La Steff is a Berlin-based sound artist, composer and audio producer. Her work moves between field recording, experimental percussion, synthesizers, voice and electronic processing – molding sound directly into an artistic collage between noise and silence, rhythm and texture, documentation and abstraction, intention and chance.
„I am interested in what happens between perception and interpretation — and in creating sonic situations in which that space becomes tangible.“
Foto: Manuel Carbone
For more than 20 years, she has worked professionally with sound as an audio journalist, producer and storyteller, recording voices, environments and situations across radio and digital media. Today, she is shifting this documentary practice towards sound art: asking what happens when recorded reality no longer needs to represent or explain something, but can become sound in its own right.
„In documentary audio, however, recorded sound generally serves a communicative function: it documents a situation, carries information, establishes atmosphere or supports a narrative. My artistic practice begins at the point where this function can be suspended. What happens when a recorded sound no longer has to represent anything?„
La Steff guides her soundscapes through a world of dark ambient, drone, and fractured textures, transforming her ongoing exploration of Musique concrète into sonic statements. Her current practice explores phonography, embodied rhythm and aleatoric processes as tools for creating open-ended sonic compositions and performances. Her background in sociology adds an interest in social space, cultural practices and the ways places are experienced through listening.
In August 2026, an exclusive self-sampling piece based on original field recordings and electronic processing was presented on ROVR.live.
Alongside her solo work as La Steff, she collaborates. At the end of August 2026, she performed aleatoric pieces accompanied by vocals and live percussion with Schuld & Scham at Studio dB/Berlin, funded by Musicboard Berlin.
Schuld & Scham is a project by La Steff and Polypixa – writer, sound artist, painter. Their work emerge from sound fragments both of them develop intuitively in spontaneous interplay, while voice shifts between clarity and fracture, dissolving words and sentences along the way. Then they assemble and mélange these sceneries into disruptive soundscapes between Berlin and Cologne – fluid patterns and raw textures. Their first piece „chuchuu“ had its radio premiere in April 2026 on byte.fm and was featured on ROVR.live end of June 2026.
Fotos: Borderless Creatures / Shirin Sheybanizadeh, Mani Shahhoseini