Intrigued by nutrition, she decided to study it online. At that point, Lilly had left Erlangen and was living in Berlin with her new boyfriend. After a year in Berlin, the pair moved to Zürich, where Lilly balanced her time between nutrition studies and modelling. When she qualified as a nutritionist, she opened her own company. Although she met “a lot of nice people” through her nutrition business, she struggled to settle in Switzerland. Her relationship, which lasted four years, was largely a negative one. While her boyfriend struggled with his own issues, Lilly didn’t have a support system. “I had to dive into his world, and had to really develop my own little community, and it took time… I felt very isolated, very dependent on him.”
Through a friend, dance music re-entered Lilly’s life. Drawn to “melodic, melancholic, deep house”, she went to clubs in Zürich like Club Zukunft, Supermarket and Bellevue, where she made a group of friends and discovered Adriatique, Solomun, and David August. “But it was not this positive experience, like when I was 17, 18, 19, and I had this uplifting house music or my dark techno,” she says, referring to the shadowy nature of melodic techno. “It felt like a strange, almost positive sensation despite the negativity. I got obsessed with it again.”
To her boyfriend, Lilly floated the idea of being involved with electronic music, maybe even as a DJ. He immediately squashed such a notion, and Lilly didn’t think about it again. But in the fourth and final year of their relationship, Lilly drove to Tomorrowland, picked up a friend en route and went to the festival, where she befriended a group of Norwegians. An “insane weekend” ensued, and gave her a taste of “how life should be”. Afterwards, she drove back home to Zürich and promptly told her boyfriend it was over between them.
