Helena Hauff

Hamburg-based DJ and producer Helena Hauff builds her music from pared-back techno and electro, recorded on strictly analogue equipment and shaped by acid house, EBM and industrial music. Her background runs unusually wide, taking in fine art, physics and systematic music science, and that range sits behind a sound built on hardware.

Hauff worked as a DJ at Hamburg's Golden Pudel Club, where she hosted a night called Birds and Other Instruments. Her debut record, the Actio Reactio EP, came out in 2013, and a run of releases on various labels followed, among them James Dean Brown's Hypnobeat. Her first full-length album, Discreet Desires, arrived on Werkdiscs in 2015 and placed 19th on Rolling Stone's list of the 20 best EDM and electronic albums of that year. In December 2017 she became the first female DJ to be named BBC Radio 1's Essential Mix of the year, and she runs her own label, Return to Disorder. In 2018 she played Movement in Detroit, AVA in Belfast and Dekmantel in Amsterdam.