Lena Willikens has a lot going on. During our interview at her home in Amsterdam, she had to field calls regarding an art exhibition that was opening in Düsseldorf that weekend called the Phantom Kino Ballett. It's a multidisciplinary performance art piece she developed with visual artist Sarah Szczesny, who designed the cover and videos for Willikens' first 12-inch on Cómeme Records in 2015.

Although Willikens is best known as an international DJ and dance music producer, music has always been woven into a larger mosaic of her artistic pursuits. She came to DJing through connections she made as a sculpture student at Düsseldorf's renowned art academy, Künstakademie Düsseldorf. Many of the city's most prominent cultural and artistic movements of the 20th century—including musical developments like krautrock and Neue Deutsche Welle—had ties to the university. It was there that Willikens met Detlef Weinrich, who played in the band Kreidler and more recently has released wavey club grooves as Tolouse Low Trax. He also cofounded the renowned cafe-slash-bar-slash-club Salon Des Amateurs, where Willikens and other local talents, like Vladimir Ivkovic and Jan Schulte, cut their teeth.

Willikens started DJing at Salon during her shifts as a barista/bartender, as that role also involved soundtracking the space between serving customers. When her first records appeared in the mid-2010s and her out-of-town bookings started to pick up, she became the venue's breakout star and a key ambassador for its distinct musical vision. The Salon vibe is a groovy and tripping outernational collage that often draws from non-club styles like krautrock, ambient, downtempo, avant-garde jazz or post-industrial. Its free spirit shaped Willikens' approach to DJing and guided the development of her taste.

That experience made her not just a DJ but a selector—someone whose sets inform as well as entertain. A selector isn't just a good DJ, but an artistic DJ, knowledgeable and adaptive, one whose very personal voice always asserts itself. They think outside the box and make connections between disparate styles of music. As Willikens explains in this feature, that approach often risks alienating the dance floor or fluffing a transition. But it's also the force that drives her passion for, and curiosity about, music.

Let's start with collecting. Can you tell me how you started buying records and what the first ones you bought were? Where did you shop?

I first started to buy records as a teenager. I was into dub, punk—many different genres. We had two really interesting record stores in Stuttgart, where I was born. One still exists that's called Second Hand Records. They had a broad spectrum of different genres. For me it was always important not to focus on one genre—that's very important for what came after. I had phases where I was totally into dub music, for example. But those were always phases, and other styles were still interesting to me.

Were you involved in any particular music scene?

When I was between 15 and 18, I had some friends in what I would call the "left skinhead scene," the punk and skater scene. I was very into punk and went to hardcore concerts as well. But I was never really a part of that or any other scene. I went to a lot of rocksteady nights, old Jamaican music, Northern Soul nights or festivals with people like Laurel Aitken. It was a mix between ska, rocksteady and reggae. The techno scene in Stuttgart was very mainstream, and that's why I didn't like or wasn't interested in techno. The smaller scenes, like the hip-hop scene or the left skinhead scene, were more appealing to me.

Were you only buying older stuff?

No, I bought new and old stuff. I was never really secondhand-only. To find rarities, this was never really my approach. I think the approach that I have now, 20 years later—digging YouTube videos, on Discogs and so on—I was doing that in record stores. I would spend a day and get to know stuff, like a certain kind of genre I hadn't stumbled across yet. Like, I don't know, breakcore.

What kind of stuff were you looking to buy and take home rather than consume as information?

That's difficult to answer. Sometimes you spend four hours and you don't really find anything. But you know it wouldn't be nice not to buy something, so you end up buying something that's not too shabby because you appreciate the store's service. You know, sometimes they give you recommendations, and you appreciate what they offer you. Often I ended up buying a bunch of records, and at home I realized that most of them are actually not that interesting. Digging for records is a process you learn. It takes time to find out what you like. It's a process of trial and error.

When did you start getting rid of records you didn't want anymore?

Every year I'd sort through and give a bunch of records I had bought to another secondhand store in Cologne. I put some on Discogs. I do still have some very old records from the beginning—most of my rocksteady survived and all my Lee ["Scratch"] Perrys. Classics. Also stuff like Missy Elliott or something—things that were at a certain point important to me, so I'll keep the record forever.

Were you buying records mostly to listen to them at home? Or were you satisfying a collector's motivation, where you had a special attachment to the physical vinyl record?

In some cases it was about that attachment. But I always had a turntable from when I was 11. Although it wasn't a Technics, that's for sure. I got Technics when I was 22 or something, when I bought my first kind of proper setup with two Technics for very cheap.

So by then you were thinking about mixing records, about DJing?

Yeah.

How did that change what you bought?

I started to buy way more—maybe about five times more records. When I started to DJ, I would usually be the one responsible for the music if friends gathered, like at house parties. When I got the opportunity to share music with other people at Salon Des Amateurs, I took it very seriously. I wasn't beat-matching—that wasn't of interest to me in the beginning.

Were you being less picky about what you were willing to spend money on, or were you just going out to buy stuff more often?

I went out to buy stuff more often. In the beginning I worked once or twice a week at Salon, so I had the chance to play records while I was making coffee or drinks during the day and sometimes at night. I was alone at the bar, and part of the bar there is the DJ booth. You make a coffee, and then you play another track. Since it happened every week, I didn't want to repeat myself too much, so I started buying more to refresh.

Before you started working at Salon, you said that your friends would usually ask you to bring records if they were having a house party. How did you become the person in the social circle who was like, "Let's ask Lena to bring her records"? And what kind of stuff were you playing in those settings?

I guess because I was the one who owned more music and was more interested in collecting or following music. I was a student at an art academy where people were studying non-musical arts. I was studying sculpture, but towards the end of my studies I made installations that involved music. I met Detlef Weinrich there, and he was an artist at the academy who was also in a band and DJ'd regularly. Actually, that was something that caught my interest about him. But there weren't many like him.

How much did Detlef and your other colleagues at Salon influence your taste and the sort of vibe you wanted to set in the bar while you were working there?

It was essential. I still have so much fun making radio shows where I play only listening music or more ambient stuff. That definitely comes from this time when I wanted to create a certain atmosphere in the cafe/bar when it was almost empty, when there was only a couple there drinking wine. You feel the room, and you also think carefully about the atmosphere you create. You don't want to bother people. So I'd never play, I don't know... club music or something. But it's sometimes nice to catch their attention. You know?

Would your colleagues have considered it kind of trashy or lame if they walked in and you were playing deep house or techno?

It would never happen [laughs]. But I was never afraid of judgment from my colleagues. Everyone had a very unique style. What Detlef would play, or what Vladimir would play—we influenced each other, but there was never judgment.

When you say it'd never happen, it's because you agree with them on the big picture of what mood you wanted to create in the cafe and bar, right?

Yeah. I think what we all had in common was that it was very natural for us not to focus on dance music, even if we wanted to make people dance at a certain point. Salon Des Amateurs wasn't intended to be a club. I think that's very important, that we never thought of Salon as a club. We always thought of it as a place where we shared music, where we met up and hung out. It could be a Saturday night and we'd just hang and listen to music and maybe not dance at all.

You said you weren't into techno in high school because it was so mainstream in your hometown at the time. When did that start to change for you?

Shortly after I moved to Düsseldorf, I saw a live techno act for the first time at an illegal club called Ego. It was Mika Vainio. That was the first time I understood there was a side to techno that's not mainstream and that was very, very appealing to me. The venue was run by art academy people, too. Düsseldorf has fostered many interesting impulses in music, and they were often from the art academy. This started in the '60s with Conrad Schnitzler, or the '80s punk and Neue Deutsche Welle movement with amazing acts like Cluster, Neu!, Der Plan and Pyrolator. They're all connected to the art academy.

Was there any sense that functional dance music was trashy?

No. Vladimir's background was throwing big rave parties back in the '90s in Belgrade, so we didn't consider it trashy. It's not a judgment or anything. For me, DJing is like a language: I talk to people in a certain way, and I'm just not the type to teach or instruct people. I don't want to tell people what to do—to tell them when to dance, when to put their hands up. I want to give them more space to interpret certain things, and I don't want to tell them what to feel in certain moments.

I've been reading this book about wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic theory of the beauty of all things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. I could relate so much of it to the way I approach my DJ sets. I've never tried to reach a certain kind of perfection. I was always looking for the beauty in imperfection. That doesn't mean I fuck up every mix—it's not about that. It's more to do with… For me, if a DJ set is technically perfect and feels very planned—when the breakdown and drops happen at precisely the right moments—then you're controlling people and telling them what to do. There can be an art to that, but it's another way of approaching it. Wabi-sabi is warm, raw and human. It leaves space for imagination and welcomes ambiguity. That's the way I want to DJ.

It would be hard for you to play "perfectly" in the sense you're describing anyway, because you often play records that aren't made for dance floors. Those aren't mixed down for club systems, they're not quantized or they're songs that aren't structured in a way that's good for mixing, like in 16-bar segments. That makes those non-club music records more challenging to transition into and out of. When you're shopping for records, do you consider how you might play a prospective purchase in a DJ set? For instance, would you think about how you might be able to transition into a certain song and whether it's too chaotic for mixing purposes?

No. If I like it, I try to make it somehow fit in. And I also leave room for chaotic moments. I think it's more about how to do a certain buildup, where you place it, where in time you feel this could be. Even if I only play something once in ten years, I have a vision of a certain moment in a certain setting, and then I wait for that moment to come. And then hopefully I remember that I brought that record.

What are you envisioning? What kind of stuff do you buy because you can imagine it working, but you don't often get to play?

Mainly really mad stuff or very weird stuff. Maybe it's a totally crazy, mad saxophone playing for five minutes. It's something that I love, but you have to have the right conditions to play it. The right moment is when you feel you have the crowd on your side, and whatever you do now they're with you. This energy is very special. They might be tracks I only get to play once in my life. But that one time…!

It sounds like you spent a lot of time at Salon cultivating the opposite vibe to anger: chill, relaxed.

Definitely. But it could also happen that a Wednesday night gets totally mad at midnight. Sometimes a random group of friends drops in, and suddenly it's the craziest party.

How do you respond to that sudden energy shift in the room?

I don't want to tell people what to do, but sometimes they tell me what they want. That's totally fine for me. If I was making coffees an hour ago and then a big group walks in and starts a party, I can change to another direction.

Even if you don't want to boss people around, do you sometimes feel like you have to push or guide the energy? Let's say there are 40 people, but 25 of them are outside smoking. And if you play the right thing, you could get them to come inside and stay there.

Yeah. At Salon the good thing is that you can see people standing outside because there's a glass door. If you don't know there are people in the club who aren't on the dance floor, you'd just think like, "OK, no one's showing up." In that case you can't be a magician and read minds. In general I see this as an exchange of energy. It's not me pulling strings, but both sides pulling strings. The audience is pulling strings as much as I do.

Did you organize your records according to energy so you could respond more quickly to changes in the room?

Mmhm. I mean, I don't play records anymore.

We'll get there.

It's the same now with rekordbox, actually. I sorted my records in terms of an energy level. After I started beat-matching, I started to sort in terms of BPM as well as energy.

How were you structuring transitions between tracks at different tempos?

I'd try to find other ways of doing transitions. The easy thing is, of course, when you have a track that starts beatless or when you use another, ambient track as a layer or bridge between two tracks with beats. Sometimes it's as easy as stopping one and playing the other. Back then I was very impressed by Jamal Moss, who didn't beat-match at all when he played at Salon. Also, Detlef rarely beat-matched, so I got the idea that there are other creative ways of doing it. When I started learning to beat-match, it wasn't so easy to go back to not beat-matching. I try really hard to tell myself, "Hey, I don't necessarily always have to beat-match." I try to remind myself of times when I didn't beat-match, when more surprising changes happened because I was free from the constraints of BPM.

When did you start to transition from never really beat-matching to mostly beat-matching?

Long time ago. I think when I started to get more out-of-town bookings.

I thought that might be the answer. So playing out more and in different cities changed how you played?

Yeah. I went from my safe place at Salon, where there was no judgment and no one expected me to do a certain thing, to playing a festival stage in front of 500 people. My first festival gig was at Nachtdigital. I was super nervous. I knew how to beat-match, but it didn't always work back then. I felt so exposed on a big stage, and I felt less like I was just sharing music. I figured the majority of the crowd weren't there necessarily to see me—maybe they were here to see the DJ after me. I felt like I wasn't free of expectations, and I would like to free myself from expectations in order to do my thing.

Still, I didn't try to cater to those expectations. I try to read the crowd and the space and decide while playing how far I can go. I always test boundaries. Sometimes I feel like I can't go that far out, and sometimes I completely misread the situation, maybe because I was delayed and arrived at the club ten minutes before my set. Those are the moments when I might completely misread and play like I'm still sitting on the plane or way too challenging.

Like, I had this really—well, now I think it's an amazing experience, but at the time it was very painful. It was at Sunset Campout close to San Francisco, a festival run by Solar and a friend of his [Galen]. I arrived there very tired and quite late, and I didn't have time to get into the vibe of the festival. I had this image in my mind of San Francisco, where all the people would be on psychedelic drugs and into crazy music. I felt safe to go far out—until right after I started. After 15 minutes I completely cleared the floor. I lost two-thirds of the crowd. I felt like, maybe I should change my idea of what to play, but by then it was too late. I was so committed to my initial idea of what I wanted to do.

At one point a random girl came up to me. She was screaming at me like, "What are you doing? Don't you see everyone is leaving?" She was so annoyed by what I played. Then I started to be stubborn as well. I figured like, the people who were still there—they were having fun and they really appreciated what I was playing. If I tried now to just switch and completely change my concept, it wouldn't work. Still, it shook me that someone was like, "Pay a bit more attention to the outside world."

Yet I didn't really transition out of it. I couldn't. I was really too stubborn, so I kept on with the one-third who were still there and enjoying it. I was really into it, I liked what I played. After I finished, the people who had stayed—they loved it. Still, I felt like I had to apologize. The festival promoters were like, "You don't have to be sorry!" But it shook me for a few months.

You mentioned another development in the way you DJ since you started to play out more: you use CDJs now. When did you start the transition from vinyl to digital?

The transition was painful, I have to admit. It began when I started to travel with records. My first years touring I was only playing records, but as I got more and more experience, I realized I was having technical problems at every second gig. Usually bass feedback or skipping needles. I remember a festival that had a table that was shaking so much that I had to hold the record player down while I DJed. I was so devastated that I started to burn CDs and bring them as backup. I started to take more and more CDs, and it started to make less sense to bring a record if I had it on a CD as well. So over the course of two years the pile of records I brought to gigs shrunk to zero.

Could some of those technical weaknesses of vinyl—like, that they skip when a dancer knocks the table—be considered wabi-sabi for you?

Those moments still hurt me. It might be a wabi-sabi moment if you heard the DJ save the mix after that. A DJ can't save a perfect mix—it has to go a little out of time in order to be saved. I really love those moments. There's a certain energy or attention that comes from hearing someone work to save a mix. There has to be room for a fucked-up transition, there has to be room for the occasional inappropriate track at the wrong moment.

Are you still able to capture those moments in a recorded mix?

I really enjoy making radio mixes. I don't have to address someone, and that leads to a way more introverted approach for me. It's more about the research and choosing the tracks. I sometimes really don't like being so exposed on stage—everyone looking at me can be very irritating. Especially because there is not much to see, and I think it distracts from listening. An unsociable day preparing and recording a radio show can help balance things out.

How do you keep it cool during a mix that's going off the rails? When you're mixing poorly, half the battle is not beating yourself up about it and making it worse. Maybe one must learn to trainwreck properly.

I struggled with that a lot. Sometimes a bad mix just sticks in your head. As soon as you feel like the crowd isn't really with you, you start to wonder why, question and blame yourself. Sometimes I feel like people are just observing, looking at me, not moving at all. Why are they doing this? Are they judging, or what? The one thing I really depend on is good monitoring. It can really freak me out to have poor monitoring, because I can't enjoy the music I'm playing. I have to tell myself that it hopefully sounds better outside the booth. It also trips up my mixing.

Does that mean you listen to the monitors while mixing more than relying on the cue in the headphones?

Yeah, I don't like to only mix with headphones. I want to mix with one ear in headphones and the other listening to the monitors so I can hear what it sounds like on the dance floor. Eventually I take the headphones off and just listen to the monitors. But sometimes if the monitors are very bad I turn them off completely.

A lot of what you play isn't available digitally, right? So did you start to rip your records when you began to use CDJs?

I rip a lot, yeah. I record from the record player into an A/D converter and then into a soundcard, then into the computer. There's no mixer between the turntable and my computer, which is meant to be a cleaner signal unless you're using a really good mixer or you want to EQ the signal as you're recording it. Sometimes I do it very poorly, I have to say. I have some digitized records where I left the room for a minute, came back and everything was fine. I edited the file, cut the beginning and end. And when I played it in a club, suddenly I hear the sound of my cat jumping on the turntable and stopping the record with her paw while I was out of the room during the recording!

I feel like everyone feels they have to admit their rips are bad. Are you meticulous about the quality of yours?

That's the thing. I'm not that interested in the technical side. I'd like for my rips to sound better, but I also think there are more important factors on what will make a track sound good in a club. For instance, if there's a really good soundsystem, which is rare, then I'll be able to play not-mastered tracks from friends that I wouldn't risk playing on a festival stage. A really good system can make even a bad rip sound good.

It sounds like instinct and spontaneity are important to how you play. How much preparation do you do in rekordbox?

I make loops live, but that's about it. I don't prepare much in rekordbox—I just use it to organize my library by making playlists, so I don't have cue points or anything like that. I really appreciate creating something in and for the moment—if it worked out, then it's for that moment. I don't want to plan it for next time. That's why it never came to my mind to prepare too much. I think I'd lose a little bit the excitement and adrenaline of, "Is this working out?" I need the adrenaline to keep myself awake, so I leave more room for failures. That's what keeps me interested in DJing. If I prepared too much, it would start to bore me. Maybe it's selfish to think about how to keep myself interested in what I'm doing, but it's also about trying out new things and risking failure. I love those moments when you look at a record and realize it's running out—sometimes those are my most creative moments and when I surprise myself.