On a sweltering afternoon in early March, Roza Terenzi (Katie Campbell) and Sleep D (Corey Kikos and Maryos Syawish) played a back-to-back set in Thornbury, in Melbourne, at an Animals Dancing party. Campbell had a severe case of the flu, having just returned home from an intense month of touring in Europe, but you wouldn't have known it. You wouldn't suspect that their 5 PM set was warming up for Baba Stiltz, either. The trio made no concessions for Stiltz, the heat or the hour. Their set was full of slamming house, electro and breaks, and the sweaty crowd lapped it up.

2018 was a watershed year for Campbell. She released six EPs on labels including Butter Sessions and Kalahari Oyster Cult, started a residency on Rinse FM, launched her own show Designer Loops on Melbourne's Skylab Radio and toured internationally for the first time. In 2019 she's building on that momentum, having already played Nitsa, Concrete, and Berghain's Säule. She's booked to play Primavera, Dekmantel festival, Lente Kabinet and Brunch In The City in Barcelona in June alongside Midland, Call Super and Motor City Drum Ensemble. She'll release an EP on Dekmantel on April 8th. Just over two months in, this is shaping up to be Campbell's biggest year yet.

Between 2012 and 2016, before she took up the name Roza Terenzi, Campbell made candy-hued, off-kilter electro pop as Catlips, often featuring her own vocals. Her first ever alias, though, was KayTee, and you can listen to her debut production as a nine-year-old, "Clap To The Crap Rap," on Bandcamp.

"It's so funny, I sound so little in it," said Campbell. "I guess I was."

Campbell recorded the single in Perth, where she lived until moving to Melbourne in 2017, with the help of her father, a percussionist in an electronic dub act called Beatworld. (He made a trance remix of the track, also on Bandcamp as the "Beatworld Dance Remix.") Listening to Roza Terenzi productions—kinetic, breaksy, drum-based concoctions with extraterrestrial textures—you can imagine how the electronic music played by her father, who used to collect percussion instruments from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, might have left a lasting impression on her as a child. Breaks might be having a moment in dance music right now, but they've been swirling in Campbell's orbit for years.

The first time we met, in January, I spoke with Campbell in the backyard of the house she shares with Nick Amezdroz, director of Pelvis Records, and Wallace, a handsome British shorthair cat, in Melbourne. The grass was more yellow than green and the heat was dry and pervasive, even under the shade of an umbrella. Campbell was low-key and friendly, occasionally flashing the same dry sense of humour she exhibits on Twitter. In the living room was the record collection she shares with Amezdroz and an assortment of hardware, including vintage Korg Electribes, a microKORG, a Yamaha CS1x and an Akai MPC. Campbell is constantly rotating equipment in and out of the modest room. She and Amezdroz were in the process of building a soundproof studio in the backyard, somewhere Campbell will be able to work on new music between tours.

"I definitely feel like I need to have more of a separate space and a bit more room, otherwise I feel a bit like I'm just chilling at home," she said. "This is a time to knuckle down on it a bit more."

Neither of Campbell's parents actively pushed her towards music, but it was hard for her not to be curious about her father's home studio, or the many instruments sitting around at home. She played piano, drums and guitar as a teenager, at one point landing a gig at Montreux Jazz Festival with her school jazz band. Her father showed her how to perform basic tasks in the studio.

"Throughout high school my parents were really supportive of me doing music. I was like, 'Do I go and study at WAAPA [Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts] and do music or do I go and do law?' Dad is a lawyer, too, and he said, 'Go to WAAPA, don't do law.'" She laughed. "They've always been good."

Campbell's parents went to see her play live in Perth last December. "They hadn't watched me perform since I graduated from uni or something. Dad gets it because he listens to electronic music. Mum does like some of it, but she was kind of like, 'Aw, I wish you would still sing.' When I was 15 I was playing jazz guitar and writing acoustic music and stuff, but I did it because I liked the process of songwriting and I liked making music, but I never really felt super connected to that music. When I started making electronic music, that's when it really made sense to me."

At 16, Campbell started going to festivals and found herself drawn to bands with electronic elements such as Yeasayer and Cut Copy. She wrote her first piece of electronic music in high school. Once she began studying at WAAPA, she was turned onto more experimental fare.

"I was listening to like John Cage and Aphex Twin and Venetian Snares and all this kind of stuff, and it was constantly electronic," she said. "That had a really big influence on the music I was making and listening to at the time."

At 18, Campbell started to perform as Catlips. There was some local buzz about the project—she played a Boiler Room set in Perth in 2014, shot a couple of video clips and supported The Black Madonna in Perth in 2016. But when Campbell changed her artist name to Roza Terenzi the following year, she drew a line in the sand between what she saw as her developing skills and ideas and the more refined sonic palette from which she draws now, without being tied to any particular genre.

"I always struggle to describe my music to people," she said. "To be honest, it's more about creating a certain mood or atmosphere through sounds which embodies Roza Terenzi. There always has to be an element of fun or playfulness, and I am always interested in the contrast between luscious warmth and sharp, metallic harshness and trying to make that work. It's dance music, but I don't write it for the dance floor. It's more to resonate with different parts of your mind through listening."

Not unlike her productions, Campbell's DJ sets are skittish and high voltage, often taking in everything from jungle to broken beats, electro, '90s rave and restless IDM. DJing was always secondary to producing for Campbell until she made her main room debut (as Catlips) at the Connections nightclub in Perth at the end of 2014, supporting Vakula. "I was so nervous I was shaking, but I had so much fun playing and it went well and I was really pumped after that. I was like, 'OK, I get why people like doing this.'"

In the past couple of years DJing has grown to demand as much of Campbell's time as producing, sometimes at the expense of the latter. "Last year I was away for three months but I didn't have a studio setup or anything. I was really desperate to make new music, I start to get a bit restless if I don't, so it is hard to try and balance those things and get the time to do it right," she said.

As well as releasing six EPs and touring Europe and Canada, Campbell managed to hold down a full-time job last year. The job—scheduling fresh produce delivery to supermarkets—was a means to an end that was tedious but, importantly, not mentally taxing.

"I like being busy, and I'd get home and be like, 'Today's been so boring at this job, now I'm really excited to get home and make something creative.' I never wanted to be at the point where I was having to say yes to a bunch of gigs that I don't want to do just for money, because then you start to resent things."

There was another reason Campbell put out so much music last year. The release of her first EP, The O.G., on Good Company, was delayed for over a year, so by the time it finally did come out in December 2017 she had plenty of new music ready for the labels that approached her afterwards. While her production skills advanced considerably in the time between making The O.G. and its release, Campbell thought it was important that her first record came out on a Perth label, and one close to her heart. Some of the first parties she attended as an 18-year-old were hosted by Good Company, and she went on to play some of her first gigs at Good Company parties too. The label was instrumental in building the Perth underground scene in the early '10s, bringing artists such as Floating Points, Hunee and Anthony Naples to the city for the first time and nurturing local producers such as Hugo Gerani and Phil Stroud.

"Perth's always been known for so much talent and there's so many people making music there but it's so isolated from the rest of the world and it's not on anyone's radar a lot of the time," said Campbell. "The O.G. was a really cool way of opening that up to the rest of the world a bit."

Proud as she is of her Perth roots, after just a couple of years in Melbourne, Campbell has established herself as a star of the city's thriving underground scene. She earned a residency at the soon-to-be-closed institution Lounge almost immediately after arriving here. In fact, it was at a Lounge pre-party dinner that she met Sophie Sweetland, AKA D.Tiffany, with whom she released the standout Planet Euphorique EP last year, having spent the previous (Northern Hemisphere) summer playing parties with Sweetland in her Vancouver hometown.

Soon afterwards Campbell was approached by the Melbourne-born, Berlin-based Salt Mines crew to submit something for the label—what became the Mood EP. "Heaps of tracks I was going to do with them were really old ones, they were like, 'You need to mix these better.' I'm really lazy with my mixing so I ended up writing a whole new EP for them which was much better," she said. "Geordie [Elliot-Kerr, AKA Shedbug] and Rudolf [Dorr, AKA Rudolf C] are making so much exciting music, they're on their own tip doing their own thing and it was exciting doing stuff with them."

It was along with Elliot-Kerr and Dorr that Campbell and a handful of other Melbourne producers were tapped by Armand Jakobsson, AKA DJ Seinfeld, for the Swede's DJ-Kicks last year. Ten of the mix's 21 tracks came from Melbourne producers in a nod to the local scene, which Jakobsson had experienced firsthand when he toured the country.

"It was so cool to have someone so interested in what's going on in Australia, who's an outsider but has been here and played shows and met people that are making music," Campbell said. "I think there's lots of cool stuff happening here but there's only a few people taking notice of it."

It was Melbourne's female talent in particular—artists such as Jennifer Loveless, Millú & Pjenné and Nite Fleit, with whom Campbell lived when she first moved to Melbourne—that really motivated and inspired her when she arrived in the city. As an outsider, it was also easy for Campbell to play for different crews and parties without feeling bound to any one of them. She's a regular at Voyage Recordings, Butter Sessions and Animals Dancing events and at Melbourne's favourite party bar and pizza parlour, Lazerpig.

Last December, Campbell was given a slot at the beloved Meredith Music Festival, 100 km west of the city. It's one of the most coveted gigs in the country. There is just one stage at the three-day, 15,000 capacity festival, set in a natural amphitheatre framed by gum and pine trees, and Campbell played live on the closing set on the first night.

"Everyone was just like, 'Remember to have fun and look up and enjoy it'," she said. "When I play live I'm sometimes concentrating so hard I find it really hard to let go. But five minutes before going on I felt really calm, which never happens. I looked up and I was like, 'How can I not enjoy this? It's such a beautiful setting, all my friends up the front, a fun crowd, nothing went wrong and I really enjoyed it the whole time. It was a magical experience to do that and for everything to come together in the way I wanted it to."

In 2018, Campbell started her own monthly radio show, Designer Loops, at Melbourne's new Skylab Radio. The show highlights past and present electronic and experimental music made by women and gender non-conforming artists from around the globe in the past 70 years. "You hear people complaining there's not enough music that's made by women, well that's just not true, you haven't looked hard enough," Campbell said. The show is an opportunity for her to play music that might not always fit into her DJ sets, anything from Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Suzanne Ciani to Laurie Spiegel and Pauline Anna Strom.

Campbell took the name Roza Terenzi from one of her biggest inspirations, the Italian astrophysicist and musician Fiorella Terenzi, who converted radio maps of galaxies into sound in the early 1990s. Time magazine once described Terenzi as a cross between Carl Sagan and Madonna.

Campbell has never met Terenzi, and isn't sure if she's aware she exists. "She'd probably be weirded out, like, who is this random Australian girl stealing her name," Campbell laughed. "She's done so much interesting work. It kind of sucks in the interviews, you can tell people aren't really taking her seriously or they're being so condescending when she's explaining this amazing stuff about being an astrophysicist, or this amazing synth that she's made. People are being so dismissive just because she is glamorous."

Perth, with a population of around two million, is less than half the size of Melbourne. The sun shines there more often than not, and the beach-oriented life tends to move at a more leisurely pace. For Campbell, moving to Melbourne was about challenging herself in a bigger city with unfamiliar crowds.

"Perth's really amazing but it's small, that's the only problem. So you're playing at the same clubs to the same people that go out to the same things and I found myself getting lazy," she said.

"I also knew that coming here, no one's going to give me a gig because they're my friend. I had something to prove when I first came here because there's so many amazing DJs here. I think that was really important for me, to have to enter a new scene."

Location was a factor, too. Melbourne is that much closer to other Australian cities, though still a 24-hour journey away from Europe. But having made her mark on Melbourne, it might soon be time for Campbell to relocate again.

"Moving is definitely on the cards because I know it opens up a lot more opportunities, but at the same time it's really nice here and I don't want to move somewhere just for the sake of it," she said.

"For now, I'm just happy floating around and seeing where things take me."