Wake Up Call Lovra Lights It Up
Lovra dresses to impress every time she hits the stage. She has DJed all over the world, serving serious looks along with some serious beats. She’s worn sweaters with comic strips all over them, giant fluffy rainbow coats and a shirt covered with a string of lights. “I looked like a Christmas tree,” she remembers. Apparently, her love for bold fashion comes from her mother. “She’s my fashion queen. Since I was a little girl, she always put me in some crazy stuff,” she says. “That’s why I always wear crazy stuff when I’m DJing.”
Born Laura Lungen, she grew up in the small German town Wiesbaden. “There’s nothing there. So you have to go to Frankfurt,” she says, and she did just that when she attended her first ever rave. “My friends told me ‘hey, there is some techno party in Frankfurt, let’s go, it’s a really underground club.’ I thought ‘Yeah okay, I’ve never heard of techno, so let’s do it.’ I was 18 years old.
“It was super crazy, because it was a real underground station,” she adds. “It was amazing. I had my first raves over there. Since then, I was so into electronic music, and I thought ‘Okay, I have to do something with this.'”
The first song she ever made was a remix of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” that she posted to Soundcloud three years ago. “After a few weeks, I had almost one million plays on it,” she says. “So it was super crazy, and then I got an email from Universal Records in Los Angeles and I was like ‘dammit.'”
It all turned out okay, fortunately. The e-mail said “Hey Lovra, you know it’s not allowed. But we really loved the remix,” she says. Eventually, Universal Records officially released the remix and Lovra had her first hit. She’s since released thumping, high energy singles such as “My Beat” and “Feel The Love,” and played all over the world, including a recent stop at Wake Up Call at W Barcelona.
Shortly after hearing from Universal Records, she got another surprising e-mail from the legendary UK nightclub empire Ministry of Sound. “They found me on SoundCloud and asked me, ‘Hey, we love your stuff and we love you, do you fancy to be our DJ?’ And I was like ‘oh my gosh, yes!'”
Even after years of experience and the boldest outfits possible, she admits that she still gets antsy before each show, and she prefers it that way. “When I have gigs I’m always nervous,” she says. “And I love this feeling. It’s such a good feeling to be nervous before your gig.”
Lovra designs the art for her singles and also created the logo she uses on her website and in posters. “It’s super important (for me) to do creative stuff. Not just music but drawing pictures as well. It’s super important for me to match all of it together,” she says. “I feel like it took ages for me to make my logo. My name’s Lovra, it’s a mix of Laura and love. It’s a super positive name, it’s super positive with love and super girly, and I wanted to have a logo that’s super girly. So I put four hearts together.”
Before she blew up online, Lovra’s first gig was in a tiny club in Berlin. “I was like ‘oh my gosh, I’m dying, 50 people in front of me listening to my music!’” A few years later, she has more experience, but she doesn’t take her time on stage for granted. “You’ll never be a perfect DJ. I get new influences all the time from other DJs, and I think I can learn a lot more,” she says. “I love it and for me the most important thing is to do the stuff really well so every show is 100%, all of the time.”