Stephanie Lachnit (artist name — La Steff) is a Berlin-based sound artist, composer and audio producer. She will be participating in the Studio 88 “SensoryScapes” programme in November 2026, working on her new Sonic Statement based on the field recording made in Doi Saket and Chiang Mai.
Stephanie’s interest lies in sound as material, texture, atmosphere and event. She is particularly attracted to the research that lies in the intersections and blurred boundaries between areas and different mediums: noise and silence; rhythm and non-rhythm; signal and texture; documentation and abstraction; intention and chance; performance and process.
Stephanie Lachnit’s practice is situated within a lineage of experimental electronic music where spontaneity and texture are prioritized over melody. She uses digital noise, clicks, acoustic drums and micro-edits as primary compositional material. Another evident influence in her work is Dadaism manifested in Stephanie’s absurdist track titles, the embrace of chance, and the refusal of conventional artistic hierarchies.
Stephanie Lachnit has worked professionally with audio as journalist, podcast producer and storyteller, recording voices, environments and situations across radio and digital media for more than 20 years. She has participated in DIY Music Career Lab, Berlin in 2026 and Feminist Music & Technology Program, Berlin in 2025.
Stephanie’s latest performance piece is a collaboration project “Schuld & Scham”. It is an aleatoric piece accompanied by vocals and live percussion at Studio dB/Berlin, funded by Musicboard Berlin. Together with Polypixa, writer and sound artist, they created a composition developed from spontaneous interplay. Stephanie composed and mixed the final piece and performed the percussion part.
More of her works can be discovered on the website.
Artist Statement
Rather than beginning with a predefined musical form, I often work from sonic situations and allow form to emerge through interaction between material, performer, technology and chance. This practice is informed by more than twenty years of professional work as an audio journalist, producer and storyteller. Recording has therefore long been a central part of my professional practice. 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? When a voice becomes texture, a street becomes rhythm, a mechanical noise becomes an instrument, or an incidental recording becomes the starting point of a composition?
This transition—from documentary listening to autonomous sonic material—is a central concern of the proposed research.
Noise, Silence and Texture as core focus areas of Stephanie’s research project
During her residency in Doi Saket, Stephanie will study how a particular place can shape the way people listen, move, perceive rhythm and compose. Stephanie sees Chiang Mai and Doi Saket as a sensory research environment.
In her artistic work, she adopts iterative practice-led methodology, where each cycle of listening, recording, composing and performing will generate new questions rather than simply confirm an initial hypothesis. Rather than beginning with traditional composition, Stephanie experiments with Sonic Sketches to find the potential and sufficient internal structure in them to be transformed into Sonic Statements. Stephanie is particularly inspired by the investigations on how Sonic Statements as non-conventional musical forms obtain its complete and resonant configuration of internal relations.
The project is expected to produce a body of interconnected artistic works, e.g. electroacoustic compositions; short-form sonic statements; live electronic performances; sound installations; field-recording compositions.
Studio 88 is accepting applications on an on-going basis. Check out our residency program and apply now.
