Wallis' quest for new sounds and new horizons

“My music never sounds the same, each EP is a reflection of the equipment I’m using at the minute, how I’m feeling, what I’m finding interesting. What I feel this EP does for me, it showcases a real level up in my skills,” begins Lisbon-based French DJ Wallis. Having established her credentials in techno over the last few years, every new project of hers has felt like a new leap, a new creative itch that has been scratched.

The latest being her UTIL 07 EP, a technical achievement that wrestles with personal change, embracing both melancholic and club-ready tracks that feel like you’re being fired through a fibre cable.

The new project brought some firsts when it came to mixing and recording. “Normally, a mastering engineer gives you a little feedback, says ‘you have a little resonance here, maybe you could take that down in the mix’ or something like that. This was the first time the mastering engineer said ‘Wow, amazing mix downs’. That was really flattering, I’m always trying to get better and better, and it was testimony that I actually got somewhere.”

Wallis’ love for new hardware is one of the key ways in which she pushes forward her artistry. Initially finding her way to Ableton at around 18, she soon came to find that too much time spent looking at a screen became “a bit boring”, soon figuring that machinery was the way forward instead. “On the machines I can do stuff that you could never do on a computer, and it became something I could spend afternoons on. I do use a lot of plugins, but there’s stuff that good hardware units do that plugins never could.”

And, she has come to be obsessive about gear. Over the course of a year she spent time buying samplers and sending them back in order to find the “dream sampler”. And when she isn’t on such a quest, Wallis will be pouring through Reddit threads. When in Berlin, she’d visit stores like Schneidersladen, a treasure trove for electronic music enthusiasts. 

This need to keep on tinkering has manifested itself differently on each EP Wallis has released. Take the scratching, skittish textures from ‘This Is Me Joining You’ from the Away EP, or the faster-tempo upbeat dubs found on the Goodbye Berlin EP.

UTIL 07 takes advantage of a new part of the Wallis arsenal. “For this EP, I have a new Summing mixer which is from Neve. Each track goes into a different channel in the mixer and then I re-record everything into one file in Ableton. So, the addition of the tracks isn’t done in the computer, it’s done in the machine and I think that just makes it sound amazing,” Wallis says.

She has always been drawn to “weirder” sounds within electronic music, and admits that sometimes, when left to her own devices, she has “overcomplicated” the mix. Trying to find the balance between stranger sounds whilst retaining relatability is one she’s still striving to achieve. Plus, there’s the added factor that commercialisation doesn’t tend to reward sounds that are edging towards outside of the box. So, whilst the factor of capital isn’t something that Wallis considers whilst recording, it does play a part in the packaging of any new record.

“Obviously they [labels] want to make money or at least break even so that the recording costs are covered. I think on all EPs there’s going to be two that are more DJ-friendly ones and maybe two that are a bit more experimental.”

Image credit: Rui Palma

And, experimental sounds need to be encouraged more in scenes such as techno where over the last few years, higher BPMs have become more of a norm. “I feel the techno scene is very conservative. They want one type of techno, and anybody steps out and they’re like, ‘Oh no no no, what are you doing?’ I think when people stepped out in 2018/19 that ended up creating the hard techno of 2022 or 2023. Now, everyone’s like, let’s strip it back down or take no risks because something terrible happened last time. Techno doesn’t really want to change.”

Risk-aversion is surely a creative antithesis; those who want to commit to a sense of artistry may be influenced by what has gone before, but usually do their own spin, something which feels unique to the self. Perhaps the fact that it’s such a meme now that anyone can be a DJ is creating an oversaturated market where it can be harder for new sounds to be heard.

“I think when you listen to stuff from 2011, 2010, YouTube tutorials weren’t a big thing. So, if you wanted to learn, you had to be really dedicated. Right now, there’s a lot of people who look at tutorials and do the same thing, they don’t make it a priority to put their own personality on it. They want to release a track, they’re not thinking ‘I want to make a piece of music.’”

And who better to quote on the matter of soul and heart in electronic music than Björk? “I love the quote where she says, ‘people tell me that electronic music doesn’t have a soul, if there’s no soul, that’s because no one put it there’.” Wallis says that being a DJ is more accessible than ever; anyone can do it. Production is where people set themselves apart, where the artistry starts to blossom. 

Image credit: Rui Palma

There have been some incredible female techno artists over the last few decades, but recent years have seen a boom of new female DJs in the scene. For example, take Kelly Lee Owens’ ‘Girls Love Techno’ slogan, which has been plastered on t-shirts. Women more frequently pop up on lineups, but in Wallis’ experiences, there’s plenty more to be done before women are on an equal footing to their male counterparts.

“You arrive in the club and the team has no context of who you are. If you arrive and you’re a guy, you start with 100% opinion. But, if you’re a woman you start at 0% and have to prove yourself in some ways.” She would often go to male-dominated workshops surrounding different equipment and sometimes be questioned about whether she even cared enough to be there. Even if there aren't directly hostile actions, these types of dismissive male attitudes are a prevailing type of sexism within the music industry.

“Sometimes, meeting big US promoters, I’ll be there, so is a DJ that they’ve booked. There is his tour manager there who they haven’t heard about and me who they haven’t heard about. They say hello to the tour manager and they shake my hand and don’t look me in the eyes. You do have that hostility in some rooms of ‘you’re just a girl, I’m not going to ask you what you do, I don’t care.’”

The last few years have seen Wallis embrace new changes in her life; she left Berlin after about a decade in the city, with the experience captured within the Goodbye Berlin EP. Then there was a return to Paris before she decided to move to Lisbon. It has a different sense of creativity and lifestyle compared to Berlin. “Lisbon is a very interesting city, there’s a creative energy you don’t necessarily have in Berlin. Everything in Berlin is established, if you want an event, you find a club that already exists and you get a yes or a no. In Lisbon, everything is created from the ground up, everyone’s always motivated and if you want someone to collaborate on an artistic project, you find people really fast.”

Wallis was in need of cultural change. Not only can Lisbon provide greater warmth, but it has also given her more of a sense of home. Ultimately, despite the amount of time spent there, Berlin never quite felt that way. Both professionally and personally, changes were needed. In our algorithm-dominated lives, screen time has a huge impact on our daily wellbeing. The initial promise of social media was connection, something that is very possible on the litany of spaces available, but over time, these platforms have been key components of polarisation. Just take a look down your reels and you’ll very easily find videos of children being blown up, politicians spewing dangerous rhetoric and AI slop.

Is this constant deluge of information and content really supposed to bring us closer together? “You’re scrolling and you see something about a war, a terrible video, it makes you sad. Then you see a funny video, you laugh, you see a cute puppy, you cry and you go on this loop of emotions. I don’t think the human brain is made for that, it’s draining and all your other tasks, you put them to the side, you procrastinate,” Wallis says. 

Subsequently, she has stepped back a bit from social media, having Instagram on an old phone with no SIM card, and she is trying to reduce the amount of doomscrolling she’s doing. Only time will tell if that does end up making a genuine difference to her wellbeing. But it’s just one part of this great period of change. A huge positive has been her gaming streams over the past few months.

Usually posting on her story, she has been playing games such as Arc Raiders and Helldivers 2 with her followers. It’s a much-needed new space for connection, and a place to switch off. “Gaming is a place where the world no longer exists. I’m in a weird universe and I’m just doing silly things. You’re not thinking ‘will this get likes or does it fit well on my feed’? We’ve got to know a lot of people from the UK, Turkey, and a lot of countries. It’s really fun, you’re on chat together and you get to know people in a weirdly intimate way.”

Nothing reflects where Wallis is right now more than the UTIL 07 EP. The song titles alone tell a story of connection, a sense of stability when someone has come into your life. Now, more than ever, she is able to prioritise what matters to her. “The older you get, the smarter you get. There are little things that were not important earlier in my life, that now I do want. Peace and quiet, an easy life, and I try to avoid unnecessary stress.”

The EP’s closing track ‘in the beginning was u and i’ feels close to the listener; a melancholic feeling presides over it. It’s as if you’re falling endlessly into a monochromatic world, where everything crumbles around you. The synthesisers oscillate and crunch satisfyingly. It’s a phenomenal piece of world-building that feels deftly unique. There’s somehow a great sense of reassurance in melancholia; perhaps it's reassuring that no one is alone in these feelings. “I think it’s my favourite, it’s not a DJ-friendly one, but for me it’s the most personal and special one. It’s a year and a half old but I only made the vocals here in Lisbon, I needed to add even more melancholy.”

UTIL 07 signifies not only Wallis’ budding quest to learn more and more about production and who she is as an artist, but the distinct changes that she’s enacted in her life recently. It’s a mirror to the personal and the professional, and a vital stepping stone in an exploratory, creative journey.

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