Artist Profile: Phase Fatale

A Phase Fatale set is about force. Hayden Payne, the New York–born, Berlin-based artist behind the name, treats the club as an instrument in itself, not a neutral (and simple) delivery system. His tracks are built for the physical pressure of large sound systems, chiselled into shape by residencies at Berghain and KHIDI. He has spent the past decade finding ways to compress the gloom of post-punk and industrial into techno’s frame, stripping out ornament and emphasising structure until what remains is sound as control. How fitting that Phase Fatale joins the 17th anniversary celebrations of Control on October 4.

Payne came of age in New York’s cold-wave underground, playing guitar and singing in Dream Affair, part of a scene clustered around Weird Records. Relocating to Berlin in 2014 sharpened Phase Fatale’s early EPs with hardened contours, driving kicks, serrated basslines, and arrangements that moved with fatalistic discipline but were aimed squarely at the dance floor. Reverse Fall (2018, Ostugut Ton), for example, creates an imposing wall of sound within the techno framework, philosophically inspired in part by JG Ballard's Crash.

His debut album, Redeemer, appeared on Hospital Productions in 2017. Sequenced like a narrative, the record drew from industrial, EBM and minimal wave, built into seven darkly melodic tracks. Silent Servant contributed a parallel 12″ of extended mixes, situating Payne firmly within the Jealous God / Hospital orbit that had been instrumental to his early development. Already there was a preoccupation with order and severity, with how sound could discipline bodies as much as move them.

The following years deepened that agenda. By the time Scanning Backwards landed on Ostgut Ton in 2020, Payne was explicit about treating the club as a laboratory. Written with Berghain’s sound system in mind, the album turned his interest in control into a conceptual frame. He spoke about psychological manipulation, Cold War acoustic weaponry, and hypnosis, and the tracks made those abstractions visceral. Even the artwork underscored the point. Adapted from a Snax party flyer, it tied the record’s themes of power and surrender back to Berlin’s queer underground. Mid-tempo churns and rigid basslines felt as though they were designed to synchronise thought and motion. The effect inside the club was undeniable.

Residencies at Berghain and KHIDI in Tbilisi gave him the chance to refine these ideas practically. The former is the most mythologised sound system in the world, but Payne approached it with precision, adjusting frequencies to test how architecture interacts with the human nervous system. KHIDI offered a different energy in a young scene, building its identity in the shadow of repression, where intensity carries both artistic and political weight. Payne embedded himself in that community, writing much of his third album, Burning the Rural District (2022, Hospital Productions), in the Georgian capital. The record captured that atmosphere through its tense sequences and cold atmospheres, speaking to both endurance and unease. Alongside his own releases, Payne has built a reputation as a remixer, reworking artists from Boy Harsher and The Soft Moon to Editors and Qual.

Collaboration has been another constant. Silent Servant had been a long-standing partner, from their Berlin Atonal set to their co-production on the first BITE release. With Pablo Bozzi, Payne found a different angle. Together as Soft Crash, they coined “Italo Body Music,” a playful but accurate term for their fusion of hi-NRG propulsion, EBM muscle and neon synth hooks. The 2020 debut Spritzkrieg and the album Your Last Everything two years later showed a willingness to embrace melody and exuberance without abandoning discipline. If Phase Fatale solo is severe, Soft Crash is rapturous, but both share the same attention to structure and physical impact.

BITE, the label Payne founded in 2018, has become an extension of his curatorial vision. Its first record, a collaboration with Silent Servant, was techno with post-punk and industrial DNA. The expanded roster spans established figures like Terence Fixmer and Teste to emerging names such as Bozzi and Gael. Their fifth-anniversary triple-LP, Shedding Skin in 2023, consolidated its ethos, signalling both continuity and a shift towards even more dancefloor power.

His most recent release marks a further turn. Transitioning Practice, a split EP with Kyiv’s Nastya Vogan (2025, Standard Deviation), was framed around displacement, memory and the liminality of return. Vogan’s tracks explore the psycho-geographies of travel and projected desire, while Payne’s contributions root the abstract in the personal. If Scanning Backwards was music about control, Transitioning Practice suggests music about care, about how the act of return inscribes itself in sound.

Across all of this, what distinguishes Phase Fatale is his insistence on thinking in structure rather than in loops. The post-punk heritage shows not only in his sound palette but in his sense of sequencing, in how albums unfold as arcs and how DJ sets are paced as narratives. His work resists the modular anonymity of much techno, preferring instead to stage acts and gestures that carry thematic charge. In his hands, the club becomes a place where force and care are two sides of the same process.