At the multi-leveled Treehouse Stage at 2019's Whole Festival, someone dancing above the decks spilled a drink, which poured through gaps in the floorboards onto Ziúr and the CDJs she was playing on. Without a hint of change to her focused expression, the Berlin-based producer and DJ rapidly stashed equipment and unplugged power sources, unpersuaded by the crowd's warnings of electrocution. A short time later, she coaxed us back in with Nina Simone's "Baltimore."

As you might guess from her nonchalance at touching beer-soaked power sources, Ziúr has a background in the punk scene, lending a hard edge and molten emotional core to many of her tracks and strikingly eclectic DJ sets. Head-banging energy is a common thread for her, but so is intricacy and originality, informed by a deep and evolving pool of influences. Having released on Planet Mu, Objects Limited, Infinite Machine and most recently PAN, Ziúr's music is driven by an obsession with unique sounds that, as she put it, "go their own route." Her discography, which is highly personal, experimental and detail-oriented, reflects this. As she told The Quietus in 2017, "I try to mix it up. Influence doesn't come just from one place... I'm always trying to mix these disparate things together. I'm also influenced by my own history that isn't club-related."

Growing up in a small-town, Ziúr was first drawn to punk and hardcore because "it was the go-to place for a rebellious attitude. There just wasn't so much knowledge about where I could go. Even right now, it feels like there aren't many options. I mean, there's way more, but you could still not define yourself as a multi-colored left-handed alien or whatever. It's hard if you try to pull that off in the Burgeramt," she chuckled.

The street Ziúr’s lived on for over a decade is a never-ending construction site, with jackhammers and cobblestone excavation emitting a harsh industrial din, not unlike something you might hear at a Janus club night. Inside, the space is small and cozy, with a large portion dedicated to her home studio. The spicy earthy smell of her perfume is pervasive in every room, making the place intimidating and enticing in equal measure, like all well-honed personal scents should. Throughout our conversations, she exuded straightforward confidence, maintaining a devastatingly consistent level of eye contact and a slippery expression I could never quite put my finger on.

After years on tour in bands and working in pretty much every capacity the music industry has to offer, her fourth album, Antifate, is inspired by the places of belonging she's since cultivated. "It's not so easy to find a place where you can be yourself and relax and feel supported, and just have a space to breathe basically," she said. "What I figured out is the people that I surround myself with give me that space, and I think I give them that space as well, to just be at ease for a second. It's a record for that. Dedicated to good relationships and the space that we give each other and the kind of love that we spread."

Fittingly, Antifate features contributions from many of these friends. James Ginzburg sent in bass and piano recordings. Sam Wilder came down to the studio she had in the back of Trauma Bar And Kino to record clarinet and saxophone. Adam Sinclaire's flute provides exuberant detail to tracks "Sister Lava" and "The Carry." Ziúr's joint efforts have been especially plentiful this year. She performed an audio-visual poem at Trauma with Juliana Huxtable and Theresa Baumgartner, has a new project simmering with Ginzburg featuring vocal contributions from both artists, and is producing a number of songs for a forthcoming project by Vietnamese band Rắn Cạp Đuôi.

Do these collaborations reflect some nostalgia for her band days? "I figured out the times when I had band projects, after two years I wanted to go further and they couldn't. No shade, but it felt like I wanted to just improve, and the end of the line was reached by that point, then I got really bitchy. I want to take shit to the next level."

She prefers more agile partnerships. "It's easier somehow to just do something quick with somebody than to have a relationship with them and have a project over some time."

Ziúr wasn't a conservatoire kid. She came to the guitar by picking one up and teaching herself, focusing on self-expression over standard technique. "I learned my own way of playing and then all of a sudden, those people who I was intimidated by, they were like, 'How did you play that?' For me, it's easier to find my own way than to learn something that is just like, 'this is how you do it,' and then you have to forget about it and apply creativity later. That's really hard."

Her introduction to "sound tech" was while working in a club in Münster, where the sound engineer took her under his wing, eventually leading to her mixing shows at the venue's smaller stage. "There was a certain interest already that I could build on," she said. "The first time we did demo recordings with our bands back then was through a mixing board that we had maybe into a MiniDisc player, or just playing around with a four-track tape recorder."

Ziúr was attracted to technology as a means for broadening what was achievable for her as a producer. "Now it's possible to go further into details quite easily. Every computer comes with something, if it's GarageBand, or you rip a version of Ableton or whatever."

Preset-averse from the start of her experiments with electronic music around five years ago, Ziúr dug into her past and present for sounds on Antifate. While listening through to tracks on an old hard drive, she found the piano recordings now in 'Gravity's Gravity, Clout Is Clout." The vocals on 'Antifate,' which are eight years old, came from this same archival process. "I was working on 'Antifate,' and then I put the vocals in, and it clicked. It was automatically just... the right pitch and the right timing, or I don't know what. I didn't do anything with it, but it uplifted the song completely. Accidentally, I guess." She discovered other sounds among day-to-day objects in her flat. To get that steamy hiss on "Orange Cream Drip," she dropped cold water on a hot iron.

Clipped to a string hanging behind Ziúr's computer monitor is a film photograph from 2012 of her wrist hovering over a friend's hip bone. The letters "ATØ" are freshly tattooed on both patches of skin. She and her friend came up with the acronym, which stands for "THE ALLIANCE TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD," during a kitchen-table conversation about the music scene. "We felt caught up by something that was seemingly open, but had certain old power structures still attached to it," she told Glamcult. "It's a romantic construct really, it's not like we're going to pile up atomic bombs in our backyard, but we were just facilitating intersectionality. If we would just celebrate our differences instead of fighting them, we would have way more power in this world."

In 2019, having yet to execute a global takeover, Ziúr utilized the concept as the basis for her last full-length, ATØ. Like Antifate, that record is also a celebration of friendship, and the belief that small interpersonal actions are an integral part of enacting large-scale change. Dedicated to people struggling to find their place in the world, ATØ is, in her words: "For everyone, who is part of resisting the status quo, for all survivors, outcasts and weirdos." The album marked a progression in Ziúr's sound, emerging from the delicious distortion of 2017's U Feel Anything? and into a clearing where pop sensibility and intricate sound design plumbed new emotional depths. "In isolation I vanished / I'm leaving no insight," she sings on one of ATØ's highlights, the skin-prickling "I Vanish."

For her next disappearing act, worries of a status quo vamoose on Antifate. Ziúr invites us into the world of riches beyond convention, depicted through lavish sounds, gleaming basslines and eccentric rhythmic structures. The album's colorful opener "Alive, Unless" sets the scene, indicative of sonic opulence to come on tracks like "Gravity's Gravity, Clout Is Clout" and "The Dip."

As an abstract reference for the album, Ziúr used a mythical land of plenty: Cockaigne, a reprieve from the hardships of medieval peasant life. Here, depending on the depiction, cheese rains from the sky, nuns flash their asses and other common notions of societal propriety are disregarded with pleasure.

"I actually recently saw this fairytale on TV and it kind of sucked," she laughed. "But I think you can compare Cockaigne to the situation when we're around each other and give each other the support and the space to breathe. It's not like something that is... a dreamland or whatever. But somehow, it is. It is."

When she looks at the big picture of life, sifting through the inevitable why-are-we-here?-isms, the connections she shares with people lend her world meaning. "This keeps me pumping or just keeps me going," she said.

One tradition that's manifested in the Cockaigne myth is the Italian cuccagna pole, wherein people attempt to scale a greased beam in order to reach ham or other delicacies stashed at its apex. The album's name encapsulates the sentiment at the center of this custom: that spoils are hard won.

"When I spoke about the space that we create for each other, that is not destiny," she said. "It's like, we worked for it. I didn't go through the park and just find somebody's golden earring or whatever accidentally. It's not like that. We've been looking for that space on the whole big journey to find a sense of belonging. So it's just the opposite of a God-given type of scenario. We've been looking for each other."

As Ziúr and I both tried to prop ourselves up against the second lockdown's droopy malaise, her with a potent pot of french press, and me with a half-litre of mate, we eventually landed on the topic of her prolific output over the past year, much of which is still lying in wait for future release.

"Music is kind of like the only thing I have left," she said. "I'm stripped down from everything that I want to do. I mean, if it's involvement in nightlife and culture and traveling and touring and stuff like that. So the only thing I'm interested in right now is making music."

The Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1567

Recently, Ziúr has been longing for the energy exchanged between performer and audience, or the magic of a well-oiled club night. I recounted a conversation I'd had the previous evening, reminiscing with a friend about the hero's journey of unclogging a broken toilet at peak hours on a sold-out night or the shaky beauty of hungover mornings spent sweeping garbage off venue floors.

"Yeah, it's just like there's so much pain involved, but... there's something that just has this sparkly type of glamor to it," she said. "Back then when I was driving tours and stuff, it's just like, there's so much drama and so much bullshit, and maybe it sucks to sleep on the floor next to a trash can. But in the end, the next morning when you sit in the van and drive to the next city, it's kind of nice again. There's just a whole bunch of shit that you deal with, but somehow I don't want to miss it."

In Ziúr's mind, livestreams can't hold a candle up to all this. "There's an exchange of energy I don't get. It's just something that is not put in words, that people just transfer. Like right now, us meeting physically in this space... We just say so much more than our words, right? If we had the same thing on Zoom or whatever, maybe we would have gotten to a different place."

While touring can be rough on an artist's body and mind, the opportunity to see her music reach people directly has been nourishing enough to make it absolutely worth it. "I'm really just waiting it out," she noted. "I've received messages from people who went to my shows that said, 'My friend was crying like a baby, and I had to hold my friend the whole time during your set,' or, 'You make me feel understood.' And just like, if I can transport this with a set that I play, it's ridiculously amazing. And even if it happens once in my life, I'm a winner already."