I only played compositions by men. It was only after I finished my studies that I thought about what we actually know about women’s achievements, whether in science or history. Of course, I was particularly interested in women in the music scene. I was shocked to realise that I didn’t know any female composers. After all, I make music on a professional level. So I started researching and opened the door to a whole new world.

Clara Schumann. I played one of her romances and then recorded it for my debut album. After that, I came across the American composer Amy Beach. Ultimately, I encountered so many female composers that it was really not easy to make a selection for my album Women. In addition to the music, I also studied the women’s biographies. I came across some incredible stories that I could relate to. I admire Mozart and Beethoven, but I find myself in the lives of female composers. That’s a real bonus. It’s important for girls and women to have role models.

Because she is an admirable woman. When she had to choose between her marriage and music, she chose her art. She followed her dream instead of focusing on money and security. Chiquinha Gonzaga also fought for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. Her mother was a slave.

Absolutely. She campaigned for women’s rights, and her ‘March of the Women’ became the anthem of the suffragette movement, which Emmeline Pankhurst was also part of. Together with like-minded people, the activist demanded women’s suffrage in Great Britain. I sampled one of her speeches and interwove it with ‘March of the Women’. For me, this mixture has something very powerful about it because these women fought for a better future.

That can be frightening at times. However, I am a very positive person. I am confident that communication among women has improved significantly. We have become a community – even in the music world. For a long time, female musicians competed with each other. But now I have many wonderful colleagues. Instead of competing, we support each other.

With this song, I mainly want to appeal to my younger followers. Apart from that, ‘Flowers’ gave me strength during a break-up. I’m also interested in Miley Cyrus as a person. I find it impressive how she managed to gain control of her career after her time as a child star.

On the way to the gas chamber, they are said to have sung Ilse Weber’s song ‘Wiegala’, which I arranged for violin and a small string ensemble for my album. For very personal reasons: I have Jewish roots, some of my relatives were in Auschwitz. Since my great-grandfather did not survive the Holocaust, I talked to my grandparents about this dark part of history.

Yes. She was also a violinist, but she stopped playing after she got married. I always had the feeling that she regretted that. One day, she put her violin in my hands. Her passion for this instrument rubbed off on me. So now I am living the dream that she gave up.

King Princess: They certainly did. Growing up there, I was really interested in being in the studio. All I cared about was just being around music from as early as I can remember. At the same time, my mom would always have instruments at her house, even though there wasn’t a recording studio. So both my parents definitely influenced me. There was no pressure, but they saw that I was interested and wanted to leave instruments around for me. I think the biggest thing for me was just watching people record their music and becoming obsessed with these older musicians. There were trunks, people sleeping on couches, rock bands recording — and I just wanted to hang out with them because I thought they were cool. Usually, they were really nice and let me hang out.

I feel like all I wanted to do was just sit on the couch and watch everybody.

It was definitely at times very inappropriate, at times really fun and at times kind of depressing. My dad is a recording engineer. The way I’d describe it, it’s like, okay, you’re at the fucking Audi factory or the BMW factory. You have the people who design the car, that’s the producers. And the engineers are the people that actually go to the garage and build it. Like build it from the engineers, from their designs. So it’s actually a more blue collar profession than being a producer because you’re physically plugging everything in and patching, and it’s manual, and it’s intense. From my dad’s perspective, he was not involved in record label politics at all. He was a freelance studio owner. We would watch records that left the studio sound really amazing and then all of a sudden you’d fucking get the mixes back from the label and it would all be like, ugh, what happened? That’s the politics. So that was always informative. Yeah. Sorry, I’m rambling.

I smoked a lot of weed this morning. We got weed last night, it was fabulous.

It just is facts that the emotional warfare that occurs between women is way more intense than anything a man could do. I’m not talking about cisgender women, I’m talking about all women. The emotional intelligence that is within us. As a non-binary person I’m also oftentimes an observer to womanhood and an observer to femininity and yet I have sapphic relationships. I would consider my relationships very sapphic. They have been beautiful and chaotic and hectic and at times dangerous and at times desolate. That’s my experience and I don’t think it’s just my experience.

I think in Munich I was really like that typical teenage bedroom producer, where everything is in your head and you just dream up a world for yourself and communicate it online, but it’s all very imaginary you know. And Berlin really made me rooted in the club, I mean that’s to be expected haha. I was deejaying at OHM like literally every other Friday before it was so popular, now it’s so hard to ever have a party there. In Amsterdam I did my masters in design and fine arts. There things became very conceptual and theoretical and I was reading a lot and thinking a lot. Rather than making original music all the time, I was more working on sound installations and producing other people’s records. Then London was like laser focus on music, just being locked into the studio sitting there all night long writing an album.

Absolutely. I mean, it is so competitive. Obviously it’s an expensive city and you have to make things work so you just have to grind. But also if you see people coming up with new micro-genres left and right and new asthetics for their party flyers like every other week, you just feel a little competitive and you’re like, I want to be contributing something that feels as fresh or as absurd or whatever. So yes, I would agree with that.

I have to find out how to deal with that, to be honest, because I haven’t taken a break in… the entire process of making the record, and now I’m touring and promoting the record. It’s just sort of snowballing, the more you do the more doors open so it’s just more work. And I’m still probably used to the times where anything you can get, you should grab and do it. But yeah, I’m just finding out how to do that.

So I studied at the Berlin University of the Arts, UdK, and I graduated in Spatial Design actually in the end. So it was sort of like architecture, but less applied architecture. And afterwards, I studied what was called Design at Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, which is like the master’s department of Rietveld. It was a double degree in fine arts and design and it was basically very research-based. I always thought that was obviously cool and interesting but also a little pretentious.

I have been producing electronic music since I was 16. Throughout the whole university path, I was making music and that was always a bit of an issue. I was definitely not someone that attended every class, I always was a little bit absent from school. I made it work somehow, but I don’t think my teachers really liked me that much. I still feel good about having done it though.

Yeah, working in university followed this sort of assignment-based structure.

I don’t like the idea of having one person tell me what they think about it, like that’s just one person’s opinion whereas if you put it out that feels like a way more educational process. I’m kind of a stubborn and annoying student I think, so I did learn a lot but I just love to argue with my teachers.

The project, Mechatok, I mean it is pretty much like an audio-visual project. I have a lot of visual collaborators, but I still do the art direction of all the visuals and a lot of the graphic design is my own. I always view it as a visual project as much as a musical one, I mean for the new record we did five music videos. Both things emerge at the same time so I’ll make the music while I make the visuals. And there’s always movies running on screens while I’m making music. So it really goes hand in hand.