How did 40 songs become nine?
Steffi built "Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising," her fifth solo studio album, out of a working pool of more than 40 compositions. The nine that made the final cut on Dekmantel Records had to clear two bars at once: stand up as individual tracks you'd drop in a DJ set, and link into one continuous arc front to back. That's the harder brief. A lot of producers can make a club tool; fewer can make nine of them that also read as a record.
The tracklist: "The Rolling Wave," "Sudden Flash," "Acoustics of Space," "Sweeping Leaps," "Sensation of Suspension," "Free From The Matrix," the title track "Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising," "Twin State" and "Gaseous Vapor." It's out October 9, following "Patterns of Vibration," the 2025 collaborative record Steffi made with Virginia, which she announced on her own Bandcamp.
Why doesn't she separate the booth from the studio?
Ask Steffi where a track actually starts and she won't point to a laptop. "There isn't so much a difference between standing on the dancefloor, standing behind a DJ booth or being in the studio," she said, describing how the album came together. It's a continuum she's been living since she started raving in the late 1980s: the floor teaches the booth, the booth teaches the studio, and the studio sends it back out to the floor.
"The making of this album felt like a nice bubble, like hanging out with good people in your virtual living room."
That's not studio-isolation talk. It's a DJ describing production the way she'd describe a good night out: company, trust, no pressure to perform for an audience that isn't in the room yet.
What does three decades on the road sound like?
"Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising" pulls from Detroit, Chicago, New York, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Berlin, the cities that shaped Steffi's ear across more than 30 years of touring, without settling into any one of their house or techno dialects. Firm drum programming sits next to pads, strings and melody lines that have nowhere near the bluntness of a pure functional club record. "Writing from the heart and roll it out no matter what the outcome is," she said of her approach, and: "Music with a good melody leaves a great memory."
At 52, with five solo albums behind her and a catalogue of collaborations on top, Steffi isn't chasing a sound that's currently working. She's making the case, again, that a dance record can still be a listen, not just a tool.
