Helena Hauff

Hamburg-born Helena Hauff works as a sought-after DJ while also crafting raw, abrasive electro-techno as a producer. Her sound pulls from acid house, EBM, and industrial traditions, and she commits every track to tape using only hardware in single-pass recordings. The 2015 debut full-length Discreet Desires showcases some of her most tuneful work, whereas the 2018 album Qualm pares elements back without losing drive. A pair of shorter releases followed: the 2019 EP Living with Ants and the 2022 EP Living with Ladybirds. On the decks she became the first woman chosen for BBC’s Essential Mix of the Year honor in 2017; her two major commercial mix albums are Kern, Vol. 5, issued by Tresor in 2020, and Fabric Presents Helena Hauff, released in 2023.

She first gained attention as a resident at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel Club, where she programmed the night Birds and Other Instruments. Through the early 2010s she played clubs across Germany and then Europe alongside Actress and Kyle Hall. Her first vinyl outing arrived in 2013 with the Actio Reactio EP on Werkdiscs, the label run by Actress. That same year Black Sites, her duo with fellow Pudel resident F#x, issued the debut EP Prototype on Pan, the imprint headed by Bill Kouligas. She also joined the reactivated Hypnobeat project led by James Dean Brown, a collective that had been generating spontaneous analog techno and industrial material since 1983.

Four additional 12-inch releases appeared in 2014: Shatter Cone on Lux Rec, Return to Disorder on Panzerkreuz Records, a split EP with Andreas Gehm on Solar One, and two further Black Sites records. During the same period she supplied remixes for DFA act Factory Floor and for the Italian EBM originators Pankow. Early in 2015 the Texas imprint Hand Made Birds compiled her initial cassette experiments under the apt title A Tape. Werkdiscs followed with Lex Tertia, an EP continuing the approach heard on Actio Reactio, then issued her first proper album, Discreet Desires, which moved toward more melodic electro while preserving the grit of earlier material. Dark Entries reissued A Tape as a double LP in 2017, the same year Ninja Tune put out the EP Have You Been There, Have You Seen It; she finished the year with the BBC Essential Mix accolade.

Despite an intensifying tour calendar, she completed Qualm, the successor to Discreet Desires, in 2018; the record employed fewer layers yet retained comparable impact. Living with Ants appeared the next year. In 2020 she assembled the continuous mix that became the fifth installment in Tresor’s Kern series, threading numerous exclusive cuts with distinctive taste. A 2021 collaboration with the Exaltics yielded the Futuros EP. Fabric released Living with Ladybirds in 2022 and followed it in 2023 with the mix album Fabric Presents Helena Hauff, another dense, uninterrupted fusion of techno and electro selections.