Part 1

Name: AOIFE
Nationality: Irish
Occupation: DJ, producer
Current release: AOIFE's debut EP, Attrition, featuring remixes by Anna Kost and RVDMNTL, is out via Incense.  

If you enjoyed this AOIFE interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her on Instagram.   



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in DJing? How and when did you start DJing?

I never really considered DJing until I went to university.

I’d always been involved in electronic music in some capacity and had been putting on parties and events from when I was about 16. When I moved to Newcastle for university, I became really involved with Ape-X, who were running parties there, and I had friends around me who were DJing who eventually showed me how. House party culture probably developed it more than anything.

Weirdly, I never really enjoyed house parties, I found them quite anxiety-inducing and I started finding kind of a solace beside the decks instead. It gave me somewhere to be and something to focus on.

I’d played in a bar once, but my first proper club gig came in 2021 at an Ape-X x Jaunt party at Digital in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Nina Kraviz was supposed to headline but couldn’t make it because of visa issues, so my friend Kieran Costello and I ended up taking over her slot to a packed Digital.

It was a pretty ridiculous way to properly start DJing.

Today, DJs are rarely just DJs. Very often, they can be producers who are also DJs or DJs who are also producers. Where do you see yourself on this spectrum and what kind of potential issues and cross-pollinations does this create?

I came to production through DJing, and I think you can hear that in the way I make music sometimes to my detriment.

I can approach a track almost as though I’m DJing, bringing in each new element as if I’m bringing in another record. It can make things interesting, but it can also make me massively overcomplicate a production. That’s something I’m consciously trying to move away from.

At the same time, having quite an in-depth emotional attachment to both means they give me two very different things. Production is a much more internal process. I can sit down alone and carve something out creatively without having to respond to anything happening around me.

DJing is almost the opposite. When it works, I’m locked into and reflecting the energy being created around me. What I play can depend completely on my mood, what’s happening in the room and what’s happening to me at that particular time.

I think the cross-pollination between the two is interesting because one is teaching me to look inward while the other is inherently reactive.

The path to becoming a producer is a process – but are there defining moments that have been particularly important for you?

I don’t think there was one defining moment for me. It has been much more gradual, and I still see it as an ever-learning process.

Something that is important to me is respect. I’m not particularly interested in making something because I think it will be popular; I want to develop a sound that feels like my own. Over the last year especially, around releasing “EX-Wife Material” and then making Attrition, I started to feel that happening.



A few close friends and other producers whose opinions I really respect started saying independently that they could recognise my sound when I showed them new music. I’d begun noticing it myself too but having other people recognise that without being prompted was quite significant. It made me realise that there was a thread developing naturally through what I was making.

I don’t think I’ve arrived at anything final, though. Hopefully it keeps developing.

When digging, what are you looking for? Is the process all about taste for you, or is it about “going beyond taste?”

I have loads of different ways of digging. Bandcamp, Discogs, record shops, radio, recommendations, tracklists. I also have absolutely no shame about Shazaming something if I hear it in a club or a mix. Usually, one thing becomes the starting point and I’ll just keep following it further.

I don’t really dig according to genre. I’m looking for something that resonates with me and there tends to be a sonic thread even when the music itself is quite different. I like weird noises, bleeps, strange modulating and lots of panning / lfos. Sub-bass is a massive thing for me too. There’s usually some element of darkness too.

Even if something is groovier or more house oriented, I tend to gravitate towards music that still has something slightly darker underneath it.

Is there still listening outside of looking for music for your next sets? What do you listen to and does it influence your performances?

Definitely. I really love listening to the radio as a way of finding music and just keeping myself cultured and inspired. I listen to BBC Radio 6 & NTS a lot because you get electronic and dance music but also all these alternative spaces around it.

Outside of that I listen to a bit of everything; indie, rock, metal, post-punk, classical music, pop, neo-soul. I came from a classical background and used to be a classical singer, so I think that has probably stayed with me in ways I don’t consciously think about.

I was able to sing by ear, and I think that affects the way I play music now more than necessarily determining what I listen to. I can recognise pitch and keys quite intuitively without needing to rely heavily on tools, which becomes useful when I’m DJing and trying to make two things work together that perhaps shouldn’t obviously work.

From the earliest sketches to the finished piece, tell me about the production process for the Attrition EP.

Attrition has five tracks: three originals and two remixes of the opening track, “Seldom.”

“Seldom” actually began as a sketch a few years ago. I can’t even really remember exactly how I started it, although it always had that name, so I must have been going through something at the time haha.



The version on the EP really developed over the last six months or so. When the label reached out about doing an EP, I gave them a library of previous unreleased productions to choose from and “Seldom” was one of the tracks they picked.

Going back into it after that amount of time was interesting because I’d developed quite a lot as a producer. I rebuilt and developed the bassline and subs, which have become a much more identifiable part of my sound and worked a lot more with returns. That’s been a big development for me, moving away from just putting more ‘static’ effects on individual chains and using returns over and over to make sounds interact and give everything a much more three-dimensional feeling.

“Obliteration” was much more immediate and emotional. I remember I was making it while Len Faki was playing at Berghain really wishing I was there lol so I guess it’s a reference to Obliteration of the Berghain, although, at the same time I was going through something personally that had left me feeling quite angry and sad, so the name “Obliteration” felt fitting.



[Read our Len Faki interview]

The track itself came together in quite a chaotic way. I was using sequencers and chopping up audio recordings to create this slightly dubstep-influenced feeling, basically making loads of things accidentally and then piecing them together.

At one point I hadn’t even introduced a kick for the first two-and-a-half or three minutes, and the original version ended up being about nine minutes long.

There were these siren-like sounds that I kept worrying were becoming a bit cheesy, so part of the process became finding ways to make them harmonise and sit together without losing the strangeness of them. In hindsight, I think that slightly chaotic process suited where my head was at when I made it.

Then there’s “Belladore,” which sounds quite sad but has a slightly ridiculous origin to the title.



It’s named in homage to our childhood Russian dwarf hamsters, Bella and Theodore, who subsequently ended up eating each other. Bella + Theodore became “Belladore. “Quite dark yet almost romantic in hindsight? Or maybe I’m mad haha.

Musically, I made a few of the pads in Wavetable and it became the first track where I felt like I was consciously making something close to the music I actually want to make and listen to, rather than arriving there almost completely by accident. I’m proud of that one and I don’t really care what anyone has to say on it.

What’s your preferred and most intuitive way of making music?

When it comes to it, everything so far is quite simple. Everything is in Ableton. I don’t use many plugins, if any maybe the odd filter and mostly work with what Ableton already gives. Give me a decent screen, a mouse and a comfortable chair and I’m happy.

I can work from my laptop and I quite like being able to work on the go, but I tend to need to get the entire idea or sketch of a track down in one sitting. I find it much harder to keep going backwards and forwards at the initial stage.

The downside is that I have a tendency to race through the fundamentals because I want to get to the fun part where I’m making weird noises. Then the fundamental elements change later and suddenly I have to go back and fix everything around them.

I’m consciously trying to become more patient with that, spending longer getting the core of something right before disappearing down all the strange little avenues around it.