mixmag germany
Becoming visible
The decision to step forward as HANAA did not arrive as a rup- ture, but as a settling. A mo- ment where the need to prove, to disguise, to protect, quietly loosened its grip. For a long time, confidence had been something external, something to be lear- ned by watching others. “I was younger, still discovering who I was, and I needed time to grow into myself without pressure,” she reflects. That time unfol- ded without urgency, marked by patience rather than haste. It was spent experimenting, mis- judging, circling the same ideas repeatedly, not to perfect them, but to understand what honesty might actually sound like in her hands.
What emerged was not a new identity, but alignment. Using her birth name became a way of removing distance between the music and the person making it.
“I feel more present in my music, more comfortable taking spa- ce,” she says. There is no sense of arrival in the way she frames it, only continuity. Music, for HANAA, remains a lifelong pro- cess without resolution. The absence of a finish line is not in- timidating. It is freeing. “I’m still learning, still evolving, and I hope I never stop.”
Her relationship with sound was shaped long before clubs or studios entered the picture. Growing up in a heavily restricted home environment and then going into foster care, adaptation became second nature. There was no single defining incident, only a persis- tent demand to reshape herself to fit circumstances she did not choose. “Very early on in life, I learned how to disappear,” she says, without dramatization. At her mother’s home, leaving the house was not a given. Social life narrowed. Silence filled the gaps.
Music slipped into that silen- ce as refuge. Not immediately, not all at once, but gradually. It became the one place where
presence was possible without explanation. “Music allowed me to exist without performing that role,” she says. Without having to justify herself. Without beco- ming someone else for safety. Even now, she doesn’t describe the act of making music as invention. It feels closer
to
returning. A quiet reconnection with something that was always there, waiting.
As a teenager, escape rarely meant distance. It meant motion.
The simple act of
sitting in a car, even for mun- dane errands, carried emotional weight. “For me, it was a feeling of freedom,” she recalls. Elec- tronic music amplified that sensation. Where life felt frozen, rhythm suggested progress. Repetition became grounding rather than restrictive. The pulse implied
that time was moving forward.
What mattered just as much was the absence of judgment. “There were no lyrics telling me how to feel,” she says. No narrative demanding interpretation. Only texture, tension, release. That openness allowed her to project her
own emotions without
contradiction. During darker periods at home, those feelings extended into shared moments with her
sister, watching
festival broadcasts on television. Vast crowds, synchronised movement, a distant sense of collective release. “You could belong simply by feeling the same rhythm.”
Electronic music offered struc- ture without confinement. It taught her that transformation does not always require es- cape, that change can occur internally, even when the su- rroundings remain unchanged. That lesson still shapes her work today. The music she makes now is built as a space to step into, to breathe inside, to hold onto when nothing else feels stable. Not a solution. A companion.
still
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