Anja Schneider
German DJ, producer and label founder Anja Schneider has spent two decades at the heart of electronic music since moving to Berlin in the early 1990s. In 2017, she left radio and Mobilee to focus on music, founding Sous Music as a more intimate, self-directed platform. She sees development as the challenge of longevity and says her passion remains as strong as it was three decades ago.12
Contents
The career, by era
Before Berlin
She was born in Bergisch Gladbach, about twenty kilometres from Cologne, which she remembered as small, dull and conservative; hanging around outside the ice cream parlour was one of the few diversions. At twelve or thirteen she discovered Kraftwerk's Computerwelt, alongside Depeche Mode and The Cure. In early adulthood she lived in Cologne and worked for a large advertising company in Dusseldorf. Trips to Berlin's old Capitol after the Wall came down exposed her to parties that continued after 4am without becoming the seedy scene she knew from home. She left the advertising job after six months and moved to Berlin in the early 1990s. "I worked for a huge company. But I wasn't good at it, I couldn't be myself," she recalled. "Berlin was so free, there was so much space."32
Learning in public
In Berlin, she worked at Kiss FM alongside Ellen Allien, and starting in 2000 she hosted Dance Under The Blue Moon on Radio Fritz, where she aired sets and interviews with guests including Booka Shade, Luciano, and M.A.N.D.Y. That show ran until 2017. Producing came a little later: her first track, in the early 2000s, was written with Sebo K in 2004 for Pias. Radio, DJing and production developed in parallel. Mobilee followed in the mid-2000s.14
Building Mobilee
Mobilee began in the mid-2000s, and its catalogue featured artists like Sebo K, Pan-Pot, Exercise One and Rodriguez Jr. From the start, Schneider resisted the idea that the label should be pinned to a single house sound. Though it was initially pigeonholed as minimal, she was wary of signing artists who simply reproduced her own tastes, and the practical test she applied to new music was simple: whether a track made her dance.31
The label's physical home was less planned than improvised. In 2007, when the team could not secure an official Sonar invitation, they started holding rooftop events in Barcelona instead. The first of these were invitation-only, and a 2010 video of dOP performing in the swimming pool helped turn the party into a sought-after ticket. By 2015, the rooftop had become a genuine home base: the label crew stayed there, ate breakfast together, and finished the day on the dancefloor as the sun went down over the city.31
Starting again under her own name
In 2017 Anja Schneider walked away from both her long-running radio show and the Mobilee organisation, the label and booking operation she had built around herself, to concentrate on her own music. She called the choice freeing and frightening at once. The operation had grown to include a booking agency with three staff and twelve artists, and she felt pressure to play every showcase while also raising children. She wanted to find out where she stood as an artist without the company brand behind her. "I want to be judged without the company and the brand behind me, without being 'Anja from Mobilee'," she said. Sous Music, named after her mother, opened in November 2017 with the nine-track SoMe, a smaller, more personal platform she could shape herself.15
The use of instinct
Schneider calls gut instinct the mantra of her life, describing decisions made fast and from feeling: "I make quick decisions - but always from the heart." That instinct shows up in her A&R work as much as in the studio. When she describes finding Kevin Over, she pairs his musical potential with something less measurable: personality, and whether he fit the collective she was building around him.3264
In the studio, she keeps a co-producer precisely because she wants the friction of another person: interaction, advice, criticism. She still holds a clear idea of how her sound should go, and treats outside input as part of the process. She also accepts failure as the price of taking risks and is willing to go against the current when it might set her apart.3264
Running through all of it is a distinction she draws between what machines supply and what people do. Sound banks and gear can generate tones; they cannot generate judgment, feeling, or groove.3264
When the room answers
At a 2015 Barcelona rooftop set, Anja Schneider began with a smile of concentration, moving only minimally behind the decks as the crowd settled in. By the third or fourth track she was dancing with them, threading through records by Athea, Reset Robot, Terranova, Theo Parrish and Adam Beyer. For Schneider, the goal of DJing is that moment when artist and crowd arrive on the same wavelength. Playing a new studio production to a crowd sends energy back into the next session, she says, so the dancefloor and the studio keep feeding one another. She values selection and reading a room over technical perfection, describing her sound as sitting between techno and house, sometimes hypnotic and sometimes dreamy. "The click kick is the goal - whether with artists, music, or DJing," she says. "Always."3264
Still in motion
Anja Schneider's working day runs on a fixed spine: getting her children to school, running, studio work, administration, label management, searching for music. She has described it plainly: "I have a very boring and fixed schedule because I am a mother!" The routine carries no hint of retreat. In 2021 she built a studio in Berlin for Berlin Beats, the nationally broadcast daily drive-time show, and the making and running of things has continued from there. Longevity, in her account, demands continued development, and she says "I still have the same passion I had 30 years ago." At the end of 2025 she set out plans to expand Club Room: Backstage and to create an electronic Rheingold with the photographer Sven Marquardt for the Salzburg Easter Festival, describing it as "a project that challenges me and makes me incredibly happy." Around those dated commitments sit the ordinary mechanics of a life in music: school run, running, studio, administration, label work and listening, appetite and routine occupying the same hours.24