On a Friday night this past May, Henrietta Smith-Rolla, the UK artist better known as Afrodeutsche, played live at the London club FOLD. Her gaze stayed locked firmly head down at her live setup—Ableton mapped to two controllers and a Novation X-Station synth—while her hair swished from side to side in front of the Underground Resistance shirt she was wearing. Her first two tracks changed what had been the mood of the night so far, setting a sombre tone before she delved into deep, rolling rhythms and jacking bleep techno. It was a much more vulnerable sound than might be expected in a club around midnight.

"It's kind of like, basically saying, 'We're going to go into my world now,'" Smith-Rolla told me. "It actually is quite hard playing such emotional dark stuff in a club because, in some ways, I don't want to do that to people. It's like, 'I'm going to take you here, sorry about that but that's where I need to go.'"

Smith-Rolla finds it harder to create lighthearted music. Even in her attempts at music with a summer mood, there's still some darkness. "I'm not human by the way, I'm a replicant, just so you know," she deadpanned, referencing her favourite film, Blade Runner. "I shouldn't tell people because, you know, I might get caught."

For a replicant, she has some pretty human dreams, the kind any DJ could relate to. When she found out she would be playing at Berghain's Säule, she had a recurring vision in her sleep. "This nightmare was, you have four hours to play at Berghain and you've brought one record," she said. "I was coming up with different ways—speed it up, slow it down, elbow on the needle, doing all this different stuff on the mixer and shouting at people. I didn't live that dream, thank fuck."

The past couple of years have been an ecstatically surprising time for Smith-Rolla on a musical level. She runs a monthly radio show called Black Forest on NTS. Her debut album came out on pioneering UK label Skam in 2018, and she's released music with LuckyMe and Eclair Fifi's River Rapid label. (Her EP for River Rapid was the label's first release.) As a DJ, she's been invited to play with artists like DJ Stingray, Aphex Twin and Marie Davidson, and she made her Boiler Room debut at Dekmantel 2019. She went from being convinced Ableton was "some insane infinite thing which I definitely won't be able to do" years ago to now teaching masterclasses for the music software company.

At the age of 12, Smith-Rolla discovered her love of jungle. She had a double tape pack compilation called Jungle Mania 94. "I took it to church for show-and-tell," she said. "I was like, 'I'm going to show everyone the music I'm listening to.' And someone robbed it! It got nicked! Jungle Mania got nicked at church. Sorry mum."

Excited at finding the compilation on YouTube after many years, Smith-Rolla played me a formative Leviticus track, which opens with lush chords. The sound calls to mind her own emotive approach to electro. "I was thinking about it and I honestly think this is my first love of padded synths," she said. We were sitting on the floor of Smith-Rolla's flat in Manchester, facing a balcony that looks out onto hanging tree leaves. When she later showed me her bedroom, there were more plants than bedroom space.

"I always need water or green near me," said Smith-Rolla, who grew up surrounded by nature in Devon. "I think rural areas, when it came to parties and free parties, you'd have them in fields or on the beach or on the cliffs or in the woods. These spaces were just there and someone would find a generator. So I think that's had a massive impact on me, that space and that freedom."

Smith-Rolla was exposed to free parties as a kid, when her oldest friend, Rachel, would go out and bring back flyers and mixtapes. It was during this time that she first heard Mr. Fingers' "Can You Feel It," and things started to click into place. "I always had that feeling, I wanted to be at that party but I was like nine, ten years old and just couldn't be there. So it was painful and brilliant at the same time."

Growing up in Devon wasn't just rave epiphanies and idyllic landscapes. Her mum moved them from London to the southwest coastal county after making "a lot of very big choices," herself still only around 17 years old. "The language of having black people in Devon, it was like, we were the first there."

Smith-Rolla described her childhood experience as "hardcore." She experienced and witnessed a lot of bullying and violence. She would be chased, hit and spat at and called racial slurs. "It was heavy," she said. Her voice slightly broke as she retold an incident where she was informed someone was after her, and she had to go to a park and meet someone she didn't know to fight. Then she broke into a loud laugh. "But of course, I don't fight, I run." They caught her while she was running and put her on a playground roundabout and started spinning her around relentlessly.

"All I remember is just feeling so sick. It was like, for what? My mum taught me it's just ignorance. And why are they behaving in that way? It's because they don't know any different and you are a spectacle. You are different and so from a really early age, I just accepted that and it made things a lot easier to deal with."

Smith-Rolla found that being a spectacle, and being looked at, played a part in the anxiety she felt. "I don't want to be seen so I'm pretty fucked doing what I do now because it's like, shit, you've got to have your picture taken," she said. "So that really comes from the fact that I was always getting stared at by everyone, from little kids to the elderly, and I had to figure out what that look meant from the word go. It was just a huge amount of pressure, every time you leave to figure out why someone's looking at you."

Smith-Rolla's mum has played a hugely positive and important role in her life, predicating her path even before she was born. "My mum told me that she was brought up in a Catholic home and she said, when she found out she was pregnant, that she prayed that her child would have music in their life. How cosmic and beautiful and lovely is that. This is a 14-year-old girl who's like, 'I pray that my child will have music in their life.' And here I am."

Smith-Rolla's mother introduced her daughter to classical music from a young age. Smith-Rolla said she would run around the house while "Flight Of The Bumblebee" was playing, creating her own human bumblebee motion. It wasn't until more recently, when she began to search for her father in 2016, that she looked into his side of the family and found out that her dad's grandfather was a classical composer.

She found out her Ghanaian father, who was an artist, had moved to Germany sometime in the late '50s or early '60s for a scholarship. The search led to her giving her solo musical project the name Afrodeutsche.

The word "cosmic" came up regularly in our conversations. Smith-Rolla found this fitting. She told me about a night where she was playing at a party above a rehearsal studio in Manchester. She went downstairs and a friend suggested she put on one of her own tracks. At this point, production was a private and personal endeavour that she didn't want people to hear, but eventually she was persuaded. Unknown to her, Skam's label founder Andy Maddocks was in the room. He called her a few weeks later to say he wanted to hear more, and then that he wanted to release her music. The music that she didn't want to show anyone yet was now going to be released on an esteemed experimental label.

This cosmic connection led to her debut album, Break Before Make. The album brings together her love for Detroit electro and UK acts like Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin, who also grew up in expansive rural landscapes. There's a deep emotional narrative on the record, not just in the musical language that she creates with glassy, orchestral synth melodies, but also the drum programming and emotion on tracks like "Start Again Part Four" and "You Heard Me The First Time."

"You have to be really honest and vulnerable," she said. "When I listen to other people's work and I can hear how vulnerable and honest they are, I'm connecting with it. I still listen to that album because it's therapy for me. I know where my heart was when I made that, I know where my head was when I made that, I know which room I was in when I did that. I felt what I'd lost, for me to process that loss."

Smith-Rolla said that the most recognisable emotional response she gets in return is when she plays live. Her live and DJ sets differ completely in mood and dynamic—her DJ sets unleash high-intensity music from across the spectrum of UK techno, dystopian electro, footwork, hardcore and more. The evening after our interview, I saw her play live at The White Hotel in Salford. She did it all with a beaming smile and a bottle of Buckfast by her side.

"I love it when I'm listening to someone DJ and I can just see on their faces they're on a top buzz because they're playing whatever they want and however they want, and they're not judging themselves in that moment," she said. "If you are kind to yourself, people hear it."