It's the third night of Amsterdam Dance Event 2017. The air outside De School carries the crisp bite of October. I've come to ADE to see an artist whose music has gripped me for years, but whose output and outfacing communication has all but stopped. Sandwiched on the bill between Izabel and Interstellar Funk at 2 AM is Stellar OM Source, playing a live set. It's only her third show in nearly three years.

Describing Stellar OM Source live is like trying to lasso a whirlwind. The raft of blinking equipment illuminating her, and the breakneck speed at which her hands move, gives the impression of watching a scene from Minority Report on 1.25x playback. She is headbanging within minutes, upper body flailing, her face obscured by a great bushel of hair. It's cathartic and engrossing, but these aren't always qualities people seek out at the beginning of a 62-hour marathon rave. The young audience is into it, but with reservations.

I leave at 4 AM, snooze, then get a cab back to see Dr. Rubinstein close out the first leg of Het Weekend's basement action. Stellar, real name Christelle Gualdi, is having brunch upstairs. We'd had fleeting communication over the internet before, but she comes over to say hi. We chat awhile about Alice Coltrane.

Six months on, we meet for a lunchtime curry before a night she's opening in Liverpool, her eighth gig of the year. She has flair in person as well as on stage: emphasised body movement, lots of direct eye contact, sentences rolling fluidly into one another with barely a pause for two hours. She shows me sketches made in the pickup from the airport—she had been engaged in dry tech-head chat the entire way, her internal monologue tilling: "Yes, I know what this does and yes that filter does have that effect, but it just feels like you have nothing else to talk to me about." I nip to the loo and come back to notice her napkin has been folded into an origami swan and a glass of prosecco on the table, freshly downed.

Restlessness runs deep through Christelle's life. She grew up in a nondescript town outside Paris. Her parents were, she says, "anti-conformist and into esoteric things." Her father held down a blues radio show for more than 15 years, and wore out a cassette of Tangerine Dream's Rubycon in the family car. Her mother would rock purple leather on the school run and treat allergic reactions with copper. Futuristic imagery and music, a cultural constant in the '80s, piqued the young Christelle's interest. She absconded to Germany when she was 16, although with her parents' blessing. An intention to study sound engineering didn't pan out, so she became a high flyer in the world of architecture and urban regeneration instead, working at an elite firm before getting cold feet and quitting age 27. It was "dumb," she laughs, but recurring dreams of being fastened to a train steadily rolling down life's tracks without controlling its direction startled her into action. "I don't settle," she says.

As the 2000s folded into the 2010s, Stellar OM Source made a name for herself in a nebulous scene of outer-realm electronic explorers, at a time when artists like Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds, Heatsick and Bee Mask were also reaching maturation. One moment that sticks out from her early material was on "How Many Voyages?," where a trapdoor opens and the bottom falls out, before a beautiful, bubbling respawn. Out of the blue, Christelle chanced upon a mint condition Roland TR-303 for €25. Deflated by countless sparsely attended basement gigs, she retooled her live show. 2013's Joy One Mile, on RVNG. Intl, was dynamic and powerful, one of that year's very best LPs. It is also, to date, a hard full stop in her catalogue.

The immediate aftermath of Joy One Mile was not just joyless, it was a nightmare. Her father, who had been ill for two years, died two months after the album's release. Two months after that her brother died unexpectedly. "I was going to play Elevate Festival in Graz," Christelle recalls. "Of course I was thinking how I could bring joy to people when I'm beyond sad inside. But I was afraid to withdraw and grieve, so I took care of my duties. I rang up Marlene Engel [curator of Vienna's Hyperreality festival] in advance and told her, 'Hey, my brother just died. See you for the show in a week.'" Marlene picked up Christelle from the airport personally, took her to a winery and brought extra packs of cigarettes along just in case. Christelle honoured the booking, but she wasn't really there.

She started getting premonitions again of being on a fixed rail she had no agency over, and "the speed of the train kept getting faster." While recording a follow-up EP, Nite-Glo, she found out in September 2014 that she was pregnant. Christelle took this as a chance to pull the emergency stop lever. She informed her agent that it was time to wind down. The following June, her son Zé arrived—named in part as a hat-tip to tropicália great Tom Zé, as well as the Dutch pronunciation of the sea, and Zé Povinho, a Portuguese national symbol who personifies the conscientious and kind working class. This was her life now. Nite-Glo arrived with no supporting shows. The few interviews she gave around that period have detachment scrawled over them. Stellar OM Source was over.

After years of reflexively turning down live sets, Christelle agreed to an offer from Unsound in Minsk and bought back pieces of equipment she had sold off (not the 303, nor her father's Juno-106). A few more trickled in after that, probing Christelle into making a call: restart her career in earnest or keep it in the cryogenic freezer? Architecture provided steady income, while music would require a concerted effort to get it off the ground again. During our conversation, she was playing a one-woman game of contradiction tennis, slumping across the table theatrically before snapping straight and singing the quiet joys of getting a red-eye flight from Brussels to Manchester knowing a party and a paycheck awaited. Being surrounded by friends at some gigs was thrilling, but other shows were duds.

She spoke effusively about Karen Gwyer's capacity to hold it all together, but fretted about the "stigma of being a techno mum." Trauma compounded her concern. "I worry that if I tell people about what happened, they will be like, 'Fuck, that's so heavy.' Well yes, but I'm still here. Shit happens in life and sometimes it's very heavy. Everybody's a survivor. But these tiny moments, where I can play, I can close my eyes, time can stop, the world can stop, and that's it. I'm happy. There's no music industry worry, it's just…" she trails off. I got the niggling sense that Christelle wasn't all the way in. She wasn't.

I get in touch with Christelle in July of 2018 from a cafe in Puglia. A recent mini-tour of India gives her a buzz that even translates over a fractured FaceTime connection. "Returning to touring and teaching workshops, it was such a shock," she says. "People were so eager. They wanted to know how I think, how I create, how I design, how I feel. This eagerness made me want to exchange as much as possible with people again. It's so genuine. It's so pure. Because I also happen to be a real person, moving through life from the heart."

There's much to chew over. Her radio show for Belgian station The Word is going well, a sandbox for her to pull out downtempo breaks, EBM and a lot of dark ambient, as well as a show of burgeoning confidence as a DJ. Christelle is excited about a forthcoming event the station has organised in collaboration with couture line Hermès (I later found out from The Word's programming team that Zé was snoring next to the booth in plain sight for her entire set). A party at Antwerp's Klub Dramatik was the biggest revelation of all. "I watched Soichi Terada play and it was insane. It was the afternoon, he didn't drink a sip of beer, but his energy, the joy in his eyes, he was being completely himself. And I know it sounds a bit hippy, but I was struck with the feeling, 'This is what I want.'"

This is not the breezy chat I had bargained for, though. Her dilemma has intensified—she is no closer to working out which side of a finely balanced life see-saw she intends to put her full weight on. She quit her job prior to the India tour and immediately regretted it. She then landed her dream job in architecture: inspiring people, killer projects, the perfect fit. One 12-inch for Lux Frágil-affiliated Interzona13 is lined up, largely as a thanks to her friend Tiago for the support, but she admits that she doesn't especially care for the material, slower and darker, that she's developing at this point. Still, "this work can't disappear," she says, voice rising with drama. "I find the tug so strong! I have to be at its service and record the tracks. I have to be this apostle of that big entity called music." But as there aren't enough shows in the calendar to pay the bills for two, Christelle is once more attempting to juggle fanaticism and pragmatism.

It's a real pickle. She is attracted to two opposing things: architecture and music. Zé can factor into one of these two high-demand roles, but not both. Like a magnet, she can't pull north and south at once. This squall of activity, she counters, "is when I feel most alive. If I have bruises on my head, my body, my soul, then I feel like I have truly put something into the world." Feeling blue after international gigs is indeed kicking hard. She is "cruising the pain" and "refusing to get depressed" by working even harder. It seems possible she's hurtling towards burnout. I decide to stall the piece as I'm not sure where the story will end up.

It's now April 2019. There's been an uptick in Christelle's gigs, with new experiences, such as a fabric debut alongside Ben UFO and Craig Richards, nestling with repeat bookings at De School. Luc Mastenbroek, De School's programmer, tells me over email that he has been a "devotional follower" since her lo-fi days, tracking her as she appeared on Shangaan Electro shows in Rotterdam and in Nachtdigital tents. He considers her meld of "techno power, wild improvised synths and FUN" to be the kind of thing De School wants to book again and again.

Christelle picks up the Skype call from her home in Antwerp, framed by a cabinet of records, the odd splash of art on the wall and a calendar overflowing with dates and sticky notes. All has changed, again. She has made her decision. She will commit to music, but leave space to take work on a freelance basis. "Architecture is an all-encompassing profession where you're always dealing with so many clients, always working to super-strict deadlines," Christelle says. The dream job was ultimately "too constraining," she says. "So now I am coming to terms with the fact that maybe in life I won't build big things after all. But maybe my creative output has a form other than buildings."

She seems significantly more at ease than at any point so far. She is falling hard for the ecstatic release of clubbing all over again. A reconnection with old Clone electro is accompanied by a roll call of new names—Peder Mannerfelt, Lauren Flax, object blue, Elena Colombi, Code Walk, Roza Terenzi and Jensen Interceptor, among others. "I mean, who are those people? This is amazing. Where are they coming from? They sound so great. And many of them were not around five years ago." On the horizon are Belgian forest raves, a Croatian beach and a spell staying with upsammy in a Mongolian yurt.

When I catch Christelle at Dekmantel in August, she is on form. The juxtapositions that first drew me in, as on "How Many Voyages?" and "Par Armor," are even more pronounced in person. Claps rain down like pin-tacks, snatches of voice snake through a thicket of acid leads, and at one point, a tune with the skip and clank of 2-step generates cheers. She slows down near the end, then rockets back up into hardcore territory as the lights turn red. She is the same whirlwind, with the same mane flinging left and right—but a significantly larger crowd now, and a visible smile on her face.

The baggage attached to her 2018 demos weighed them down, so she scrapped the lot. Her new EP, drawn from live recordings, is reaching the end of its four-year gestation. It sounds simultaneously like a departure from, and evolution of, her style—still whipcrack-sharp and bulging with layers of chattering hardware, but more streamlined. There is the warmth and luxuriousness of filter house inside a trippy acid-electro exoskeleton. It's a tad like Anthony "Shake" Shakir signed to Crydamoure. Aaron Coyes of Peaking Lights is due over soon to act as a "mafia boss," helping to declutter the material, just as Gunnar Wendel (Kassem Mosse) did on Joy One Mile. Coming out on Dekmantel, it'll be called I See Through You.

Most important, she says, is "the little guy structuring my life a lot." Soon, Zé will travel with Christelle to the next edition of Hyperreality. Marlene, who took diligent care of Christelle six years ago when her brother died, has gone out of her way to buy plane tickets for Zé and even arranged a babysitter in Vienna. Christelle is scheduled at peak time between Solid Blake and Nina Kraviz. To top it off, this will be her birthday weekend. Though still only cautiously dipping her toes back into the game, the warmth she is beginning to feel "is mind-blowing," she says.

Christelle wants to set Zé on an early path of appreciating alternative lifestyles, bringing him to as many gigs as time allows, a little dancing mascot as well as some company on the road. The day after our call she is taking him to an expo where tattoo artists, street performers and gabbers rub shoulders. "As a parent," she says, "you want to show your child that the world is really, really, really big. They have so much to discover, and all those places and people and many tribes will welcome you because you show interest."

Christelle follows-up with more over email a few weeks later. She is staying out later and making more of the parties. "I love [life] the way it is. I find that I don't fit anywhere—not in the DJ world, the architect world, the parents world—so I try to be at peace. I guess I always tried to be different and this is my nature. Recently a DJ friend with a booming career told me that she would like to have children and said that I am a model that it's possible to combine both. That moment made me realize that I don't need models l if I can inspire someone else. Of course, the balance of motherhood, music and architecture makes me sacrifice a lot of things. All in all everything is slowly falling into place, one day at a time. It takes a lot of acceptance. I often tell myself, 'Right now, it's like this.'"