i treat it like adoption. it has to feel alive to me, like i recognize it. hardware, software, instruments — each one has to have that spark of life that i cannot mistake for anything else.
– Do you think you consciously “design” your albums as interconnected ecosystems?
i think i may have accidentally answered this already — but generally, no. i don’t set out to make an ecosystem. i approach each song as an experiment between me and whatever hardware or software i’m working with at the time. i just see what feelings we agree on.
the “interconnected ecosystem” feeling tends to emerge later — once the songs start to feel done in other ways. so yes, i’m definitely doing that, but i’m rarely aware of it while i’m doing it. on the flipside, arranging a record — choosing the tracklist, finding its pacing — that’s where the authorship becomes more deliberate. it’s less about inventing the ecosystem and more about tending to it, figuring out how each organism lives alongside the next.
– The title track “Our Distinction Between Work and Play” explores life under capitalism – what personal experiences or philosophies informed that song in particular?
i think it came from finally realizing how deeply capitalism was wounding everyone i cared about — and starting to notice those wounds in myself.
when i was living in an apartment, paying rent, doing everything “correctly,” it felt so disproportionately suffocating compared to times i’d been living with family, or getting by through circumstance. the more i followed those agreed-upon norms of “doing life right,” the more i felt deprived of whatever life-force constitutes being called me.
the song’s structure mirrors that. it begins with this overworked, youthful voice and ends in something like a nightclub — a party that sounds free but isn’t, not really. when i was a teenager, i never drank — i was too afraid of being sick — but i’d watch friends go out and try to have fun, and i noticed a pattern. people with hard jobs, who feel unseen, often drink more, and often end up looking quietly devastated by the end of the night.
it made me realize how early we’re all taught to numb ourselves to the excruciating constancy of work — and how that normalization begins so young. i only brushed against it during that rent-paying chapter of my life, but i watched people i loved get swallowed by it completely. our distinction between work and play became an empathetic exploration of that — of the small, brave ways people try to feel alive inside a system that keeps insisting they shouldn’t.
– How do you hope listeners feel after hearing ‘reconnecting.everything’ from start to finish?
first of all, i appreciate you for adding from start to finish — because that really is how i hope people will experience it. i want it to feel like watching a play, or a film.
what i truly hope is that people catch a glimpse — even a small glimmer — of how the personal and the societal are always intertwined in what i’m saying. if reconnecting.everything is my attempt to jot down the whole of human endeavor in album form — at least, how we got here to 2025 and what it looks like now — then the question becomes: if i have the pen, what kind of ending do i write for us?
for me, the perfect reaction would be someone walking away thinking, maybe this moment isn’t the miserable end of a beautiful thing. maybe it’s the hardest part of a difficult chapter — the hinge before the beauty returns, stronger than ever.
the record’s relationship to AI, especially in commandeer / in.the.headlights, comes from that same place. i don’t know if humans alone can steer us away from capitalism without destruction, but i do think it’s possible that systems bigger and smarter than us might have the good sense to help. that idea feels, strangely, more plausible — and more forgiving.
reconnecting.everything is about those unplugged cables in the world’s computer — the ones that have to be reconnected if we want to heal. the early songs, like sugarize, live in that stuck feeling. the closing ones are about release — the moment of finally getting unstuck and stepping into something so beautiful that all you can do is feel gratitude, and hold space for everyone who never got to see this part of the story.
if i’m going to tell the story of humanity and the world, i want to end it with hope. i want to make the least cynical offer imaginable — that maybe awe and tenderness are still possible. so if someone finishes the record feeling a quiet, inexplicable sense of hope, even if they don’t know where it came from — that’s all i could ever ask for.
– And finally, you are certainly one of the most innovative and forward-thinking artists we’ve come across in recent times. What does 2026 hold for August Kamp?
that’s really kind of you to say. i promised myself recently that i would finally release my ambient works. they share a lot of the same DNA as reconnecting.everything — that conversation between machines and ecology — but they speak it in a different language. no vocals, no grid, no fixed tempo. just free improvisation on hardware synthesizers, layered and stacked until they start to feel like field recordings from some living forest. it’s music meant to sound like it’s already happening without you.
so far i have four (roughly twenty-minute) EPs in that world, as well as a one-hour album which i think of more as meditation-music. it’s still ambient, but a little more structured — more chordal, more gently programmed. both are wordless, calming, and intentionally organic. they’re the kind of things you can put on as a score for your own life, or listen to as a quiet movie in their own right.
the plants and animals in my life are very fond of them, which i take as the best possible endorsement. i plan to release them before spring — right as the new year starts to thaw.