By Carla-Isabella Dunger
Stephanie Blum works as a DJ under the artist name [Blu.m], but as a sound engineer, she says most people just call her Pippa.
At the start of our talk, she walks into the room, claps, and listens. Anyone who works in sound will know what she’s doing: she’s testing the acoustics of the space.
She was “Head of Sound” at Garbicz festival in Poland for three years (though she is not involved in this year’s event) and has spent years working at clubs across Berlin, including Berghain, ELSE, Renate, and others.
Sound techs are the unsung heroes of club culture: Few ever get publicly recognised for their work, yet they are essential to any event where music happens.
Because of this, I want to understand her job better, along with her personal connection to it. How did she come to do this and, above all, what does it mean to her to do this work as a woman?
First, how did you get started?
“Well, my first job was at a record label, a subsidiary of Universal,” Pippa says.
“I was always music-mad. Then I went into film. I was a producer, and I have my own film production company. Then I brought sound in along with it.”
At one point, she studied law, but for 15 years, film was her primary focus. She worked mostly through her production company, Triple Beat Productions, which she still runs.
Pippa was executive producer and writer of the film Gegengerade (2011), a high-intensity drama about the complex relationships that can be created and destroyed at a heated football match (you can watch the trailer here). She also produced the short film Sores & Sîrîn, about Kurdish siblings who grow up as war refugees with a foster mother in Hamburg until a fateful day when a relative comes to take them back to their home country, dividing them and challenging their ideas of home.
The film won multiple prizes at festivals across Europe and was shortlisted for an award at the 2009 Oscars.
She worked in television, too: “I did the first season of Die Toten von Marnow, but then realised TV is not for me. Though I did a hell of a lot of work on the scripts, and we got great mentions for it.”
Eventually, film and TV stopped feeling like her passion. “I had the feeling I wasn’t making the films I’d actually wanted to make anymore,” she recalls. “I’ve made many films that I genuinely love and am proud of, but at some point, that changed.”
Music pulled her back.
“I really thought, for the first time: What is the thing I find genuinely great? I kept coming back to music.”
She retrained as a sound engineer. “I only did my formal training in 2019,” she tells me. “I was in my mid-to-late thirties, so this was a big career pivot.”
Can you explain to readers what a sound engineer does?
“I’m mainly in club and festival sound, so live sound, though I really love the studio.” Most of the work, Pippa says, happens before the party begins.
“You come in during the day, prep the club, check if there’s a live act, check if the equipment they need has been delivered. And you do a soundcheck with them.”
“Ideally, you take the sound the artist wants and match it to the club, and you work it out with them. At that point, I often make small corrections because I know how differently it will sound later, when the room’s full.”
The cliché she keeps having to dismantle is the figure hunched over a desk all night.
“People always ask, where’s your mixing desk? Basically the system’s already set up, and there’s not much point fiddling unless something actually needs to be done.”
She adds: “For a sound tech, the real work is the preparation. The night is just where it shows.”
I must look confused, because she clarifies: “We do correct the sound during club nights, but we are not constantly on a console, more likely on an iPad on the floor. By ‘fiddling’ I meant ‘fiddling around.’ I am not a fan of engineers fiddling with systems just to fiddle. I see that all the time, especially when the night gets long and capacity of hearing lowers. It doesn’t make the music better. I believe that very subtle adjustments are best and only if needed!”
Her biggest passion lies in turntables. “That’s why I started the masterclasses at the SAE Institute. It’s actually kind of rare that sound engineers know how to set up a turntable. But if the turntables don’t work, it’s bad for everyone.”
For a vinyl DJ, she says, a wonky vinyl deck is “the horror.”
What makes good sound?
“You don’t hear good sound. You feel it. I’m not in some loudness war where everything has to blast your body apart.”
I ask more about this, and Pippa drops another great line:
“You can step into the music. If you keep noticing that you are hearing it, or you keep clocking things, some percussion knocking your ear off, that’s not good sound.”
Being a good sound tech is also about forming brief relationships with artists. “As a DJ, I’d expect everything to work when I turn up, so I can deal with my tracks, not the sound,” she says. “As a sound engineer, I expect the DJ to trust me that I can judge when it sounds bad out on the floor.”
This informs how she starts a night: “I go to the DJs and have a quick word. I tell them they don’t have to worry about anything, I’ll give them feedback if something’s up. Taking that pressure off them, since dealing with sound isn’t really their job, is one reason why I’ve never had problems.”
And she’s blunt when she needs to be.
“I believe in giving trust and room to breathe. If you keep playing in the red, it just sounds like shit. And I’ll say so.” She says she rarely sees sound engineers giving DJs more headroom, but “headroom is essential for everything, better sound, trust, more air.”
“I feel like I trust them and they trust me. I have literally never had a major problem with an artist. It’s all very simple in the end.”
How did your first sound job end up being at Berghain?
It came, she says, “through contacts and through proving myself.” And what about the mythos of Berghain? It is, after all, one of the most legendary and talked-about clubs in the world.
“Berghain is cool, but not because it’s famous. It’s cool because it’s such an insane sound system in such a difficult space. High, bare, echoing walls. For sound, that’s typically everything you don’t want.”
She’s not drawn to the mystique. “I never saw Berghain as this hype place and never went in thinking my job has to be there. Beyond its fame, there are so many more reasons why I love this place.”
She smiles: “I just went yesterday and it’s as if I’ve never left.”
What does “head of sound” mean at a music festival?
“When I began at Garbicz, the festival had a bigger live stage than they’d done before, and they asked if I could do it,” she says. “Then, as it developed, I became the head of sound for the whole festival. Basically it’s good planning and a lot of preparation.”
Some details: “I read around 600 riders per festival. I know every cable, which keyboard goes where.”
She goes on: “I picked the suppliers, I made the calls, I could decide to try something new or stick with what was tried and tested. And that’s the really cool part, because I can create more of the sound myself. In other places, I was never the one setting the systems up from scratch.”
Besides knowledge of sound systems, are there any festival-specific skills someone needs to do this job?
Laughing, she says it can be done by “whoever can break down call sheets can keep the overview of nine stages and five festival days. And of course you need to know your sounds.”
I tell her it sounds exhausting. She smiles:
“I know what it’s like to be thrown in the deep end and nobody gives you the information you need. I don’t want anyone else to live through that.”
After we talks through the logistics, I uncover a driving reason for why she does it.
“When the festival is running, under the open sky, it’s a completely different feeling. Look, my arm hair stands up just talking about it. It’s electric.”
What does it mean to be a woman working as a sound engineer?
She started in her late 30s, a woman changing to a new career in a man-dominant field.
“When I come in somewhere, I check the situation, and half-consciously I notice how I’m being perceived,” Pippa tells me.
“It has a lot to do with posture and positioning. In our job you have to make yourself upright, or it can get difficult. If I sense an unprofessional vibe, I don’t talk much, I get very concrete, it’s only about the work.”
What she says sounds painfully familiar to me, and to the other women I’ve spoken to working in nightlife: “You have to prove yourself massively. Guys say things like: ‘You’re not even lesbian, so we could’ve been something.'”
“I don’t want to be spoken to as a woman. I want to be spoken to as a sound engineer.”
Does a system of rank and hierarchy—earning a title like “head of sound”—help?
“I do not value rank and hierarchy at all. That’s a big thing that can make life harder for beginners and female-read people. I firmly believe that ranks do not matter and that every opinion is worth the same.”
She tells me that titles like “head of sound,” or being “executive producer,” do give her the opportunity to wield a higher degree of control and power, but “everyone should be treated the same and respectfully.”
“I take people working for me aside and talk them and ask them to join in a free and fearless environment. One time I did this and a guy started crying. It felt like all the pressure fell off him at once.”
That proved, in her mind, the need to create “gute Fehlerkultur” (good error culture), an environment where people feel safe owning up to things that go wrong without fear of blame or humiliation, which lets the group improve and take creative risks.
“When I became the head of sound, things changed. I’ve now got a standing, and also, at my age, I don’t take shit anymore.”
Age, though, seems to never stop being a factor. When she works with people older than her, they “repeatedly” ask her age until she tells them (44, as of this writing), and then “I slot back into their prey scheme. Then they come closer: oh, I live nearby, I could pop by. And I shut it down, immediately go into super-professional mode.”
“My law background helps,” she says. “I’m good at differentiated thinking. I block it out.”
How do you respond when someone crosses a line?
“Years ago, I got invited to a dinner, supposedly professional. It was supposedly about a grant,” she says. “But then I thought, wait, who else is on this commission? So I wrote them an email and figured it out.”
Pippa has developed a relationship with her fear, she says. “It’s the part to dismantle first. Work the problem through completely. Think about the very worst that could come. Mostly it’s not so bad you can’t handle it.”
Staying in the room has become, in her words, a “principle.”
“I can’t just let them get away with it, because then it happens to the next person. At some point, they can see it on you, that you can’t be messed with. You gain your own stability.”
What advice would you give the next generation of women working in nightlife?
She has faith in the younger generation, which is why she likes teaching.
“Your learning curve is so much bigger when you don’t start from zero.” Schools, she says, only teach studio sound and what she calls “little club” sound. “So then, in a big club, you’re the muppet who supposedly knows nothing. I want to spare everyone that.”
Her advice is blunt: “People who read as female are more hesitant, more scared of mistakes. But the boys race to the faders, even though they often know far less about what a certain button does. So I always say: ask questions. The ones who don’t know are the ones who don’t ask.”
And: “You don’t get booked if no one knows you. Be present.”
The way forward, she feels, is shared—not just all-women initiatives, parties, and collectives, but also working with men. “We should take up the space, but not overrun anyone. We should do it together.”
As an aside, she tells me she has to give a “shoutout” to someone named Peter. “He’s my buddy,” she says. “Just knowing there are male-read people who’ll simply talk sound with me. That alone was the best foundation.”
She goes on: “You might have lived nine out of ten situations badly, but there’s a tenth person who’s different. Teaming up with good people like that strengthens you. Especially for female-read people, non-binary people, and any marginalised groups.”
That toxic bro culture in music is real.
Pippa nods. “If I notice two boys already half-begging for their space, I watch quite amazed and feel a bit sorry for them.”
“It’s sad. Those male macho power struggles genuinely hurt to watch. They make me feel uncomfortable and second-hand embarrassed.”
I hear you’re taking a step back from being Head of Sound at Garbicz this year. Why?
“This year I’m not working on Garbicz, I’m just playing a DJ set!” she says. “I stepped back from my usual role this year because of other commitments.”
There is another, secret, new project in the works that she says can’t be public yet, but: “It also just felt like the time for a new challenge. That’s very much in my nature, as you’ve probably noticed.”
I have. Pippa AKA [blu.m]., a sound engineer, film producer, and artist, refused to be contained, and there’s no limit to what’s next.
Pippa AKA [blu.m] is a sound engineer and founder of Triple Beat Productions. Follow her on Instagram and catch her DJ set at the 2026 Garbicz music festival.
Carla-Isabella Dunger is a writer at Hinterhaus, a subculture worker, and a music and culture journalist whose work centers on FLINTA* visibility within the scene. She is a co-founder of the FLINTA* Roundtable, organizes events at Golden Pudel Club, and is also active as a DJ. Follow her on Instagram.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Edits: Alexander Cheves
Images: Mara Menzel, with additional images courtesy of the artist
