THE GUARDIAN | Jul 20,2018 | EN
The German musician’s only ambition was to play her local bar, but the noisy, neo-gothic sound of her new album, Qualm, has put her on the cusp of clubland’s big league
“When I wear a lot of black, it’s probably not a conscious decision: it’s more that you can’t see the tomato sauce stains.” This is a perfect moment of German deadpanning from Helena Hauff, a musician and DJ not inclined to take things seriously, even as she is treated with reverence by the club world.
In the five years since she started releasing tracks, she has become a figurehead for a noisy, neo-gothic imperative in techno, delivering live and DJ sets of sometimes terrifying strobe-lit intensity that triangulate perfectly between acid house energy and industrial harshness. The almost entirely live jams of her new album, Qualm, are the best attempt yet to bottle that lightning; they are likely to push her into clubland’s big league.
This rise to prominence was not planned, though. “When I started, my ambition was only to play in this little bar around the corner every now and again,” she says. As a teenager in Hamburg, she was into Nirvana, the Stooges and her favourite band, late 80s British trance-rockers Loop – “just rocking out in my room on my own”. But when she went to a techno club at 17, her conversion was instantaneous and total. It does not take a musicology PhD to see why the grottier end of techno would appeal to a fan of the primal repetition of the Stooges and Loop – but at Hamburg’s notorious basement dive the Golden Pudel she also found people whose ideas resonated with her. “I realised pretty quickly that the people surrounding the Pudel were pretty politically involved,” she says. “Not like a political party, but a kind of anti-capitalist idea, engaging with helping refugees, anti-gentrification demonstrations …”
Hauff began going to the Pudel, often nightly, and practiced DJing every day – “it is and was a total obsession”. Before long, she was a resident there. Then she began to make tracks live with vintage synths and drum machines, caught the ear of Darren “Actress” Cunningham and through him released an EP via leftfield electronic mainstay Ninja Tune in 2013. Since then, she has climbed the ranks, collaborating widely, getting to know the raving styles of crowds from Kent to Kyrgyzstan, but never altering her 80s/90s style beyond a steady refinement of technique.
She is not bothered if she is called retro, though: she speaks fondly of Dutch electro/acid label Bunker never changing its electro sound because “they truly believe that is the ultimate sound: it might not have changed in 30 years, but it still sounds more futuristic than anything else. I can’t think of one thing that is new, really new – that isn’t in any way something that’s been done before.” Qualm is proudly straightforward, “a kind of strong, weird, one-drum-machine-and-one-synthesiser thing.”
Her success has come alongside several other women breaking through in the former boys’ club of underground techno: she cites Cologne’s Lena Willikens and Siberian superstar Nina Kraviz among her favourite acts. As with most things, her approach to the topic is pragmatic. “It’s important we talk about this, but I’m not on social media, I’m not like [disco/house DJ] the Black Madonna, for example, who’s very active on Twitter and determined to get her message out there,” Hauff says. “But I know other girls say they started DJing after they saw me and that’s really, really cool. Every woman who goes out and does whatever she wants to do, and makes music and DJs and is visible, helps to make a change and make a difference.”
Hauff’s lightness of touch is refreshing. Likewise, on Qualm, track titles such as Fag Butts in the Fire Bucket and Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg capture the interface between sublime and ridiculous that has always made raving so potent. She may wear black and deliver harsh sounds that have been associated with bleakly cerebral industrial music, but those sounds are picked based on the pleasure principle and on the joy of finding herself part of a friendly community in those early visits to the Pudel. Ultimately, she is optimistic. “If I had to choose between producing and DJing, I’d definitely choose the DJing, because it’s more social,” she says. “I do like people.”