Juliette Finds the Silver Lining

The Seattle electronic musician and recent DJ extraordinaire chats about the pitfalls of rapid success and the drive to succeed on his own terms.

Photo by Bianca Josi.

[This article was originally published on The Tape Deck on September 12, 2022.]

In early August, Scott Kulicke found himself in a situation that would be a dream come true for any artist.

It was the last day of the second inaugural Day In Day Out, a festival held on the grounds of the Seattle Center. The three-day lineup featured an overwhelming amount of established acts outside the city, but DJ sets bookending each performance would allow some of Seattle’s more recognizable local acts to steal some of the limelight.

At the end of the night, sandwiched between Japanese Breakfast’s show-stopping performance and the reliable grandeur of The National, the audience had grown into a crowd 6,000 strong. Kulicke stood alone on a side-stage with a host of samplers and a Fender Jazz electric bass slung over his body. Across a deft combination of thumping beats and instantly-recognizable soul samples, his fingers would fly across the frets to add a thrilling touch of live unpredictability.

During a particularly intense shred, I remember catching Matt Berninger disengage from a conversation to point in delight, beer in hand, at Kulicke’s bass brandishing. Berninger’s enthusiasm mirrored that of the crowd who, similarly plied with drinks and spiritually livened by Michelle Zauner’s triumphant show, danced in thrall with the music. Then, as it built to a climax with the oncoming drop of a classic Donna Summer clip, The National took to the stage a few minutes early and the sound was cut, leaving Kulicke high and dry.

It was a comical close to the set that nonetheless provided him an ideal introduction to the city’s festival-goers. When a crowd is openly calling for an unknown DJ over an established act like The National, you’ve probably done something right.

A week later, I’m sitting with Kulicke in the basement of his new rented house to talk about the show, which has caused the gates of opportunity to swing wide open. The owner of popular SODO nightclub Supernova happened to be in the crowd, and within 24 hours he had booked Juliette for a late-night spot at his club. “Everyone loved it,” he says of the club spot, which will invariably lead to larger gigs down the line. “The last the last 8 to 10 months have been real boom times.”

He himself attributes his recent successes to a combination of luck and circumstance. The serendipity reveals itself when I ask him how long he’s been DJing. He responds, “About 8 to 10 months.”

“I used to DJ at a bar I tended in L.A. when I lived down there,” he says. “I didn’t pick it up until last October when my now roommate told me that Hazelwood in Ballard was looking for DJs. I thought, “That might actually be really fun if I could get all my friends out at a place for a night. I remember crudely how to do this and I can go rent a DJ controller from American Music. Let’s do this for one night.’

“It went really, really well,” he recalls, “even though it was really incongruous with the venue. Hazelwood is like a small, beautiful, quiet cocktail bar. It’s not the place to be blasting disco at the four patrons there that are on Tinder dates.”

As he talks, we’re surrounded by his humble setup: a succession of music technologies including old and new keyboards, a pedalboard, a set of small monitors for mixing, and a tower for his cat. Some stray fruit flies float lazily around in the aftermath of a compost mishap. It’s a small but comforting place to compose, and it reflects the type of music Kulicke has been making ever since he picked up the moniker of Juliette.

Though the throngs of people now following Kulicke’s project on social media might identify him primarily as a DJ, he’s actually relatively new to the art. Instead, he’s been writing and recording chill, cinematic electronic music (“bad Tycho,” he cracks self-disparagingly) for over six years. It wasn’t until recently when he started turning his attention toward DJing, and the two versions of his act happened to dovetail when a long-desired headlining spot at Barboza put him in the sights of booker Evan Johnson, who then secured his DJ act for a monthly spot at the Runaway. This, plus the fortunate timing of a free slot at Day In Day Out, led him to the performance that is now giving him more work than he can (or wants to) accept.

“It was supposed to be a one-off,” Kulicke says of his initial Hazelwood set. “I’m actually having this conversation with my partner right now that the DJing thing was not supposed to be a thing. It’s not what I want it to be.” Then, impromptu, he hits play on his computer and shows me what he’s been working on: a spacious, pristine sunrise of a track, far from the bassy club beats I heard the previous weekend. His Soundcloud page reflects this reality: amid the handful of tracks available for listening, every single one follows the familiar path of emotive EDM, all blooming comedowns instead of sweaty bangers. The contrast between this original material and the music last Sunday night is stark, and it’s a contrast that somewhat plagues Kulicke.

“The DJing thing is interesting because I care very little about it, and it has instantly started going so much better than my original music and makes me feel sort of…salty.”

Photo by Rob Moura.

A native of Philadelphia, Kulicke spent his earlier years picking up one instrument at a time: first saxophone as a kid, bass as a teenager, then one of his older brother’s guitars, and finally keys and production. After moving to Los Angeles to earn a screenwriting degree, he started to reckon with latent mental health problems – namely anxiety and unaddressed depression – by making music as a form of self-therapy. Long solitary nights listening to specific seminal records by Jungle, Roosevelt, Tycho, and Glass Animals reinforced the style of music he would eventually chase. “There were these late nights,” he recalls, “lying on my couch by myself listening to these albums over and over and realizing, ‘Wait, this isn’t actually that complicated.’”

He would scrutinize each song, picking up on individual instruments, until he felt confident that he could replicate their alchemy – in effect learning the same skillset that would help his DJ career. From there, the Juliette project was born.

“It’s super dumb,” he says when I ask about the name’s origins. “I knew I wanted to do it as a woman name for reasons that were entirely uninterrogated, and six years later I’m like, ‘Aw man, I should have thought about it more.’

With a few original tunes under his belt, Kulicke started building his artistic presence up the only way he knew how: small shows and online outreach. As with every nascent musical act, progress came slow. First came the usual early sets at low-stakes venues like High Dive and Substation: “There were eight or nine people at the Substation show, four of them were in the other band and I got paid three bucks.”

Then came the crushing lows that would accompany a typical foray into blog coverage via Submithub. Out of hundreds of submissions, an overwhelming majority declined, and the ones that did responded in a measured fashion: “The pile of rejection emails haunted me.” Only after years of work building an audience did Juliette finally secure a headlining slot at Barboza, where friend and local singer AUSTEN helped pack the venue.

Kulicke acknowledges the uphill battle involved in promoting the type of music he makes. “I definitely know that the market for bedroom instrumental electronic isn’t robust,” he admits. But there’s also a part of him that acknowledges the inherent triumph in making that climb, especially when it’s on his own terms. If you peek at his Instagram account, you might note that it’s become a triple threat of creativity that includes not just music but photography – delicate, grainy vistas caught on Fuji film, like an aesthetic extension of his music. Juliette, for him, has become a convenient umbrella term for everything in his pursuit.

It’s only recently that he’s added DJing into the mix, and in this context, it’s understandable why he might be frustrated about finding such immediate success. To Kulicke, it feels a little cheap.

“I’m having a lot of success playing other people’s music,” he ribs, implying that he’d rather be known more for his original material than a Donna Summer drop. “The way I’m sort of justifying it to myself – not that it like needs a justification, but it does in my brain – is that by doing it all under one name, one feeds the other. Plus I get to make all my choices purely on fun.”

Still, the friction is there: “I remember during the Day In Day Out set thinking to myself, ‘Should I be playing some of my own music in the middle of this set? Like, am I wasting a huge opportunity?’”

There’s an interesting point to be made about what constitutes “original” music in an era of hyper-curated musical experiences. It wasn’t that long ago when the status quo was still centered around recording tracks from scratch in DAWs. Today, many young people are currently spending their formative years interacting with music in unprecedented ways. Even now, the era of the streaming playlist, already notable for its groundbreaking access to an entire history of recorded music, is being supplanted by the idea that segments of already-existing material can be welded onto candid captures and skits to create something wholly original. The argument follows that DJing as an art form isn’t just an equally virtuous endeavor to making music from scratch; in its ability to conjure ecstasy from instantly recognizable pieces, it might even be preferred.

It’s a sea change packed into a relatively short amount of time, and it’s perhaps why Kulicke, like so many others in his age group, still has hang-ups about it. “On paper, I’m of the latter mind,” he says of the distinction between playing completely original music and DJing, “but I can tell that if I had to pick one, I obviously pick the thing that’s mine. Every baby is like a blessing in the world, but like my baby’s special, you know? It’s that weird attachment to things that are ours. I shouldn’t feel that way, but some part of my brain does.”

There’s another thing creeping up in the back of his mind: the fatigue that comes from burning the candle at both ends. “I’ve just been on nonstop since the beginning of June, and I’m exhausted,” he says. “It’s the coolest problem in the world to have, but the burnout is real, and it forces some reflection about why you do this in the first place.”

It’s a relatable problem for any creative, but the panicked drive to push yourself against your own limits especially rings true when success starts knocking. Between the monthly Runaway DJ sets, the electronic sets, and the extra spots he plays now and then, Juliette’s become a constant force in Seattle’s summer live scene. The Day In Day Out set would set a milestone in that timeline, but by then Kulicke’s creative batteries would be depleted and burnout would caused him to wind down his efforts for the rest of the year, having already turned down offers to play in October onward.

The demand is causing him to reconsider why he wants to make music. “I don’t think I want to be a professional musician. I don’t think that that would actually make me happy,” he muses. At the same time, he’s irked by the types of problems that would affect professional musicians, including his lack of productivity in the interim. “I was talking about this to my brother, and I was just sort of talking shit on myself,” he says. “I remember saying, ‘I haven’t released a new song since the start of the pandemic.’ Like, if you aren’t making art, are you an artist?’” Even with this relatively modest break, a measure of guilt creeps into his attempts at self-care.

Most of the impetus for his slowdown, then, is grounded in an attempt to rekindle his love of the art. “I’m trying to slow way down on all fronts for the next couple months, write a 3-to-5 song EP of my own original music, do a big release show in the winter and then sort of start working back up to ideally a bigger summer next year,” Kulicke says of his plans.

There would be one more show before then: a spot opening for NPR favorites Among Authors at Neumo’s in early September. “Part of me didn’t want to play this show because it was just a little too much at the end of a long run,” says Kulicke. “A year ago, I would’ve murdered a man to play Neumo’s, and here I am a year later being like ‘but I’m sleepy today.’ But I also think it’s a good opportunity for forced accounting with myself: do I need to say yes to every offer? Do I need to say yes to something simply because it’s a good business move for this project’s growth?”

At Neumo’s, Kulicke would throw everything into his performance. The set would be his last opportunity for a while to showcase his growth as a musician, and to present the warring sides of his artistry. In an attempt to incorporate what he learned about crowd work from DJing, he stuck to four original Juliette songs, maintaining a constant BPM for the first three and recreating the songs part by part on the fly. The humid disco of “McQueen” transitioned seamlessly into the ethereal thump of “All You Need To Do Is Ask” and “Lakehouse,” all tied together with the same live unpredictability of his Day In Day Out set.

The set was a hit. In the dark confines of the venue, the substantial crowd ditched the typical wallflower scene common to Seattle sets and danced the night away. By the time he launched into his touchstone track, the torch-like “Mayfield,” he had won them over just as easily as on that August night. This time, however, he did it all with parts of his making.

“At the end of the show, I was really happy I’d played it,” he says despite the impending burnout. For all the blanching about his burgeoning reputation as a DJ, he acknowledges that the art has changed him.

“At the end of this run of shows I’m pretty tired from performing and I’m feeling really stale about my own music, but I never get tired of seeing the swarm of bodies dancing,” he concludes. “The few times that I have the wherewithal to look up from my 1,000 knobs and keys and actually observe the crowd, it’s everything I dreamed of when I was a teenager playing bass alone in my bedroom. Making any music is cool, but making dance music has ruined everything else for me. I don’t want to see people swaying anymore, I want to see them moving and sweating and smiling and getting their hair messy.

“If you want to do music professionally, you need to say yes to things even when it’s just work; if you want to do music because you love it, you are never, ever obliged to take an offer that doesn’t give you a giddy sense of ‘Holy shit, I actually get to do this.’”