Sara Landry: hard techno’s high-frequency priestess

For Landry, that meant moving to New York City after high school to enroll in NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, or as our subject calls it: “the school of do whatever you want.” She took courses in subject areas like fashion, derivative assets, and psychology, and prepared her final thesis on The Psychology of Capitalism. “I remember writing a social analysis on how the perception of the Kardashians on social media fundamentally altered which female body types were considered attractive, and I was right,” she says, throwing her finger in the air. It wasn’t until the tail-end of her studies that she dipped her toes into music courses. Eventually, a visit to Amsterdam Dance Event, a music conference held annually in the Dutch city where she currently resides, would cement her love for techno’s rougher, wilder shades.

Following graduation, Landry returned to Austin where she took synth classes with a sound designer and local professor named Francis Preve. “He was a very, very early mentor for me, and I kind of learned the fundamentals of synthesis from spending some time with him,” Landry explains. “And then from there, my Ableton journey was really just a lot of me fucking around in my childhood bedroom in my mom’s house.” That’s where she shaped the first eight years of her career, logging the proverbial 10,000 hours on the software on her way to becoming a self-taught master, and eventually a beta tester for Ableton Live 11. “Some of my most iconic tracks were made while I was doing that and experimenting with their new features,” she shares of working behind the scenes on the leading DAW.

After breakout releases on T-Minus and mau5trap (the latter being home to her 2019 ‘Wait’ EP, which serves up a comparably minimal palette, yet is stunning in its simplicity) Landry emerged a technical beast. Yet Austin’s then-limited nightlife scene posed some challenges for the eager producer. “At the time, I was playing way harder techno than anybody else was in the city,” she reveals. “I was wanting to do these events and wanting to connect with people, but there wasn’t a venue or promoter that really could book me. And so I was like, ‘well, I got a spreadsheet. I can figure this out.’”