Artist Profile: Kleo
Kleo, the Copenhagen-based indie-pop artist, has made waves with the release of her debut project Event Horizon, gracing complex and shimmering instrumentals with her explorations of love, loss, and the catastrophes and triumphs in between. But Event Horizon, and her catalog as it appears on the page, fail to tell her story of artistic and personal maturation, and her debut album serves as the culmination of this journey.
It was Kleo’s childhood surroundings that first opened up her creative horizons. Her grandfather was a classical pianist, and compositions by Chopin and Debussy would echo through the cavernous walls and high ceilings of her house whenever he came to visit. Her father was an architect and her mother was a painter, and their constant discussions and appreciation for art opened up a space in which she could be comfortable pursuing her passions.
“I grew up in a big house with people who weren't afraid of deep conversations and very philosophical conversations over dinner– all enamored with art and all kinds of art… They always encouraged me to just explore whatever. It was a very secluded and very safe space.”
Her first personal encounters with music, however, took place in the context of the scores of the films she loved as a child. Movies like Titanic and Romeo and Juliet carried expansive sonic worlds within their visual presentations, and Kleo, from a young age, felt emotionally compelled by the expansiveness of these spaces.
She began checking out LPs from the library: an activity that introduced her to groups such as Pink Floyd and Radiohead. Yet her watershed moment came when she, flipping through TV channels late one night, came upon Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance.
“I felt like Kurt Cobain was sort of howling; he had these wolf eyes and [was] singing out from this ocean of lilies and this gorgeous nineties stage. I thought to myself, there was such a synchronicity and… the band, they were all trying to convey the same story and they were simply playing so well… Subconsciously, I think I decided, ‘That's pretty cool. I want to do that.’”
She began writing songs as a teenager, but, for years and years, she didn’t possess the confidence or the creative focus necessary to execute what had slowly become her passion. She would begin a track on the piano, designing a chord structure and the beginnings of a melody. But, as the layers slowly piled up, she felt unable to finish the process of compiling them into a complete song.
Her voice and artistic desire were there, but they were stifled by her inability to tame and channel her creative stream.
Yet in her 20s she began practicing transcendental meditation: a spiritual practice of which the late David Lynch was a notable devotee. It centers on the body’s natural tendency toward stillness coupled with a personal mantra that focuses the mind.
It immediately appealed to Kleo, and she credits the resulting focus and clarity she received from the practice with finally opening up her creative horizons.
“[David Lynch really focused on the fact that] f you're filled with stress and if you're depressed or sad… creativity sort of crumbles beneath that… You can't stand in the eyes of the hurricane and describe all that agony. It's a glamorized view on the idea we have of the suffering artist and that you have to go through some kind of pain in order to create some magnificent piece. That was not the case for me until I learned to meditate.”
Yet even in the earliest days of her musical output, Kleo struggled beneath the weight of her doubts. When she finished her first-ever single, “Miss You”, she told her producer that she never wanted it to see the light of day. It was ultimately released, and, from there, things took off.
She has since signed to Danish music label Tambourhinocerous and has continued to build on her ever-blossoming catalog.
Event Horizon, therefore, represents the culmination of multiple decades of artistic exploration. It is Kleo’s first brave step into her emerging sonic world, and it is magnificent in its complexity and expansiveness. From the swelling classical atmospheres of tracks like “Everything Everywhere at Once” to the dancing strings of tracks like “Law of Attraction”, Event Horizon puts virtually all of Kleo’s artistic history on display, playing in the same vast spaces she fell in love with as a child.
Yet, as she approaches her next project, she hopes to venture into a new kind of sonic intimacy– one that engages the listener more closely and operates within another spectrum of the creative bounds that Kleo has come to occupy.
“There are moments in the new album where I wish there was a lot more intimacy going on… It can be like a diversion. It's a very, very beautiful avant-garde costume, but I'm thinking about going to more intimate, organic stuff.”
At the same time, however, Kleo reiterates how proud she is of Event Horizon in its complexity and wide sonic scope. and she hopes to continue to build upon a first effort that served, in many ways, as the zenith of her entire musical history.
