Helena Hauff: All That She Wants

For someone whose profile is growing meteorically with every gig and release, Helena Hauff is still a little self-conscious. "I feel a bit weird being on stage," she says. "As long as I've got something to do, I'm alright. But as soon as the next record's mixed in then I'm standing and dancing… but sometimes I stop. It's like a nervous twitch, I don't know what to do any more. I realise that there are a lot of people actually staring at me."

It's a couple of hours after she was in complete control of an early evening slot at Dekmantel festival. But even though hundreds of people crammed into The Lab area to see her, it was at the 30-minute mark that the 27-year-old Hamburg-born DJ/producer first looked up and out across their sun-splashed faces, smiling widely as a particularly punchy techno cut rolled through the system. "I like being quite close to the crowd and seeing them and feeling them and getting the vibe, just realising what's going on," she says. "You can be disconnected when you're on a bigger stage. I like seeing the crowd, knowing that they're there, knowing that they're having fun. That's the most important thing at the end of the day: I want them to have fun. But I [also] feel a bit strange sometimes and kind of want to hide – but that's impossible."

Helena's DJ sets are packed with rough, tough tracks that stomp and crackle and don't rely on any frills – apart from the whiplash of acid and the hot euphoria of Italo. If you need one, she's a timely antidote to the shenanigans going on elsewhere in dance music. Although she's got her insecurities, she doesn't really let them show.

At Dekmantel, on a sun-dappled terrace in the forest, she's totally focused on selecting an invigorating sequence of records, pausing briefly to take swigs of beer and roll cigarettes. In fact, her lack of eye contact with the crowd and total disinterest in showing off only adds to her aura: "She's such a badass," we hear a girl next to us on the dancefloor say to her friend. We're all here to experience one of her workouts, which have gained a reputation thanks to on-point performances at spaces and events including Fabric, Unsound, Robert Johnson, CTM, Corsica Studios, Kazantip and Berlin's ://aboutblank.

Then there are her productions, which range from sprawling experimental headfucks to dark, pounding techno and beastly electro, for cult labels PAN, Lux and Handmade Birds. She's burrowed her way through the depth of the underground, rising to the top in order to play Sónar and release on Actress's Werkdiscs (now a sub-label of Ninja Tune), managing to comfortably operate in both super-niche and crossover circles in a way that some self-righteous 'outsider' DJs would kill for. Ultimately, she's that rare thing: an uncompromising artist who does her own thing, while thrilling what's steadily becoming a wide audience.

Hauff's Sunday set at Dekmantel marks something of a career high. Today she's in the middle of some of the most impressive bookings of her DJing history (she played Swedish quarry rave Into The Valley on the Friday, and completed a back-to-back with I-F at German lakeside party Nachtdigital on Saturday, for instance), and at the end of the summer she'll release her debut album on Werkdiscs. In Holland she's billed after Actress, the label boss conjuring an electrical storm beneath blue skies before Helena steps up and revs through stark drum tracks, 303 roller-coaster rides and enough techno oomph to rouse the crowd from their sun-daze.

She's shared bills with the Londoner since 2011 and released on his label since 2013. Her LP, 'Discreet Desires', came about after she sent him three tracks and a photograph they were inspired by. He replied, and the project evolved into 10 tunes and a different photo, which Helena found later and thought suited the music better. The black-and- white image is the LP's cover art, depicting her kissing a mirror and giving the illusion of two people embracing one another. "I liked the idea of having me on my first album. I think it's just such a weird idea that all the pop and mainstream artists use photos of themselves. I don't really get it, but I like to play with the idea of that. I don't think you can really tell it's me on the photo – It's me kissing me. It made sense with the concept of the album and the mood of it and the titles I've chosen for some of the tracks," she says. It's a cheeky pot-shot at celebrity narcissism, but it's also hard not to see the image as erotically charged: a stolen kiss with a forbidden lover, perhaps, or an exploration of sexuality. "I like the idea of a discreet desire, having something that you desire but that you can't really talk about," she says.

This is the idea behind the record, but Hauff doesn't give too much away and is keen to retain a sense of ambiguity, wanting the listener to come up with their own meanings and conclusions: their own discreet desires, be they sexual, political or otherwise. But she does go into detail about the track 'Funereal Morality', which is based on the Notre-Dame Affair in which, on Easter Sunday 1950, members of France's Lettrist movement hijacked a mass that was being broadcast live from Notre-Dame cathedral. "They were dressed as monks and one of them climbed up and gave a speech and talked about why the Catholic church is fucking crap. I used the English words 'funereal morality' [on the album] – the morality of the afterlife," she says. "You don't live now, you live for the after. You basically work for something that's never gonna happen, you give something and you're never going to get anything back, unless you're religious. But I don't believe in that. The idea of the church working like that, and using people: I don't like it. It goes hand-in-hand with the discreet desire thing, that you can't do certain things because someone tells you you're not allowed to. For example, you have to study and become a lawyer or an accountant. You work and then you're dead. A discreet desire might be that you just don't give a fucking shit about that."

Hauff's managed to make that particular desire a reality for herself. She quit going to university in her early twenties because she was more interested in buying and playing records and hanging out, despite having the chops to sign up for courses in Fine Art and, later, Systematic Music Science. "I had really horrible nightmares when I stopped. Like, 'What am I doing? I've lost it completely. I actually had a scholarship. I'm just lazy and stupid, that's basically it'," she says. "But now I'm really happy that I stopped, I'm enjoying life a lot."

Her obsession with music eventually led her into production, which she explains with typical dry humour: "[I thought] there's so many people out there who produce music, how hard can it be?!" After finding the limitless possibilities of Cubase a bit overwhelming, she settled on analogue equipment. "I had a friend with a studio with a lot of machines and I went there a couple of times and played with them, and then I thought, 'That's my way to go: that's what I need to make music with'. He had a couple of 303s and he sold one to me. Everyone was saying, 'You don't need a 303, the only thing it can do is acid'. And I was like, 'Yeah but that's exactly what I want.'"

She was first introduced to dance music at cult Hamburg venue Golden Pudel, which prides itself on being resolutely underground and DIY with a totally open approach to bookings and how DJs play music. "I must have been seventeen," she recalls. "I went with my best friend but she wasn't into music at all. I mean, I wasn't into music, I didn't know anything about club music, didn't know any names – didn't know how it worked. But I was quite a bit more open-minded than she was and we ended up there. She wanted to leave after half an hour and go to some kind of crazy, horrible place on the Reeperbahn. I said, 'I really like this place, why do we have to go?' She wanted to eat a kebab as well, I was like 'Ohhhhh why? It's like two o' clock in the morning. Why do you have to eat? Can't we just drink?!' I liked it and I came back." A young Hauff would go on to develop her DJ skills at the Pudel, hosting her own night there and embodying its counter-cultural ethos. Visiting the club was a rite of passage for her, as one memory clearly shows: "I was seventeen, I remember dancing next to the DJ and bumping into the decks and the needle was jumping and I didn't realise what I was doing. I feel so ashamed about that now! So when it happens to me, I'm not angry."

'Discreet Desires' is a strong statement and a neat follow-on from her last large body of work, 'A Tape', which came out on cassette via Handmade Birds. Some tracks are pure club bangers while others sound like the score to vintage B-movies or retro video games, veering between flashing electro ecstasy and darker, meditative moments. There's both paranoia and euphoria, all shot through with playfulness and a clear sense of humour. "I think humour is very important. For example, I think that

DJ Stingray is the funniest DJ in the world. He plays that really fast, really hard electro sound, but I think it's really funny," Hauff says. "I don't know if everyone feels the same, and obviously they don't have to but if I don't find something a little bit humorous, I don't like it." Although her press shots and sometimes very hard DJ sets might not give off the gags, 'Discreet Desires' is very playful and in person Hauff jokes around about stealing a golf buggy from backstage, her fascination with uniforms and how good she is at rolling cigarettes: "I'm a pro at that. I'm better at rolling fags than DJing. To be honest, if there was a rolling-fag job out there, I could really make some money. I'm really quick at it – I smoke a lot." She's so straight-talking, she's probably not lying, either. But then, it doesn't look as though her day job is going to slow down any time soon.

'Discreet Desires' is out now on Ninja Tune