Though flippant, Hauff partially attributes her success to her abiding commitment to the tastes she honed as a university student in Hamburg. Bred on a musical diet of The Stooges and Loop, she was sonically primed for the strobe-lit intensity of DIY electronica, which she recalls first randomly picking up at a record store when she was 18. She quickly grew fond of Dutch artists like Guy Tavares and I-F, who have notably not changed their squelching school of acid and electro in the 30 years since they first started throwing parties. It wasn't long before she started collecting similar records and DJing, and then holding a Tuesday night residency at the vaunted local haunt Golden Pudel, at which she invited Tavares and I-F to play.
Golden Pudel's understated anarchist ideology resonated with Hauff as she began hosting her own nights and cultivating a hometown following. "I realised pretty quickly that the people surrounding the Pudel were pretty politically involved," she told the Guardian in 2018. "Not like a political party, but a kind of anti-capitalist idea."
Hauff's affinity towards the club's punk-minded ethos blossomed in tandem with her escalating focus on production and record digging, which became an obsession to the point that she dropped out of school to pursue music full-time. At first her focus was on her studio. She used (and continues to work from) an all-hardware setup, whose immediacy and limitations allowed her to elicit the cantankerous sounds being circulated by some electro pioneers in The Hague. Some of her earliest releases from this period, like Return To Disorder, which became the name of her record label, are particularly raw. The tracks, which straddle electro and subversive hardcore, rarely peak and rarely resolve, deploying mincing synths and washes of static that chew up the ear. To her, the style looked towards the future while remaining rooted in a lineage of protest music that soundtracked Detroit's recent past.
While Hauff excelled at production and continued to make music at a dizzying pace, it was her DJ sets that propelled her to recognition not long into her budding career. She proved to be a discerning selector as well as a highly technical mixer, and her chops behind the decks attracted high-profile admirers like Actress—who released her debut album, Discreet Desires, on Ninja Tune sub-label Werk Discs in 2015—when he saw her play at Pudel as a 20-year-old.
"I still think she's the best DJ in the world," her close friend and collaborator L.F.T., an electro DJ and producer from Hamburg, told me over the phone. "She knows exactly which track is on each record—she has an almost photographic memory and knows what will fit into each other." Having played back-to-back with her a handful of times, including a hugely popular 2020 set on Berlin's HÖR, he said she exudes extreme calm behind the decks, and has an uncanny ability to mix any two records together perfectly in less than five seconds. "She knows what will happen before it happens," he said. "It's pretty special."
I spoke to Hauff about how she honed her technique, inquiring specifically about whether or not she wrote notes on her record sleeves, as many vinyl DJs do as cues for themselves in the club. She said no. Instead, she has a special type of synesthesia that allows her to "see" songs. "Quite often I play a record, and I don't know what the hell it is or what the artist is called, but I can see the structure in my head," she said. The anatomy of each track resembles a complex "anti- clockwise clock" where different parts of the song form structures that imprint themselves in her mind's eye immediately upon first listen. "I can see exactly how many bars are in a track, when a new element will start, where the hi-hats are," she added. As such, she doesn't require the scree of a CDJ, instead pulling from an extensive collection of rhythmically and stylistically diverse vinyl that she can methodically construct into seamless, genre-spanning sets.
Hauff is impressive behind the turntables. She's commanding and magnetic, playing with a casualness that belies the rigor of mixing high-BPM records for crowds of spiral-eyed partygoers in claustrophobic clubs. (Though she told me that one turntable malfunction literally left her crying under the DJ booth between mixes, she conceded that any slip-ups likely weren't perceived by anyone but her). At Lyon festival Nuits Sonores in May, I watched from La Sucrière's overhead mezzanine as she lissomely popped records onto the turntables, pausing to leisurely hand roll cigarettes and scan through her record bag while still engaging with a spellbound throng of more than 2,000 people. The performance was exceptional to say the least, securing my full and undivided attention in a way that few DJs still can.
But it was at Hauff's much-anticipated Berghain appearance in September that she flaunted the full range of her skills, showcasing how her curation, even more than her technical panache, has secured her enduring popularity. In a venue whose bread and butter is the knuckle-dragging routine of four-to-the-floor techno, her set was a refreshing landscape of dynamic peaks and valleys. Troweling from a timeline of noisy, neo-gothic dance music—curdling acid, full-pelt industrial, fanged electro—her selection harkened at times to gritty '90s nostalgia and at others to mechanical futurism. It also eschewed a set's traditional shape in which tensions climax and build.
Her method was to churn up themes, cycling fluidly between different strains of off-kilter dance music played one after another. While this tactic could have come across as eclectic at best (or abrupt at worst) in lesser hands, in Hauff's, the result was to create less of a trajectory than an overall atmosphere.
"It creates a lot more energy [to play different genres]," she told me after the set. "It's also a lot harder than playing just one thing. But when it goes well, it creates this uniform sound over time. And if you listen to that for three or four hours, then you can hear that it will make sense together— you'll see the big picture."
