Who is The Tunegirl, and what happened at Awakenings?
On 17 May 2026, Awakenings Upclose in Amsterdam put a 63-year-old on the same bill as Colin Benders, Dasha Rush, Rødhåd and Luke Slater. Her name is Andrea Gill, she works a regular job in Melle, a small town in Lower Saxony, and on stage she is The Tunegirl. No warm-up slot, no token booking: she held the same room as some of techno's most respected live acts. Within days the clips were going round the scene, and the first reaction was the same everywhere, who is she, and is she really doing all of that by hand?
What is she actually playing up there?
Everything you hear, in real time, off a wall of cables. The Tunegirl performs on a self-built Eurorack modular system, 188 modules spread across 99 patch setups, with no laptop and nothing pre-recorded. Melodies come from Mutable Instruments Plaits and Rings, sequencing from an Intellijel Metropolis, rhythmic movement from a Pamela's PRO Workout, drums from Behringer machines. The sound is Detroit-leaning minimal techno, built and rebuilt live as she repatches the system on the fly.
"I'm not a DJ. I don't play any tracks. The Tunegirl is a live performer who creates live techno using a Eurorack modular system."
That is not a marketing line, it is the whole method. As she puts it, "the sound is created spontaneously and cannot be replicated. There are no track IDs, because it's like a snapshot in time." What the Awakenings crowd heard that night exists nowhere else, and never will.
How do you start modular techno in your late fifties?
Slowly, and on your own. Gill grew up on the rock of the 1970s, AC/DC and Status Quo, and taught herself guitar by ear. In the early 1980s she DJ'd disco, funk and soul at a local club; by the 1990s she had moved to techno, chasing the Detroit and minimal sound of artists like Jeff Mills and Robert Hood on an Atari and Cubase rig. In 1999 she sold the lot and stepped away for a decade to raise a family. She came back to production in 2009 through software, Reason then Ableton, and found it hollow. Then she fell into online videos of people performing techno live on modular systems, bought a Eurorack case with no background in synthesis at all, and spent a year teaching herself before her first system actually worked.
The rest built quietly. Her recorded work started gaining traction from 2022, she became a fixture in the modular community, and the bookings followed the craft, not a viral moment: a closing set at Superbooth 26 back-to-back with Colin Benders on 9 May 2026, then Awakenings eight days later. Ahead of her: Paradise City on 28 June, the main Awakenings festival in July, and Awakenings Monegros in Spain.
