Steffi has been a vital electronic music artist since the mid 90s, when she first began playing out and throwing parties in Amsterdam. Moving to Berlin in 2007, she was embraced by the Ostgut family, becoming a resident at the club and releasing on the label.To date she’s released five albums; including two solo LPs for Ostgut, with a third due in the Autumn, co-producing another with Virginia, with Analogue Cops as Third Side and collaborating as Doms & Deykers on Martyn’s 3024 label. Her impressive discography features club classics like ‘Yours feat.Virginia’, carefully chosen remixes and appearances on labels including Permanent Vacation and Underground Quality, and a mix for Panorama Bar. She owns and operates three labels; Klakson,with Dexter, which was founded in 2000 alongside Awanto 3, Dolly and Dolly Dubs. Her newest imprint will be Dolly Deluxe, inaugurated this June with music made for her fabric mix.
Taking the helm for fabric 94, Steffi has chosen to kick the regular mix CD standard up a notch by commissioning all the tracks exclusively for her mix.The curated group of close friends and collaborators were guided to produce tracks “with a certain mindset”, which Steffi has moulded and weaved together. Considering each track was made especially for the mix – it’s musically cohesive with a mood and sound that followers of her career over the past decade will recognise as classic Steffi (if there may be such a thing). It’s a singular vibe; classic not retro, robotic but enveloped in warmth, low slung but twisted, bass heavy but never linear, playfully picking up key dancefloor elements to refine with lush soundscapes, vocal picks and hypnotic rhythmic effects.The result on her fabric mix is a tale that took the sound of Warp’s ‘Artificial Intelligence’ CDs as an atmospheric starting point and then travels far beyond it as she flawlessly navigates her way through retro-futurist landscapes, using restraint to explore the more abstract, broken elements of house, electro and techno.
“Fabric always offered full support for my creative wishes and it is such a great honour to contribute to the mix series. I have great respect for the endless amount of positive energy the whole team has put into this club over the years going through ups and downs, but still shining and sailing such a strong and important ship!”
‘Echo 1’ by L.u.c.a sets the ambience, flowing into the syncopated groove of Voiski’s ‘Sound of Distance’, seamlessly blended into the stripped back hypnotism of STFSHD ‘1.5’ – Steffi’s first track produced together with Shed. Rising Russian talent Unbalance floats spine tingling pads around an industrial drive, ’No life on the surface’ has Steffi and Martyn exchanging interplanetary melodies, jagged percussion and trembling bass frequencies.At this point the mood is stripped back, almost unnervingly, to signal a change of direction.Answer Code Request emerges with ‘Forking Path’ as stuttered rhythms and otherworldly pads are pinned down by a faint 4/4 drum pattern. Dexter uses a broken groove as the framework for ‘66’, a melodic head-spin setting the stage for the angle grinding bassline of 214’s ‘Sound Moments’. Finland’s Mesak delivers a twisted electro funk stepper full of disorienting arpeggios, a sentiment explored further with Duplex’s ‘Voidfiller’ and Late Night Approach’s ‘Poison Valley’, both of which use drum machines to carry piercing synths through to other dimensions. For the last 20 minutes, Steffi bounces off the energy provided by each track before. Sharp, metallic textures are brandished in UAS ‘World Gets Crazy’ and Afik Naim ‘Saturniidae’, followed by ‘Off the beat’, a new collaboration by Dexter and Virginia with mangled harmonies treading the line between warm and unsettling. Privacy’s ‘Broke’ unites many of the elements explored throughout the mix with a powerful blend of intricate drum patterns, emotive harmony and sharply chopped vocals.
“When fabric approached me to do a mix cd I wanted to do something special, so I approached my inner circle and some of my favourite producers to ask if they wanted to produce a track specially for this project with a certain mindset. I have always been a massive fan of warps artificial intelligence cd’s and this was a starting point in terms of atmosphere … My initial thought was to step away from beat mixing completely and let the atmosphere set the tone, but when the tracks started rolling in it naturally shaped up as a fully mixed CD.”
Tracklist:
1. L.u.c.a. – Echo 1
2.Voiski – Sound of distance
3. STFSHD – 1.5
4. Unbalance – Freedom
5. Doms & Deykers – No life on the surface 6.Answer Code Request – Forking path
7. Dexter – 66
8. 214 – Sound moments
9. Mesak – Commonaukko
10. Duplex – Voidfiller
11. Late Night Approach – Poison valley
12. UAS – World gets crazy
13.Afik Naim – Saturniidae
14. Dexter & Virginia – Off the beat
15. Privacy – Broke