Helena Hauff

Helena Hauff is a DJ and producer from Hamburg, Germany. Her sonic aesthetic is rooted in a twilight-lit area of colliding sharp acid sounds, cold Detroit rhythms, monolithic industrial landscapes and minimalist wave atmospheres. Helena’s sound world is intense, electrified, futuristic, but with strong traces of underlying emotionalism and experimentalism. In a relatively short time, she has released records on such notable labels as Werk Discs, Ninja Tune, PAN and Blackest Ever Black. Her influences can be spotted in her precise and eclectic mixtapes, where heavyweight industrial beats and abstract experimentation meet EBM rawness or the elegance of more atmospheric forms of techno.

Helena’s musical path started from digging through records in her local library, which led her to early exposure to such artists as The Cure or Karlheinz Stockhausen. This helped her to develop a unique taste and use it for realising her own artistic visions.

Helena’s creativity stretches far beyond her solo moniker. She recently joined James Dean Brown in his legendary neo-tribal Hypnobeat project. In addition, she is also half of the Black Sites project along with F#X, which also has releases on Panzerkreuz and PAN labels. She is also a resident at the Golden Pudel club in Hamburg.

Her selection reveals the wide spectrum of Hauff’s musical taste. Not all of these influences are apparent in her compositions, but that makes it even more intriguing. Hauff uses her mixing skills to weave a story from the music of many different genres and eras. However, the collection never loses its conceptual track and everything is merged into a coherent whole. Even though the release years vary from 1974 to 2014, there are no visible temporal boundaries as all these pieces form a narrative, which does not belong to any specific period and does not adhere to any stylistic frames. In some cases they are put into entirely different contexts here.

Post-punk contrasts

Chrome’s opening establishes an unruly post-punk world. KaS Product’s urgent voice and minimal electronics provide another thread through a selection that resists genre boundaries.

A nocturnal Nico chant coexists with Asbestos Rockpyle’s abrasive lo-fi punk, while Kondaktor’s monolithic pulses sit beside the French new wave of KaS Product. The only unifying aspect here is that the tracks possess a strong character and have their own unique emotional twists.

Electronic continuities

Front 242’s early electronic body music offers one route through the programme. Cute Heels carries that restless electronic character into a contemporary setting.

This collection could be compared to Louis Soutter’s figurative painting “Masks”, a remarkable work whose profound modernity reflects some contemporary sensibilities and issues. Both works bring together past and future, touching on truthfulness, diversity, regression, artistic adventurism, brutality and creativity. The mix manages to maintain similar artistic intensity by using contrastive elements and building up the tension before releasing it in different directions. Its many layers reward more than one reading.