By her late twenties, Katya Lee had already lived the version of a music career that most performers spend a lifetime chasing. She fronted two of Russia’s biggest pop acts, first the dance group Hi-Fi and then the all-female group Fabrika, the kind of acts that headline television specials and collect Golden Gramophone awards. Then she left all of it, bought a ticket to New York, and started over with almost nothing.
“I was a bit of a little mermaid,” she says of that move. “I traded my legs for the voice.” The joke lands sideways because the trade ran in reverse. She still had the voice. What she lost, at least for a while, was the ability to use it. She arrived in 2014, barely speaking English, in a city where no one knew her name and no one was waiting.
Learning a City by Listening to It
Lee treats that arrival as an experiment she ran on herself. She cut off easy contact with other Russian speakers so nothing would slow how fast she absorbed the new language, then waited to see what her surroundings would do to her. About a month in, she says, she woke up one morning and simply understood everything. New words kept surfacing overnight that she did not remember learning.
The apartment she landed in made the experiment harder. Her windows looked directly onto a Manhattan skyscraper under construction, and the noise ran from dawn until late at night. Instead of suffering through it, she started walking the city with a decibel meter, measuring the sound in libraries, subways, parking lots, and coffee shops. Almost everywhere she went, the readings ran past healthy limits. The city, she decided, was quietly wearing people down, and nobody was naming it.
Building a Song Out of Gunshots and Sirens
That instinct, to turn a problem into a recording, runs through everything Lee makes now. Her track “Blindfold” was not written so much as constructed. There is no guitar on it and no piano. She built the whole thing out of manipulated gunshots, explosions, sirens, and screams, layering them until they stopped reading as noise and started reading as an environment.
The density of that work caught the attention of LemonTree Studios, one of the small number of Los Angeles rooms equipped with the immersive Dolby Atmos format used in modern cinemas. According to Lee, engineers there began treating “Blindfold” as a reference precisely because of how much sound design was packed into it. The track was mixed for Atmos by engineer Ed Donnelly and is registered with ASCAP. “I wanted to see how far I could push a sound until it stopped feeling like music,” she says.
Clothing That Listens Back
For Lee, the music rarely arrives alone. The construction noise outside her window became a dance track she called “Wall of Sound,” built from the videos she filmed of the drilling, with a subway preacher she had watched everyone ignore installed as its unlikely front man.
Then she made something to wear alongside it. She took the cheap foam earplugs that get produced by the million and never break down, glued hundreds of them in blue, yellow, orange, pink and fuchsia across a disposable jacket, and turned the two most throwaway objects she could think of into one garment that looks like candy. She calls it her emotional armor. People keep reaching out to touch it, which is exactly the point, because a question is easier to start with than a song. She brought a version of the idea to Art Basel this past December, dressing models in the jackets outside the main entrance and letting the crowd come to them.
Her interest in wearable technology has pulled in serious company. She has worked on a piece she calls the CyberSuit, a garment built to function as a playable instrument, alongside Ken Perlin, the NYU computer scientist whose foundational graphics work earned him a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Freedom as a Working Material
Ask Lee what she is actually making, and the answer tends to circle one word. Freedom sits at the center of her values, and most of her projects find their way back to it. One of her songs was written while she was stranded abroad for a month during a visa appointment that collapsed, with a single dress to her name. She filmed the video for it anyway, in a swimming pool, handing her phone to a passing stranger to shoot.
She talks openly about the limits on her own movement, the passport that closes doors other artists walk through without thinking, and turns even that into material rather than a complaint. The thread is not a protest for its own sake. It is the conviction that a person can find some kind of freedom inside almost any situation, and that making things is how she keeps proving it.
The Girl on the Monowheel
The clearest picture of how she works might be the video for her song “Traveling.” Lee filmed it for free, riding a monowheel through New York and Los Angeles in outfits she designed, trailing a friend on roller blades with a screen taped to his hat so he could see her behind him. The only rule, when security or police started after them, was simple. Do not stop.
She likes that image of herself, the woman from the future gliding against traffic in a place where everyone expected her to fail. Eleven years after she landed, unable to order a coffee, it reads as a fair summary of the whole project. She kept moving, and she never came back down.
