- Raw, industrial electro and techno delivered with punk panache. What else would you expect from Helena Hauff?
- Helena Hauff remains one of dance music's most beloved enigmas. Her approach has been almost militantly underground. She has no manager or social media, only plays vinyl and, even amidst the ever-lingering danger of skipping needles, rolls cigarettes with an effortless cool. Hauff's music is equally uncompromising: electro and techno with the punky rawness of EBM and industrial. But, despite—or perhaps because of—this, she's one of the biggest DJs in the world. She seems as surprised about all this as anyone else. As she told Resident Advisor in last year's cover story, "How the hell I ended up getting the bookings I have now… I don't know how it happened." But now, after a decade in the limelight, we get her first commercial mix. fabric presents Helena Hauff doesn't change the formula one bit. It's a tour de force of the sounds and styles she's brought to the masses: namely, raw, grubby and occasionally big room electro.
The mix is built around crunchy 808s and Halloween-ready melodies that nervously skirt around the stereo field. But there is also quite a bit of funk here, from the Miami bass swagger of YTP's "What You Want" to MicroControlUnit's "Save the World," whose slight swing and vocoder vocals would be catnip to I-F. Hauff drops a track from an early alias of Drexciya's James Stinson, "Data Transfer," which captures in miniature Hauff's aesthetic: the drums are tough and mechanical and the melody cuts with a razor's precision.
True to her contrarian nature, Hauff's fabric presents entry stands out in the series for its lack of a narrative arc. There's no gradual ease into peak-time fare that leads to comedown catharsis—her only slight concession to convention is the Autechere ending, a rare and beloved remix of D-Breeze's "Crazy For You." Instead, Hauff moves quickly between peaks and troughs within the space of single tracks, the mood changing from minute to minute. One second she's letting loose some fat and chunky Cybotron-style funk courtesy of Yarn Init, the next we're running from the approaching steel claws of Signal Type's claustrophobic "In Abyss." This doesn't mean there aren't some big moments. My heart rate reset when she unleashed the compressed madness of IMOGEN's "Granular Tears" and the gentle melody that briefly claws its way through the steel scaffolding of Nite Fleit's "Naive" was a real highlight. But the pacing here is textural rather than linear.
One of Hauff's best and most surprising blends comes when she unleashes Ement's "Despite of Time." It moves towards climax with big percussion and an arpeggio that sounds like it's cruising 140 MPH on the Autobahn. But just when you think it's hands in the air time, broken snares punch through the loose electro drum programming as Raavel's "Wakalaka" comes swinging from the ropes. The tone instantly changes from euphoria to paranoia. In lesser hands, this pairing would send most punters scrambling to the smoking area, but Hauff pulls it off.
This range speaks to Hauff's democratic approach to track selection. Alongside records from the early '90s and early '00s that fetch silly amounts of money on Discogs (the original pressing of that Stinson track goes for a casual $500, while other 12-inches from the likes of illektrolab and Signal Type approach the triple figure mark), she also plays some Bandcamp-only releases that have come out in the past couple of years. This makes an impressive argument for Hauff's larger narrative about electro: her particular style of club music has never gone out of fashion, it's just the scene's taste that's changed.
And it's this point that makes me feel optimistic about dance music more generally. For all the doom and gloom that saturates clubland discourse—from where DJs should stand to endlessly recycled samples—Hauff feels like an antidote. fabric presents Helena Hauff is a reminder that she's done about as much as anyone to expand dance music's Overton window without compromising. "The core of the music has never changed," she explained to RA. It's just that we've caught up with her. If that jagged, compressed bassline that opens the mix sounds familiar rather than jarring, it's because she's been evangelizing EBM-edged, acid-flecked electro for the past decade.
Correction, October 5th: A previous version of this article said that Hauff didn't have a booking agent. She does. (She doesn't have a manager.)
Tracklist01. Helena Hauff - Turn Your Sights Inward
02. dynArec - Sunken Park
03. Clarence G - Data Transfer
04. Slam & Optic Nerve - Machine Conflict
05. The Exaltics feat. Paris The Black Fu - 10 Oseco Ndstill Lmidnight (Lorenz.Orx RMX)
06. YTP - WHAT U WANT
07. Turk Turkelton - Rock It
08. Yarn Init - Tripcon II
09. Signal Type - In Abyss
10. Illektrolab - Overdrive
11. Ement - Despite of time
12. Raavel - Wakalaka
13. IMOGEN - Granular Tears
14. Radioactive Man - Night Bus To Nowhere
15. FJAAK & Tobi Neumann - F-Zero
16. Nite Fleit - Naïve
17. Magda Rot - Alter Simus
18. MicroControlUnit - Save The World (MCU's Apocalypse Mix)
19. D-Breeze - Crazy For Love (Autechre Remix)