When you've been collecting gear for 22 years, and vinyl for even longer, moving house brings with it the perfect opportunity to downsize your collection. For hardware-loving club producer, prolific DJ and tastemaking label owner Steffi, who permanently relocated from the buzzing streets of Berlin to the quiet green hills of Sobral Da Abelheira in Portugal's Mafra region two years ago, the act of streamlining her vinyl stash was a cathartic experience that helped to usher in the next chapter of her life.

Sitting on the warm, sunny veranda of Steffi's new studio space, a vision of rural lushness as far as the eye can see, you get a real sense that this new beginning is unfolding here. "We were both really ready to leave the city. It pulls you to a different place. I mean, having this [gestures around], is extremely fucking amazing, isn't it?" says Steffi of the move with her long-time partner and fellow Panorama Bar resident, Virginia. The two had been coming back and forth to Portugal for a few years before they made the decision to settle in Mafra, encouraged by the pandemic. Steffi and Virginia wanted to open the new studio space as a way of giving something back to their new home and contributing to the scene in Portugal.

I am taken on a tour of the property, which they have named Candy Mountain for its location at the bottom of a grassy elevation, and its veritable candy store of synths, drum machines and other hardware that gleam inside like treasure. A huge wall of records towers over the neatly stacked shelves of gear, with Steffi's prized Cirklon step sequencer commanding the room like a mothership. There are vintage Moogs, newer Moogs like the DFAM, digital synths from the 2010s, an acid-primed Roland SH-101 and a bounty of pedals like the BigSky reverb. On the top rack, a family of 808, 909, 303 and 606 originals catch my gaze. We walk down the romantic winding staircase to the bedroom and living area below, which is fitted with turntables and bright yellow smiley slipmats. Nestled in tranquillity, the space is the ultimate dream hub for making music. We head outside to soak up the last of the afternoon sun and begin our chat.

Born in the Netherlands, Steffi cut her teeth DJing in her hometown in the mid-'90s before relocating to Amsterdam in 1997 where her career started to take shape. She launched a club night with Awanto 3, and in 2000 they co-founded the long-running Klakson label alongside fellow producer Dexter. She eventually moved to Berlin in 2007 and became a resident at Panorama Bar, putting out her first production on Ostgut Ton in 2008 before launching her own Dolly label in 2010. Steffi's first album, Yours & Mine, was released via Ostgut Ton in 2011 and spawned a romantic house hit in "Yours" featuring Virginia. Her second full-length, Power of Anonymity, arrived in 2014 and her third LP, the IDM-adjacent World of the Waking State, in 2017.

Her fourth album, The Red Hunter—released at the end of October—summons a writhing snake's pit of tricksy, quicksilver rhythms and deep electro grooves, but like her last releases, it still keeps the dance floor in sight. Written during an intense period of personal upheaval, it's also dedicated to Steffi's late mother, whose passing during the pandemic marked an intense and enduring period of grief for the Dutch artist. We talked about how this has affected her life the last few years as well as the trajectory of the new imprint, how her newest LP came about and the inner workings of her intense creative process.

You have an incredibly vast hardware collection up there. Which machines are you using most at the moment?

My drum synths are the most important ones as I write all drums from scratch these days. Pearl Syncussion SY-1, Pearl Drum-X, Division Department 01/IV, Toyo Gakki Ult and Simmons SDS-3 are the most used and valuable ones for me. The fact that I have quite a few standing around also means that I don't have to multitrack too much if I want to program a lot of rhythm sections at the same time. Very luxurious.

What if you could only keep one?

My Cirklon sequencer. I can work so fast with my sequencer, it's my best friend. I use a step sequencer that is connected to all my hardware and to my computer so it's able to also play my VST instruments. It's the heart of my studio basically. It's a very fast and intuitive old school way of writing and I get instant results, especially on the rhythm sections. On The Red Hunter, the rhythm sections are the most important element for the music; it's not only the foundation of the record but also the central theme, so using a step sequencer gives me very quick options to write in different scales and work with different pattern lengths without having to 'think' about the music too much.

Are there any synths in your collection that you haven't completely mastered yet?

All of them! It's an interesting question. Because when you actually read the manuals you can just see how complex most of the synthesisers are and how little, at the end of the day, gets used of what it can actually do. So, to answer the question, it's fair to say it applies to all the machines up here. Especially the polyphonic machines. If I were to be taught by someone who is involved with the process of developing the synthesisers, I just know they would be like, 'Is that all you've done?' and 'Have you seen this?' Most of these machines are so in depth that you forget this. One important thing for me is not to do hours of tweaking—that's the reason why I'm not modular. I don't tweak for hours because it takes too long to get a result. I really like to make music and get a result from it. I don't want anything too fiddly and boring. I like to write fast.

Are you still regularly buying new synths? What's your most recent purchase?

The Udo Super 6 has been the most impressive thing that I've purchased recently. It has a great sounding engine, and the synth resembles a Juno-106 when it comes to layout, but it has a super modern approach. The pitch bend section and the modulation section is amazing and it's really hands on. No complex menus or layered functions. I am still buying new synths but it's not so manic anymore because now the fascination comes from both worlds. I use hardware and software, so I'm buying a lot of plugins. But I'm really trying to put the lid on the hardware thing because you can see for yourself how full it is up here.

What plugins have you been using?

The Eventide plugins; the old reverb they released, and the flanger, the phaser and the harmonizer. My god, I need a new laptop because everything is so high-definition these days. But it's really important for me to state that it really doesn't matter if I use a computer or the hardware. This is a collection of more than 22 years of gear that I would like to work with, but through the years I've also found this home in VSTs, so I'm completely comfortable in both worlds and now merging the two, it's just like heaven. And there are so many great plugins, there are so many great synths, and so many VST versions of hardware that they're bringing out now. ven in the drum computer category they're really stepping up, it's great.

Are you still using Logic as your main DAW?

Yes! I'm very lonely in the Logic world really… I love Ableton, seriously. I think it's powerful when it comes down to creativity, amazing. But I can't see the song because the arrangement view is so tiny and compressed, and with Logic when I colour code all the tracks, I can literally see if something looks too long etc and I need to go back to it. It's also a visual thing for me. And I'm just so used to Logic that whenever I jump into Ableton or end up doing an arrangement in Ableton, it just doesn't feel… my flow gets disrupted. But for live I use Ableton.

It all looks very neat and tidy. What effect have patch bays had on your workflow?

I started to use a patch bay on the second album, which was still more like house/techno/electro. But with this new album, I found when everything's connected; you can just go crazy with the opportunities, pulling that synth through that effect machine and then back in there etc. The first album was much more classic house and techno-oriented, it was just much more about basslines, drums that had a big classic feel, 808, 909, 707, that kind of stuff. So the sound also stays within that classic house and techno narrative and I wouldn't go wild with the effects.

Sounds like you've unlocked a whole new level of creativity.

I think where I am now, 12 years later––or 14 years later––it's a natural development that you want to push your own boundaries. I hate to repeat myself. Although if you would have asked me 12 years ago, I would have said the same thing—'I want to make an album like this one'—but I wasn't there yet. And now I'm just like, I knew I was going to do this one day; that was already the goal that I've set for myself. So every time I've reached the ship on the horizon, there needs to come another one, and another one and another one, so I'm never not inspired. Next on my list is to go back to dance floor stuff, because this has been such a personal process of microscoping everything, and now I just want to write some banging dance floor stuff. But you never know…

How has the move to the countryside affected your approach to making music?

From a stylistic perspective, nothing has changed––it's not that I'm looking at a palm tree and feel like I need to write a different type of music. But it has done a lot to my state of mind, which is nice. Because you're living very far away from civilisation in terms of, like… in the city you walk outside you can go grab a coffee, whereas here you need to make an effort to go and see people, shopping takes a 20-minute drive, so it's a whole different mindset. It's just a different pace. As a person, it has made me more relaxed because I'm in nature and it makes me just worry less about stuff, and feel less affected by other people's energy or stressful environments in general.

So you're not going to make an ambient record, then?

Oh yeah—at some point! Always. [laughs] That was on my list even before moving to the countryside.

Let's talk about the album. Did you have a strong vision of how you wanted The Red Hunter to turn out before you got into the studio?

Yes! The title track was the first track I've written when I knew this was going to be a new project. Because I was sketching the track and I was like, 'This is exactly what I want to do, and then within this narrative I'm gonna go deeper, or left, right, whatever.' But interestingly enough, that was the first track I wrote and knew it was going to be the pizza dough for a new album. I wanted rhythmic elements to become part of the main melody because normally I just chuck loads of strings on it––if you listen to the first and second albums it's really melodic––but here I knew it all needed to come from the rhythm. It all has to have that driving element, and this I kind of worked out in the first track. I was like, 'Yes, that's where it needs to go.' Because with that in the back of my head, it didn't really matter whether I was there [points], whether I was in Berlin or in hotel rooms. I knew I could do it with any piece of equipment as I know what it needs to be.

Your music has always had a strong emotional pull to it, especially when paired with Virginia's vocals. But is it fair to say this is your most personal record to date?

I think so because of the message; I was very open about dedicating it to my mother ––next week it will be four years since she passed away, and this was written in the last four years. Whereas I would normally take out three months to write an album, get it out, this was all assembled over the past four years in the process of one of the important people in my life just disappearing, and working out how you deal with that. And then the pandemic and all this kind of stuff hit, so yeah, I think that was different from all the other albums where there's touring and everything is fine. This was a whole different phase of my life.

With this album, I had to give myself more time and I had to let go of that, because I'm very used to saying, 'I'm going to write an album,' block my calendar and go into the studio. I've got this rhythm of how I produce and then I just bang it out. Whereas this was a collection of bits and bobs that I've done in the house, in Berlin and here, and then just moulded into this homage to my mum, which I decided to also mention, you know. Some people just roll out an album and they're like, 'fuck it,' but for me, these projects are always really personal because I can actually put something in it. And when I look back at the last three albums, they also had a message and I know where I was in life, but this is, of course, very much about how you carry on when your parent dies. It's a whole different story for me.

My mum was also very much involved in my musical career, so it's like, all of a sudden there's an element missing in the whole picture of how you go to gigs, and the response from your family, and the support… all of a sudden it's like, this gets pulled away, and you have to reassemble yourself and get going back on the road without that element of somebody texting you "how was the gig!" so that was really new.

You named the tracks after specific memories and feelings. How did you go about developing this narrative?

It's a non-vocal album, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have that typical song structure. I'm occupied with what the music sounds like, for me, and what it resonates, so I'm finding the journey through the titles—I'm not just saying, 'Track 4b, third take.' Sometimes people do that because it's just very pragmatic, but for me there's also storytelling in finding the names that go hand in hand with what the tracks sound like.

Did the sequencing feel intuitive?

Yeah, but it was quite hard for this one, because all the tracks are so individually doing their own thing that it was kind of like, 'Wow.' I had some feedback. Because it's a new label and there's a whole new concept behind it, I had to get feedback from a couple of people because I'm A&Ring it myself, at the end of the day. Which I've been doing with my own record labels for like 22 years. But when it's your own work, you're always much more private about it. So I had to send it to a couple of people who are very close to me and who are also working with us getting everything set up to ask them, 'What do you think? How do you feel this is rolling as a tracklist?'

I read that you're not really drawn to polyrhythms, but it feels like the beats are pulling in different directions and there's all this conflict coursing through the music. How did you go about creating that?

It's a lot of modulation. When people ask me if I have any connection with polyrhythms it all sounds very pragmatic for me—like you need to produce according to a certain blueprint. You need to do this, this needs a 3/4 bar etc. For me, it's about how I can use drum elements and make them melodic by tweaking and using lots of post-production effects, or effects on the fly that I would record straight away. That was how this came about. By making these percussion elements come to life and not just having a hi-hat sound like a simple hi-hat, for example, but instead having the hi-hat tell a story on its own.

It really feels like they're all in conversation with each other.

Exactly. But it also doesn't become too chaotic.

You've talked about conjuring a "female spirit" for this album. How does this concept connect with the rhythm work? And are there any synths that carry this quality more?

When my mum passed away I was really occupied with the idea of what you actually get from the female line. What gets passed on to you? I have this massive drive when it comes to work, and that's definitely something that came from that line of women.I found it really fascinating to emphasise that in the music by having everything really bottom-heavy and adding little layers of melody on top. Everything is really chunky and at the same time, it's also very delicate. And I find that really interesting in female energy—it's very powerful and it's very underestimated and also, unfortunately, wrongly used in many cases. You could say a lot about it, but it's just nice to play with it in the music as well.

Talking about delicate melodies, the opening track has a synth melody that sounds a bit like an acoustic guitar, or a plucked string instrument. Which synth did you use to create that?

That's linear synthesis, it's all digital. This is the Modor that I used for that one and you can use a couple of different types of digital synthesis, there's linear and FM, and you can mix and you get that really… yeah, it almost sounds like a plucky style. But those late '80s/early '90s FM and linear and synthesisers, they're very known to be imitating a real instrument, and if you tweak that and put some effects on it, you get this sound.

What are your thoughts on using samples?

I'm not about samples when I'm producing solo. The stuff with [the electro producer] Privacy as Negroni Nails, we use a lot of vocal snippets, and when I worked with Martyn there definitely were. Because he comes from a more UK approach, a more drum & bass approach. So there was definitely more sampling. I found it fascinating, it was a very great learning experience––how to use a sampler, that was a really big breakthrough for me. How you can reprocess your sounds when you're not happy with something, you can just throw it in a sampler and replay it and stuff. But when I'm solo, I'm much more about producing a little bit more organically.

So the idea of re-processing your own audio rather than someone else's appeals more?

If I were to record something in the studio, I would crank it up or just do crazy stuff with it in post-production. And if I compare that to earlier work, it was much more classic house and techno, and now it's all about 'Let's get the freak on' and really go places.

Seeing as you've mentioned the '90s, I was listening to Warp's Artificial Intelligence compilation just before coming here and parts of it really remind me of The Red Hunter. What do you think of the IDM tag and how do you feel about genre comparisons in general?

I think it's a compliment. I don't mind being categorised in there. On the third album, someone came up to me and said, 'I can clearly hear that you're a Drexicya fan.' I was like, 'There's literally nothing on there that sounds anything like what they're doing.' There's literally no influence that came from classic electro. It's bollocks. When you use it as a journalist, it's just because you don't understand the music. Do you know what I mean? If you were to say that my first two records were house and techno, I would be like, 'Oh, yeah, totally, Detroit, Chicago.' I'm happy with this being called 'contemporary electro' because I'm coming from a more classical way of producing, so for me it's definitely where I wanted to be at some point.

I think what I find interesting in the drum & bass… 'revival' is a nasty word so let's think of something else. But yeah, there's a lot of broken beat coming back that has drum & bass touches, but it sounds much more synthetic now. Stripped down, with a new jacket. And I really love that, when people are pushing the envelope. It's like, 'Oh, this is the basis for the new track, and it has that kind of tempo and it has that way of programming, but we're using really different kinds of sounds.' And that pushes the genre to a new kind of level. And I think not a lot of people were doing that in the electro scene.

I've been in the music scene since the very late '80s and I've a got a massive collection and have been collecting all kinds of different genres over the last 25-plus years, so I'm coming from all over the place as I've never really attached myself to one genre as a punter or as a DJ or as a producer.

Do you have a favourite way to start a track?

A kick! A kick bassline and then I'm going to build the little tangly elements around it.

How important is speed in building a track?

It really differs—sometimes I've got the rhythm section and everything's there, but then I'm not happy with the melody so I'll just remove the melody and write a new section on top. And sometimes I'm just like, 'It's there,' and I'll just pack it aside. And then finish the arrangement in a different period of time. It really differs from one track to the other. Sometimes I can sit on a track for ages and then eventually it comes out and someone says, 'Oh this is my favourite track from the album,' and then the first thing I think is 'That was a fucking bastard.' It's so different.

How do you know when you've finished a track? Do you set yourself deadlines?

I think once I've got the basics of the arrangement laid out. Most of the time I just play it, close my eyes and turn away from the grid and just listen to see if it makes sense. And if it's too long or too short, I just listen a couple of times, until I'm like, 'OK, the flow's good.' One thing I've learned over the years is that mistakes are allowed to stay in the song. In the beginning, I would always be like, 'Oh, this hi-hat starts too early,' and now I've learned by recording more one-take songs with other people that mistakes are fine. It doesn't need to be tight and neat on the grid, sometimes it needs to have that unexpected, 'Oh, now I thought the kick was gonna come back and it's not' kind of thing. So I'm also a little less critical about the arrangement.

How did you go about writing the dance floor-friendly versions of The Red Hunter for your live shows?

I've done one gig where I kept it electro-y and I was like, 'This just doesn't translate as well as how it does on the record,' so I was just thinking, 'Do I want to perform the record as it is?' And then at some point I decided to write a version of the record in a dance floor grid with a lot of 4/4 kicks. In the live show, I'm using a couple of my other aliases; there's some Crushed Soul stuff in there that is much more banging and dance floor, but the stuff that I used from the album is modified for the dance floor—4/4 versions—which was actually really funny because some stuff that has a totally different impact on a broken record all of a sudden becomes the main element in a 4/4 version. Maybe I should release them eventually.

This is pretty banging though.

Yeah, for music heads. We used to dance to this stuff all the time in the '90s.

I like Surgeon and Lady Starlight's 50 percent stupider concept, which is that when you perform live, you're 50 percent stupider than usual. What kind of live setup do you have?

A simple one––Ableton and controller. I'm not that fancy person who goes all modular. I've no desire to either. I think one big bit of praise that Ableton Live needs to get is that it's super intuitive, it's amazing. If you've got the eight tracks going, you can say, 'I'm going to use the bassline of that track in combination with the kick of that track, melody lines.' You can transpose everything so it sits in a different key. It's amazing. You can rearrange your whole oeuvre into a whole new thing. I think it's highly underestimated and yes, you don't see people twisting knobs, it's more like a fader pushing thing and effects and stuff. It's almost a bad thing to use a computer on stage, but it's highly unestimated how brilliant Ableton Live is for live. There's a reason it's called Ableton Live.