After decades spent immersed in house, techno and rave culture, Steffi returns with her fifth solo studio album, Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising. Drawing on a lifetime of influences spanning Detroit, Chicago, New York, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Berlin, Belgium and Italy, the album reflects the depth of experience that has shaped her approach to electronic music.
Across nine tracks selected from more than 40 pieces of music, Steffi brings together potent drum programming, ethereal pads, strings, melodies and direct club-focused grooves. Following her 2025 collaboration with Virginia, Patterns Of Vibration, the new album places the energy of the dance floor at its centre, exploring the connection, euphoria and sense of togetherness that have remained central to rave culture across generations.
With Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising, Steffi turns years of musical experience into a deeply personal expression of the dance floor, carrying the energy of rave culture into the present while leaving space for listeners to find their own meaning in the music.
Your new album “Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising” draws from decades of your experience with house, techno and rave culture. When you first started working on the album, was there a particular feeling, sound or moment that you wanted to capture?
My 3rd and 4th solo albums were both ‘broken’ beats oriented and did not really contain any four to the floor stuff as I really had to explore this genre for quite a while as my roots in DJing (believe it or not) started in electro IDM and breakbeat in the early/mid 90s so for me that was an important phase.
However over the last 20 plus years I have been much more straight up dancefloor oriented with my DJ sets and lately I really felt I needed to return to writing for the dancefloor and bring in all my years of listening to electronic music since the late 80s into this project.
So from a perspective of a young raver and from a perspective of 30 years plus of DJing.
You describe the “Feel Factor” as the moment when the DJ, the music and the dancers connect on the same wavelength. How do you translate something so instinctive and physical into music when you are working in the studio?
There isn’t so much a difference between standing on the dancefloor, standing behind a DJ booth or being in the studio, it’s the way I perceive music, the way I connect music and the way I live music.
It’s all the same for me and I really draw my energy from that feeling and nothing else around it. I am locked in and can check in to that energy every time I want to.
You created more than 40 tracks during the process and eventually narrowed them down to nine. You also shared some of the music with trusted friends before the album was completed, which was a first for you. What made you approach the process differently this time, and how did their feedback affect the final album?
The making of this album felt like a nice bubble like hanging out with good people in your virtual living room.
Bouncing stuff up and down for a short feedback is something I rarely do but through my record labels I have gathered a lot of like-minded music heads around me that write from the heart and soul and are on the same wavelength so there is a fun communication with this crew about tracks we love and artists we appreciate and it opened up something for me during the process of this album.
It was actually really fun sharing my ideas to a few close people around me. It did not change anything in regards to what I wrote or how I wrote it but it was nice to have some people on the side supporting this process.
Your 2025 album “Patterns Of Vibration” with Virginia reminded you of the positivity and simplicity of the club experience. Did that project change or influence the way you approached this solo album?
Yes totally as through writing Patterns of Vibration I found my way back to the dancefloor and realized how much fun it is to write for the floor. Also through playing some really fun live shows with Virginia I was able to stay in that mood and vibe off it for this next album.
Music and the music industry has become pretty generic lately and for me it’s more important than ever to focus on positivity and joy in music rather than focus on formula and success. Writing from the heart and roll it out no matter what the outcome is.
After experiencing rave and club culture across several generations, from the late ’80s to today, what do you think has remained essential about the dance floor through all these changes, and what do you hope listeners take away from this album?
Music with a good melody leaves a great memory!
Every day fantastic music keeps being written and it’s the DJs’ role to shine the light on that. Deeply search for these tracks and make an effort to bring this to the dancefloor and leave your ego at home.
The listener is allowed to take away whatever they feel they wanna take, it’s not up to me to define that, if they enjoy it, that’s great. Life is simple!
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Photos by @stephan.redel
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