Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Zoe Lowe. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Zoe, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Have you ever had an amazing boss, mentor or leader leading you? Can you us a story or anecdote that helps illustrate why this person was such a great leader and the impact they had on you or their team?
The best boss I ever had never called himself my boss, but there’s no doubt that superlative belongs to Wes Figueroa of CTC Studios. I wasn’t new to audio work when I moved to Orlando from Hong Kong, but it felt like starting from zero. Wes was in the process of expanding his one-man/one-studio operation when he happened to get a cold email from me. He was the first person to give me a shot here and he’s been teaching me lessons from the moment we met.
The first time I sat down with him, he was more candid with me than anyone in the industry had ever been, including about the fact that a girl in the studio doesn’t necessarily command respect. That was something I already knew, but it made a huge difference to hear it plainly acknowledged by someone who could have downplayed it. He backed that up by giving me, and all his engineers, the autonomy to call out or remove myself from unsavory situations; more importantly, he gave me all the tools and opportunities to disprove anyone who doubted me. Occasionally that involved some tough love. I’ll never forget when he told me (during the very same first meeting), “This soft-spoken thing might work for you for a while, but that’ll change.” Another thing I needed to hear in the early days; I guess I just wasn’t expecting it from a near stranger!
Obviously Wes is allergic to bullshit. Also, coming from a service background where the customer was always valued over the team, it was a dream to work for a guy who’d never throw his employees under the bus. He told me that as soon as he heard a prospective client turn their nose up at the idea of having a female engineer, the call was over. No convincing, no pitching a different engineer. The thing Wes teaches you is to know your worth, a lesson that all professional creatives need to learn. “You don’t wanna just be the friend that works on music for free forever.” If you hadn’t guessed, CTC stands for Cut The Check!
He was my boss for a while, but he has also been and remains many other things: a friend, a mentor, a creative collaborator, a business partner, and a father figure when I was a world away from home. I’m proud to say we just collaborated on his first release under his new moniker – They Won’t Stay Dead! featuring two other Orlando legends, Kristen Warren and Phenom. If you’ve ever been recorded by Professor Wes, you’re in great company.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I record, mix, and produce for local and remote clients, and I do music and audio-related work on a volunteer basis as well. Everyone in professional audio has a weird story! Most of us don’t mean to end up here but like it enough to stay. In my case, tale as old as time, I started out playing in a band. My twin sister was a great guitarist and I was an okay drummer, so we sort of became the de facto back up band for a lot of things during our teen years. I started using free DAWs to create arrangements for us and caught the producing bug. A day didn’t go by where I didn’t spend hours listening or playing or mentally arranging. Pursuing the arts in a culture like Hong Kong’s – high achievement, high earning potential, traditional markers of success, et cetera – felt beyond improbable, so I only ever shared my music anonymously and never considered the long-term. But around 17, I realized (like most creatives do eventually) that I’d never be satisfied doing anything else and had to go all in.
I’m still a Hong Konger, so I retained some cynicism – I had no connections, no formal music education, and no extra cash for studio time. It seemed like the most efficient (if not the most romantic) solution to all of it was to just get into engineering myself. I reached out to every indie show promoter and studio in the city and, after plenty of rejection, started hanging out and engineering by day while serving and barbacking by night. I actually met some of my best music industry connections in the restaurant scene! I eventually moved into the studio world full-time, and have been running sessions from my own studio in downtown Orlando since 2023. I owe Professor Wes another massive shout out here for granting me the use of some of his equipment after we moved on from our last recording location. Recently, I’m focusing more on production and writing work, and on personal projects that spotlight some of the great people I’ve met – one is a spooky holiday album, Wrong Door!, with some of my favorite artists in Orlando and Atlanta, and I’m working on a remix project highlighting the younger cohort in the Hong Kong scene.
Five years in, I’m lucky enough to have produced and engineered everywhere from festival stages to bedroom studios to major labels. I still go by uncomfortable twin, the username I had when I posted music anonymously. I owe my clients everything, and I pride myself on keeping things affordable and accessible for them. I love solving puzzles with clients – bringing abstract visions to life, polishing rough ideas, and traversing barriers of experience or genre. I specialize in working with hip hop and indie vocalists, but I also provide editing, mixing, audio repair, production, and sound design services for most commercial genres, podcasts, and voice-overs. I welcome inquiries regarding pretty much any music or audio-related work you can imagine – even if I can’t help someone out directly, I love connecting them with people who can!
I’d be remiss not to mention Hong Kong one more time. The motivation behind my own music is often to center my hometown, and I dedicate all of it to my younger self and the people I grew up with. I consider my generation of Hong Kongers the luckiest, growing up between the 1997 Handover and the National Security Law passed in 2020. Most of us participated in two major protest movements as students in 2014 and 2019, and witnessed the strength and idealism our city possesses even as it becomes unrecognizable. So it’s more than nostalgia; as change continues and the diaspora grows, it’s really important to me to recreate our collective memory of those times through sound, images, and words, and to empower other people to do so. That’s the goal, ultimately.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
I’ve definitely had to shift from learning before doing to learning by doing. Really I had to just stop being afraid to embarrass myself. Embarrassment is not the worst case scenario; would that it were. I’ve unlearned this lesson so many times over, because the impulse arises in any new environment, and I’m naturally pretty self-conscious. We’d all like to avoid finding things out the hard way! But any engineer will tell you that making mistakes is the quickest way to learn, not to mention the best way to make sure you’ll never forget.
I’m not saying preparation doesn’t matter, but you can’t anticipate everything. So to me, learning how to mess up effectively is part of good preparation. I’ll be honest, this lesson didn’t really hit home until the first time I trained someone and saw what really helped versus what held them back. Stay calm and focused instead of beating yourself up, learn how to troubleshoot, and always account for the situation with your client or your team instead of keeping people in the dark. I realized pretty quickly when I began working with live stage crews that I’d much rather be the person with a million questions than the person with nothing left to learn and no flexibility. The first person might get teased at times. The second person is everyone’s least favorite teammate.
Of course, be aware of the stakes and don’t ignore your discomfort. But I know in my case, I had to stop waiting to feel “ready” for things. My mentors and role models are where they are because they’ve already made all the mistakes. I’m just trying to catch up!
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
I’ll flip this question around and talk about something that creatives and non-creatives alike don’t always realize. If we mean creative/non-creative in a professional sense (cause there’s no such thing as a non-creative person!), there’s a common idea that creative work is the nontraditional, intrepid way with no returns promised. That assumption impacted my own decisions a lot, but I’m noticing it’s less definite these days. Yeah, there’s no set path of upward mobility for a lot of creatives. Your output is undervalued and you’ll work for a lot of big egos with no sense of professional boundaries. But isn’t all that true for any early-career professional in 2023? Think of all the teachers and servers and nurses and contractors you know. Most people my age doing non-creative or non-entrepreneurial work are just as likely as creatives to need thick skin, internal motivation, and a second job to make things work.
That’s not something to romanticize, but to acknowledge. Honestly, I suspect some creatives are hesitant to acknowledge it for fear of compromising their own starving-artist pretensions. Being employed (and paid) by someone other than yourself will always feel like the stabler option, but it’s not the 50’s anymore. The career employee is a rarer breed. Employers are less likely than ever to cultivate talent or promote internally. We’ve all witnessed our most reliable, hardworking friends in “conventional” jobs get blindsided or burned out. That’s not exactly sustainable. I joke that I’m tired of working for myself – I never get time off and I don’t pay me enough. The thing is, at least I work for someone who loves me back.
I don’t mean to sound bleak, or to dismiss all the creatives who do great work in corporate environments or otherwise not on a freelance basis – the opposite, really! The lesson for me as a creative is: don’t feel like the grass is always greener. Don’t compare yourself to peers in “traditional” industries and question your path. While you’re at it, stop taking things so seriously – the arts are important, no doubt, but nothing justifies all the ego trips, angst, and infighting that go on in creative industries. Focus on your basic commitments because the world won’t end if a recording engineer has an off day.
For my friends in non-creative careers, you deserve as many points for ingenuity and passion and creativity as any artist. Probably more. I’ll emphasize that art doesn’t have to be your profession to be your vocation, but if you’re ever so inclined, just don’t feel like that’s absolutely out of reach or unsustainable. I wish I’d realized that sooner.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @uncomfortabletwin / @uncomfortable_twin
- Youtube: @uncomfortabletwin7144 (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrFaP51y-AU8A3_rmO1d2Ig)
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/14RexUm2Fuhdv9ofG1etwp
- Booking: [email protected]
Image Credits
@thedollographer @victorialhy @lushroomm @jtdilletante