Nene H’s Primal Techno Rebirth on Second Skin

The first thing you notice on Second Skin, the sophomore album by Nene H, is how the vocals sound like transmissions from a parallel reality – wordless disembodied fragments floating freely in the ether. In contrast, the production is solid and decidedly corporeal, with bone-crushing industrial synths and darkly pulsing percussion. It’s all a little hauntological, ancient ghosts lurking in the heart of the techno-machine.

“[The voice] is the incoherent part in the coherent story,” she says, speaking over Zoom from her living room in Berlin, delighted that I’ve picked up on the sonic dichotomy. “It’s like me searching for myself.” 

She’s been searching for a long time. The Istanbul-born, Berlin-based DJ and producer has been making music under the Nene H moniker for over a decade, slowly refining her sound over a steady stream of releases and performances, culminating in 2021 debut album Ali. A tribute to her late father, Ali is a meisterwerk of funereal techno, its dissonant electronics sitting comfortably alongside Middle-Eastern modalities and eerie FX-laden vocals in Turkish and German. 

Second Skin is the record that comes after – after grief, after the demise of a long-term relationship, after burnout from years of conforming to the expectations of club bookers and festival organizers. It is, she says, the sound of her finally finding her authentic, liberated self. 

“The first skin was the one I wore while trying to be someone else, the person I was expected to be, and epically failing at it,” she says. “Second Skin is me just owning who I am, without fighting it.”

Nene H grew up as Beste Aydin, a young girl from a middle-class Turkish Muslim family in Izmir. Music was ever-present – her mother would always be singing, her Azerbaijani-origin father often accompanying on the accordion or xylophone. Family gatherings would inevitably turn into impromptu concerts, aunts, uncles and cousins all pitching in. 

“Everybody has an instrument in their hand, everybody is talented,” she remembers. “It’s just being in music, but in a very natural way, you know?” 

Aydin’s first instrument was the accordion. But when she was ten, a chance encounter with an elderly friend of her grandparents led to her falling in love with the piano. A year later, aged 11, she was accepted into the Izmir State Conservatory to train as a classical pianist. Despite some initial resistance from her parents – they wanted her to become a doctor – Aydin threw herself into her musical education, developing a relentless work ethic, practicing “like crazy” every day.

“I guess when something is unreachable, or not allowed, you make it bigger in your head,” she says. “Music became a sort of rebellion, and maybe that’s part of the reason I got so hyper-focused on it.” 

At 20, she received a scholarship to attend music school in Stuttgart, where she spent six years, graduating with a master’s degree in classical piano. It was a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, she was ecstatic at being recognized as a talented pianist, someone good enough to be accepted by a prestigious European conservatory. But she was also very aware that as a Turkish Muslim woman, she didn’t quite fit in. She remembers one professor asking her if she ate on the floor.

“I experienced all these things but I didn’t really know how to name them,” she says. “Years later, I was like ah, that was racism. But at the time, it just felt really weird. I felt like I was less than, that I had to work extra hard to prove myself.” 

The bigger problem was what she saw as the elitism and narrow-mindedness of the classical music scene. She found it stuffy, too bound by rigid conventions, unable to countenance any perspectives other than its own. Spending eight hours a day practicing just to play music written by old, white, dead men was so emotionally sapping that she eventually began to hate what she was doing. 

“For the last ten years, I’ve been trying to decolonize myself from [that way of thinking],” she says. “I’m trying to go back to how I felt when I was a child, when I was really connected to music from the heart.”

Aydin had already begun experimenting with electronic music composition and production while finishing her studies in Stuttgart. But it was when she moved to Berlin, aged 26, that she really dove head-first into club music.

Her first proper club music experience, fittingly, was at Berghain, with a friend who had come to visit from Turkey. It was life-changing, offering her something the conservatory never had – a kind of musical honesty that couldn’t be faked or rehearsed. “In the club, you have this really pure human experience of being with the music, and being surrounded by people feeling the same way you’re feeling in that moment,” she says. “It’s so primal.”

She lingers on that last word. Primal – not in the sense of something crude or unsophisticated, but something pre-verbal, closer to instinct than intellect. After years spent following notations and adhering to form, the club presents a different logic altogether – one where the body leads, where meaning is produced collectively, in real time.

“You can’t lie about it, you can’t run away from it or twist it,” she says. “You either feel it or you don’t.” 

After that first experience she kept going back, often alone, just to feel it again. She started making her own music, exploring modular synthesis and putting on ambitious, experimental live shows. At the 2017 Berlin Atonal, she presented the Rumi-inspired Fountain Of Fire show, wearing a niqab and chanting over slabs of dissonant noise. Three years later, she performed with Georgian choir Ensemble Basiani at Berghain for CTM festival, draping Georgian chants over hard-edged techno.

She also made a name for herself as a techno DJ, starting with small gigs in Leipzig cellars and tiny thirty-person rooms, before graduating to regular appearances at clubs like Funkhaus and events such as Boiler Room Berlin. The club was always more than a career to her, though. It was political. “It can be a space where you can decolonie your minds,” she says. “A space where you can actually share ideas and learn about experiences that you don’t have.”

In the early years, when the scene was overwhelmingly white, even her presence at the club felt political. “Back then, the door policy was that they didn’t feel safe letting Middle Eastern people in,” she says, choosing her words carefully. The demographics have shifted since. “All the clubs are full of brown people now. It’s amazing how things change. In the world, everything is going in the wrong direction. But the clubs are still spaces where [progressive] development happens.”

She’s not been shy about putting her politics into practice either. She co-founded Sirän, an Istanbul based collective focused on queer electronic music, running parties, workshops and other events for years before Turkey’s economic crisis made it financially unviable. Three years ago, she launched Umay, a music label that champions queer, BIPOC and SWANA artists. The label was inspired by her own experiences of watching how differently the industry treated people based on what they looked like. 

“Some European person can just make one EP and blow up,” she says. “Meanwhile it takes some of us many years until we are accepted and seen as producers.”

In 2018, Aydin found herself juggling club sets and festival dates with visits to the hospital, where her father spent 90 days in a coma before passing away. He had been ill her entire life – a childhood accident with a horse had led to one lung being removed—but that didn’t stop him from always being a beacon of joy. “He is the most important person in my life,” she says, holding back tears even seven years later. “He was such a supportive, visionary man. Even when he could barely breathe, he would always be there for me.”

Those three months were life-altering for Aydin – the five-minute hospital visits, the interminable waiting, getting used to the idea of death as a constant presence. After his death, she turned to music as a way of processing the grief and exploring the different ways we deal with death. Ali was the result, its sinister drones, reverb-drenched chants and Turkish flute samples painting in impressionistic brush strokes of grief, rage and disorientation. 

“It was beautiful to be able to express all these emotions within the music,” Aydin says. Ali had always pushed her to make music about this or that story, about the histories he carried. “He also always wanted a grandchild. And I was like, okay, maybe this is like a grandchild.”

But grieving, she notes, never ends. It just changes, shifts into something less immediately traumatic. After her father’s death, Aydin got into a long-term relationship in which she “lost [her]self.” She was burnt out professionally, and wrung out emotionally. When that relationship ended, she found herself lost in the wreckage. 

“The breakup was the catalytic catharsis for me,” she says. “I was left with this construction site where it’s like, okay, now I have to rebuild what I broke. I have to find my real self again.”

The nine tracks on Second SKin are like a diary of that rebuilding process, each track a different part of the puzzle. Opener “Where Was I” features eldritch, ritualistic vocalizations over ambient drone. This is Ground Zero of her emotional life. With each track the music becomes more confident and muscular, moving faster and faster. 

“Back To Beste” is an industrial-techno self-affirmation. “Bad Lala”’s relentless bass is the sound of Aydin getting ready to face the world again, her wounds still raw (“it’s about the time I spent in Chengdu with friends right after the breakup, but also the messiness and chaos of returning to club life.”) By the time we gets to closer “The Castle,” any hesitance and self-consciousness has fallen away. It’s the sound of pure liberation on the dance floor, Aydin reborn as a new, radically self-assured Nene H.

Aydin is close to 40 now, and after years of exploring identity as something iterative and unstable, something seems to have settled. The name Nene H – originally a shortening of an earlier moniker Nene Hatun, after a Turkish folk heroine – has mutated over the years, reflecting her own evolution. Nene means grandmother, while the H has, over the years, stood in for halal, Habiba, heroin. “Age has changed the meaning,” she says. “Back then it meant something about liberation and war with the self, within the self. Now it’s just me being me. I’m not picking fights with myself or the world anymore. I’m just trying to exist.”

With the album out, she’s working on a new live show – an analog-only set, four-to-the-floor at its root but with room to challenge, to push the envelope. She’s also hoping to focus on Umay a little more, with a couple of releases planned for this year that she’s very excited about. But what she’s most looking forward to is returning to the studio. 

“When I really feel the most authentic is when I’m sitting and making music,” she says. “It’s really my safe space, where I feel the most ‘me’.”