Alec Empire

Hanna Bächer

Guten Morgen. And a very warm welcome to Alec Empire.

Alec Empire

Hi.

Hanna Bächer

The video we just saw is from 1999, I think it’s a demonstration against the NATO invasion of Kosovo.

Alec Empire

Not invasion, it was like, the bombings.

Hanna Bächer

You’re right.

Alec Empire

But it’s not only that. I mean, the real reason for this protest... In that year it was really different to the normal first of May protests you see every year. In Germany, many people were very concerned with the idea of Germany’s active involvement in international wars. You know, Germany had not participated in wars actively after the Second World War. So it was a very big deal when the Social Democratic government and the Green Party introduced the option that Germany should become this powerful player again in the world. A lot of people were very angry of course, because of the Second World War and so on. So I think the context is really important when we watch this video. It’s not just the first of May protest that you see every year. It was about something, for us, very serious at the time.

Hanna Bächer

You were born 1972 in Reinickendorf, right?

Alec Empire

Yeah, I mean I grew up there. The hospital was in Charlottenburg, where most babies were born. Sometimes there’s the confusion, people look it up and go, “Charlottenburg, he’s like the bourgeois, rich kid guy.” Whatever, but the thing is, many were born there.

Hanna Bächer

You were 18, more or less, when the [Berlin] Wall came down. This [video] is another ten years later and highly political, but as a teenager, was politics a direct influence on your creative work, or did music come first without the politics?

Alec Empire

For me, politics and music were connected for my whole life. This has something to do with the history of my family. My grandfather was killed in a concentration camp, so, you know, you grow up and you ask yourself certain questions, “OK, what happened? How could this happen?” I grew up in the Berlin that was divided by a wall; we had some relatives in East Berlin. So it has huge influence on the way you see the world. So for me, music had to be political. Not all music, of course. But I thought music always plays a role in public life and therefore it’s important what the music is about.

I noticed very early on that certain people want to take that away from music. And they have bad intentions. When they want to destroy the meaning of music and they love to sell meaningless entertainment, they go, “Hey, artists should stay out of politics. They should not make a statement.” I think that’s very dangerous. I mean, we hear this all the time still. I think it was always the case that creative people were under attack because they could build a bridge to a large amount of people, could present certain ideas that could change people’s lives. Some people might be cynical and go, “Yeah, but which song ever changed somebody’s life?” Maybe not the song itself, but the way you suddenly see the world through another lens, or through another filter, is key here.

To give you an example, in the ’80s I was a young kid, I was really into early hip-hop music, Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, that kind of stuff. It was played on the American radio stations here in Berlin, which was a big advantage because many people in other parts of Germany didn’t hear that music. I think maybe that also played a role later on in what happened with the club culture and stuff. So for me, listening to that music, I saw a different America than I saw on television. I mean, Chuck D from Public Enemy said this, I think in the ’80s, “We try to be the black CNN.” Or something like that, I don’t exactly remember the quote. So this is an example of how you might have certain views about certain groups in the population, and when you hear their music, suddenly you develop some sort of empathy, some different understanding, you maybe understand where they’re coming from. So music is very important when it comes to that.

Hanna Bächer

Were you aware of either music or radio happening outside of the West Berlin island? Was there any contact?

Alec Empire

Yeah, sure. I mean, I grew up in West Berlin. I think it’s important to mention. So yes, technically in a way, we were occupied by the Americans, British and French, and then there was East Berlin. But the thing was, it felt like an island because the moment you drove a half hour or something you reached the border, and you had to go through East Germany. So it felt very claustrophobic. Sometimes people go, “Yeah, but you guys were allowed to travel and you had a lot of advantages that people in the East didn’t have.” Which is true, but in everyday life, I think there was the feeling of not being able to do what everybody takes for granted, to go, “OK, it’s summer, let’s go to some lake, or let’s see nature, what’s outside of Berlin?” That was all closed off. There were people with machine guns standing there guarding us.

But it was this weird thing, because now when we talk about immigration and borders and America and walls and stuff, people always think it’s about people from the outside not being allowed to come in. But with East and West Germany it was such a bizarre situation where the population on the East was kept hostage and couldn’t leave, and you know, a very special environment. I think that’s why – I mean, I can only speak for myself – but it’s probably why a lot more musicians from that era think like that. I’m very sensitive to when the government becomes too powerful, when surveillance technology is used to spy on people and invasion of privacy, all these things. We’ve seen it, how bad it can get, so that’s why this matters so much to us.

Hanna Bächer

Talking about Berlin in the ’80s just before the Wall came down. Who was important to you? Were there any figures? Because we actually had Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten speaking here just two days ago. I’m curious if that was a world that you were aware of?

Alec Empire

Sure, I mean, I was in the very early age of this sort of punk scene. The reality was, you know, you played shows in squats and all the typical small punk clubs. For some reason I was right there when this happened, I mean, I was 12, 13 years old and we opened up for these punk bands which would become very big later on. Die Toten Hosen or Die Ärzte, those types of bands, and they were maybe playing to four or five hundred people. I think now some of these bands would fill maybe even a stadium, I don’t know. It was a very small scene. But I have to say, what I didn’t like, and I never liked this at the time, was the sort of nihilism that was around, because there was no perspective. I mean, the fascinating thing, I think, about the ’80s in Berlin was that it felt like people couldn’t... There was nowhere to go into the future. And I think, to me, the music that was made in Berlin at the time really reflects that. And I felt really different. You know, for me, I mentioned hip-hop early on, it was this, “We need to get out of this place, we need to do something better, we don’t want to accept this situation.” And this was very different to this older generation, which was more about, “OK, let’s experiment, let’s...”

For example, when you talk about music, I think there’s one big difference between the ’80s and the ’90s. I think the ’80s – and it has something to do with the computer being the central big step in evolution at some point, and was becoming more important – but I think the ’80s was a lot about chaos and destruction and, like, banging on burning trash cans and stuff like that, which is an interesting thing in a way. But I think my generation, we were about, “OK, how can we take that and control it? How can we use technology to not just do something chaotic but to put a certain order to the chaos, so we do something with the audience?” When you look at videos or old film from ’80s concerts, you don’t really see a lot of people moving, for example. Very often people stand there and they maybe hold a beer or something, maybe they throw something or they shout something. But when you compare that to footage from, let’s say, three, four years later, the big raves, where you see 5,000 people dancing, it’s a huge difference. So the Wall coming down in ’89 is almost like it seizes the time. There’s the Berlin before the Wall came down and then after. I belong more to the generation, I think, after the Wall came down. Even though I was already active in the music scene before.

Hanna Bächer

A lot of people, though, have this reproach towards techno, or specifically, Berlin techno of the ’90s, that it’s not political at all. But you are saying it actually was political, while people were dancing?

Alec Empire

I thought in the beginning it had something political about it. And of course I declared it dead, I think in early 1992! I was, “This is going in the wrong direction.“

Hanna Bächer

Still going, sorry.

Alec Empire

It’s a good question if this is the same thing that is still going. You know? But maybe we will get to that later. The reason why I was fascinated by acid house and early techno – and I was one of these guys, I was like, “No, we have to be anonymous, we can’t have our artist names on the records, it has to be all white labels.“ Track titles, even coming up with track titles - it should be numbers. It should be just the music, and we are tired of the slogans and the empty political messages.

At the time, I really felt tired of what was going on in the political left, I have to say. I hated the right of course, but I felt that towards the end of the ’80s, a lot of the stuff that was coming from the left in place like Kreuzberg, where most of these things were happening in the ’80s, it was for me empty. It didn’t have any meaning. On one side we saw, for example, the GDR collapsing and people still, you see them now still on the first of May, you see people with hammer and sickle flag. And I’m like, “How many more times do you want to see this stuff fail?“ And you’re still repeating this nonsense. So I was immediately very on the sort of anarchist, freedom side. We do what we want, we have to control everything else, self-determination and so on. There was this big conflict brewing, so that is why I was identifying with the early techno stuff. The problem was, in the beginning it was freaks and outsiders who loved that stuff. And, for example, the club Tresor opened up and they kind of imported these Detroit DJs.

Hanna Bächer

I think they opened in ’92 or so.

Alec Empire

Yeah, end of ’91 or something. The thing was that, let’s say Underground Resistance, Jeff Mills, all these guys, they were not what you would consider mainstream techno a few years later, because nobody cared about that music in America, so it was this weird, almost mistake of nature or evolution, I don’t know, that there is the place, Berlin, the Wall is coming down, at some point there was this open space. Governments didn’t know what to do. Authorities were like, “OK, what is this house? We don’t even know who owns this house.“ So you would have these free spaces, but the music that was so relevant was not the music of the Berlin of the ’80s. It was done by producers in Detroit. And sometimes when I speak about this with friends and other musicians, in theory, it doesn’t make any sense. Like, why do Germans, mostly Germans I would say, in Berlin at the time pick music from Detroit that was done by these underground people? Why didn’t they pick reggae music from Jamaica? Or Russian something, whatever? They could have picked anything, but they picked this. And it’s an interesting question that nobody could answer so far. But there was something for some reason, maybe there was this connection between how people in Detroit felt and how we felt in Berlin when we saw a system collapse in front of our eyes, and everything changed. People now, maybe younger people cannot imagine what that feels like. Even though I was from the West, to see such a radical change happen in society.

You see, like a year earlier, people were like, “This will go on forever.“ Oh my god, these speeches and so on, those will probably never end. It was like the definition of hell in East Germany, because you could see that on television – you want to buy a car, you need to wait 20 years to get it, but everything is great still. It was an absurd scenario that didn’t make any sense. So it didn’t feel like, a year later, we can go into all these warehouses and create music that actually was completely fresh and new.

Hanna Bächer

So you were totally surprised when the Wall came down? There was absolutely no way that you could have felt that, or in the music or art scene you could have anticipated that before?

Alec Empire

No, I remember there was a very good film called – I just know the German title, Flüstern & Schreien [Whispering & Screaming]. It was a documentary filmmaker who went into East Germany and filmed certain bands, interviewed them and so on. I don’t know exactly when that was, maybe ’88 or something, I’m not so sure, we have to look it up. But around that time. And he was able to get some interviews with musicians who were not actually allowed to perform in public. And it felt like, “Wow, these people are real rebels, almost.” People don’t know, in the GDR, you had to get this permission. You had to play in front of a jury, or something – a committee. Then they would tell you if this is okay, is this a threat to the people? You had to hand in your lyrics and so on. They would even tell you how much you are supposed to earn. A total nightmare, I think.

People in our age often don’t understand that these ideas are also being talked about in our time now. For example, you get this all the time, right? You’re a musician. There’s one guy, you absolutely hate this person, it’s shitty music, it’s bad, why is this musician earning more than I do? It’s not fair, right? I mean, I guess every musician at some point is going to say, this is not good, why do people pick that? Why is this person rewarded with millions of dollars? But anyway, what do you want instead? You want what I just described. That you have some bureaucrats sitting there. “Maybe you should earn €10 per hour. And your concert is an hour long, so...“ But this was the reality there. A total nightmare.

So when you watch this documentary, you don’t get the sense that... I mean, these people, it felt like everybody was stuck. There was nowhere to go from there. Later on I always thought, maybe when you feel like that, maybe change is just around the corner somehow. Because I had this in other situations in my own life, where I was like, “OK, why is there no progress? I want to do this.“

Even making music can be like that. You feel stuck, you have a certain idea and for some reason you don’t get to that point. You go, “Why is this machine not doing what I want?” And then suddenly you take a short break and then you have the idea, and you go, “Hey, wait a minute, no. You don’t tell me what to do, it should be the other way around!”

Hanna Bächer

I want to play a bit of music in a minute, but one question before. So, the video we watched in the beginning, and you speaking about the techno scene and Tresor – I think to a lot of people, either from a perspective of not coming from Berlin or from a perspective of knowing the music scene nowadays, thinking about punk and squats being very political, and techno being one thing that is [not political]... For a lot of people that doesn’t go together at all, that punk and techno would be one. But it always was for you?

Alec Empire

Yeah. It was an option for me. When I was in the techno underground I noticed something really early on and I didn’t like that at all. And it was this, “We have to escape reality. We are in this club or at this rave or whatever.” And you even hear this, if you look at old interviews, footage, people say, “You know, for a few hours, I want to leave my life behind,” and so on.

Hanna Bächer

Escapism.

Alec Empire

Exactly. And I guess it’s still the same thing for most people, maybe. Who go to a club, take drugs, they don’t want to worry about other stuff that is happening in their lives. To me that was always very strange. I was like, “Let’s confront what we don’t like,” you know? Because we need to solve the problems. For example, racism. Back in the day, what we saw was like when the Wall came down and this led to Atari Teenage Riot, the band, very fast, because we saw that there were a lot of neo-Nazis in the east of Germany. Of course, during the GDR, these people didn’t exist, because everybody was a socialist, of course. So after the Wall came down, suddenly you saw all these [people], and [it was] extremely violent. I was in fights with Nazi skinheads in West Berlin, for example. But they were, compared to the guys from the East, it was like if you watch a movie like Quadrophenia, it’s like mods versus rockers, and versus punks. Yeah, you had sort of a street fight, but it was not about, “Hey, I’m going to stamp on your head until you’re dead.” You know? It wasn’t that kind of...

Hanna Bächer

Actual violence.

Alec Empire

Yeah. I mean, stuff like this also happened, but it wasn’t the majority. I think the difference was there was such a militant far right-wing in the East, where we were like, “OK, this is a totally different level of a threat,” because we saw these attacks on asylum homes, stuff like that, and what you do? This stuff happens, you hear about it, you’re shocked. They are throwing fire bombs through windows and there’s babies in the room and you go, you can disagree with the politics as much as you want, but there’s no legitimization for this behavior, sorry. We were outraged.

We go to the clubs, to the raves and people are like, “Yeah it’s a bit bad, but let’s have a party.” And this kind of thing drove me crazy. I was like, “Wait a minute, this is happening outside and you’re just pretending...” Suddenly, these sort of people I also knew from the punk scene – because a lot of the early techno guys were coming from the punk scene in the ’80s – suddenly they behaved like these hypocritical hippies who were like, “No, come on, peace. Let’s have a party, we don’t want this.” And it reminded me of, maybe you know this, you go to a family thing and there’s a disagreement about politics and there’s always a few family members who go, “Let’s not talk about Donald Trump,” or something like that. I think everybody knows this. And it was the same kind of weird peer pressure thing to sweep stuff under the carpet, and I thought, “This is bad.”

I actually make the direct link to what happened at the Love Parade in 2010. How people never confronted those people who organized this stuff, never held them accountable or responsible. There was always this weird herd mentality, you know? I always felt threatened by that.

Hanna Bächer

What happened at the Love Parade in 2010? I think when it was in West Germany that people got...

Alec Empire

Stamped to death.

Hanna Bächer

Got stamped to death, actually. But talking about the Love Parade, I think coincidentally the first Love Parade was just before the Wall came down in ’89, and this famous motto, “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen,” or “Peace, Love, Pancakes.” So were you opposed to that happening?

Alec Empire

No, no, no. I was at these events. I loved it. For example, imagine this. All my friends were punks at the time. I was the only guy in my school who listened to this music and people were like, “What are you listening to?” There’s just a boom-boom-boom, and is somebody singing at some point? I mean, now it sounds like a clichéd joke, but it was like that. These were the normal types of people who listened to whatever, rock music. The punks, my punk friends, saw it immediately as a threat. They were like, “Hey, this is computer music, this is dehumanized,” and blah, blah, blah. “It is capitalistic.” And so on. So there was this really hostile environment where everybody hated that music.

And I mean, this is how I treated the first Love Parade, the first two or three ones that I went to, it was for me almost like a trigger. It was like, “Hey, we are doing this protest, want to come? What is it about? Is it against Starbucks or whatever? No it’s about this.” People would... Their faces would turn red. “This doesn’t mean anything! You’re making a mockery of our movement!” And so on. I always loved that. I always, I mean, if you look at my discography and stuff, I always love offensive stuff. As a DJ I loved collecting records with the weirdest sleeve designs, or the artwork or even the music itself. Anything that would kind of trigger people. You confront them with something that is against the way they view the world. Because I think this is the danger about music – it can become a soundtrack to traditions and rules.

For example, we know it from, let’s say, the military. Everybody marches to the same rhythm. It can be used to create conformity. The weird thing is, if you look at certain footage of raves, a little bit later in the ’90s, we always call it “marching music” because a lot of people dance almost like the same way. I was like, “This is weird.” Before, it was slightly chaotic and everybody was free. Then suddenly you had to dress a certain way. These were the dance moves you were allowed to make, and to me that was just really boring. And then, of course, at some point when this dominated culture, we found out this was similar to cultural fascism, almost.

You know, because we felt there was no room, no freedom anymore. Because the DJs were like, “This is how you have to arrange your tracks, so they get played.” Before that, the DJs were looking for records they could play. They were like, “OK, I have to actually get involved. I don’t want the records to be easy to play.” I mean, you want good records of course. It was a challenge when you saw a good DJ. It’s like, “Wow, he’s mixing that record with that. I wouldn’t even have thought of that.” But then it became like, “OK, it has to be at this tempo, this is the intro, you have to leave that length in the beginning, so it’s easy to...” I was like, “This is becoming just rules.” There were less options than ever before, and this is always when I’m out. I’m like, “This is not for me. You guys can go ahead, but...”

Hanna Bächer

I was thinking of playing a track off your Digital Hardcore release, the actual single called Digital Hardcore. Shall we play “Pleasure is Our Business”?

(music: Atari Teenage Riot – “Pleasure Is Our Business”)

Alec Empire

OK, why do you play this one?

Hanna Bächer

Actually, it was a tongue-in-cheek comment on what we were talking about earlier. You said the way that people were perceiving pleasure, or someone showing pleasure on the dancefloor was a difficult thing, and this track was called “Pleasure is Our Business.” And you were saying, “That is what we’re actually doing. We are playing for pleasure, and that doesn’t mean that we’re not political.” But when I say “we,” this was around when you started playing with Atari Teenage Riot.

Alec Empire

This track was from 1994. I mean, it was done in 1993, end of 1993. It was the first release on Digital Hardcore Recordings. I don’t know what the question was. But I think it’s important because at that point, I was like, “OK, I’m the anti-techno guy.” We were all dressed in complete black. The only link back into the techno scene was we were doing these raves with the Spiral Tribe at Potsdamer Platz, when they had to flee England. They came first to Berlin, and we hooked up and made these kind of like...

Hanna Bächer

Why did they have to flee England?

Alec Empire

Because of the Criminal Justice bill. They were doing these illegal raves in fields and the government wanted to crack down on this stuff. There’s a really good chapter in the book by Simon Reynolds, Energy Flash, where he did an interview with me a year later. He took a lot of the stuff I told him and he described it very well. He did some more research and it was interesting how the brewing companies – it was beer companies, alcohol companies, who didn’t like the rave scene. For them it was like, “What are these people drinking? They drink water and energy drinks. They don’t consume our stuff, and they take some pills, or whatever.” And they saw it as a threat to their business. Because before at rock festivals, there was beer everywhere, alcohol. So the bigger picture was quite interesting. These raves were big. It was like 10, 20,000 people in some cornfield somewhere. So a lot of people saw their businesses going down maybe, or if this grows further, it will take over.

Hanna Bächer

So you brought them to Berlin...

Alec Empire

No, I didn’t bring them. They left with all their trucks. They had trucks and stuff. They called themselves the Spiral Tribe, and they were a tribal kind of...

Hanna Bächer

I hear they played in places like the former Yugoslavia.

Alec Empire

They went further east, yeah, when Potsdamer Platz, when they started building what you see now, the Sony Center and all this stuff. It was like a wasteland. At that time, I remember we were making music that was, it was the old part, you know, the Wall was not just actually one wall. There was some space in between, where if you were to climb the first fence or something, then you’d have to run over certain landmines and they could shoot you in the back. And this is where they parked the trucks. This was also where, right around the corner, where Tresor was. The old Tresor.

Hanna Bächer

And Hansa Studios.

Alec Empire

Yeah, like now, it’s quite interesting, if you’re at Sony Center, there is, when you walk in from the U-Bahn station, there’s like an architecture thing where a very old building is integrated with all this modern stuff. This building was there, sort of like the ruins of it. Imagine us parking the trucks around there and hanging out, doing a campfire. It was very Mad Max, I have to say. It was all sand. We had to watch the machines so not too much sand is getting into them and stuff. It was a good time.

Hanna Bächer

And talking about Atari Teenage Riot again, was Hanin Elias part of your crew before you started making together, you knew each other first?

Alec Empire

I ran into her, actually when the Wall [came down]. In those days, when the Wall came down, you kind of climbed around, and then people were demolishing the Wall. It was a very exciting time the first weeks after that. I saw her and a friend – I saw two people in astronaut outfits, like the helmets. It was her and some other guy. I was like, “Hey, who are you?” I always had this idea, I want to start this group. I want to bring the energy of punk together with, at the time it was more like acid house and hip-hop. And yeah, it seemed like she was on board with that.

Then I remembered Carl Crack, who was kind of from my area where I grew up, so I recruited him. I use the word “recruited,” because Carl told me later on it was a very strange approach to him in this public space. I saw him and was like, “Hey, this is the mission. We’re going to create music to fight fascism. Are you in or not?” He’s like, “Uhh, OK. Let’s go.” Because at that time, I have to add, I was really tired of the sort of anti-fascist action stuff. The street fights. I thought, “OK, this doesn’t go anywhere, we need to do something else. We need to use computers, use the technology and try to influence the minds of people. We have to spread the message through music, in a way.”

These two things kind of came together. That’s why I picked music. We can fight until the end of days. The stronger person maybe will win, but you don’t change somebody’s mind. It’s a very relevant thing these days again. Because I think a lot of people, they get frustrated when they face an opposition. It doesn’t even have to be neo-Nazis. Of course, you don’t have the patience. You hear some dumb stuff, and you hear it over and over again and maybe these people are in the majority and you go, “Is there a shortcut maybe?” A lot of people pick violence. They go, “I just want to smash this guy’s head in.” But this is not the way to solve this problem. At the time, we were like, “We need to bring a lot of people together,” and the old music just didn’t work anymore. The punk rock stuff from ten years earlier sounded very dated and it didn’t sound like our generation.

Hanna Bächer

Should we listen to a tiny bit of “Hetzjagd Auf Nazis!”?

(music: Atari Teenage Riot – “Hetzjagd Auf Nazis!”)

Alec Empire

I mean, this recording is actually from ’93 and this ended up on the album which was released in 1995. This was the live recording. We played a really big show in Berlin at the time. You hear the audiences, a lot of people, so... But the 12" actually came out a year earlier, in 1992, and that I think for a lot of people was the key song in a way, because there were these attacks on asylum homes and the police deliberately delayed their arrival. They didn’t help these people. I think they came like an hour later. The population applauded while neo-Nazis threw these Molotov cocktails through the windows.

Horrible stuff, and now looking back... Maybe it is hard to understand now for people who are younger, but the way we felt was like this, OK? Germany was separated and divided for good reason, because of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. So when Germany got reunified, and we saw a lot of the German flags everywhere, a lot of people were talking about, “We need to find our patriotism again.” And every time you say this stuff, or you hear this stuff, you hear these other voices – “Yeah, but what about nationalism?” – and you hear these dark, kind of evil people come out of their holes, and they go, “Hey, but we are one people again.” And so on.

That might sound okay to people now, but at the time when people said this stuff it was about excluding minorities, most of the time. It was like, “OK, you don’t look German, you don’t belong here.” And so on. I think now, Germany over the last 20 or 30 years tried to give itself a different image. Let’s see how good that will work out during the next elections, because you've seen the same kinds of voices getting louder again since a few years ago. So our fear was, and I wouldn’t say it was paranoid, but we thought there was actually a danger of Germany slipping back into... You have this bad combination of East Germany, where people had a lot of weird education, what they believed about the world and so on. How the individual doesn’t matter, and so on. Then you have these far-right people in the West who loved this. They were like, “Yes, now we are somebody again. Now Germany is this powerful force in Europe and we can tell other countries what to do,” and so on.

So for us there was always this fear, is this maybe that we are going backwards in time? Because the mentality, what we saw in the streets and how people behaved, was not like, “OK, now we are open to the rest of the world, the other half of the country can travel, this is great, there’s more freedom now.” A lot of people saw the future of Germany very different. So when you see this footage on television where neo-Nazi skinheads attack these houses, the police don’t come to help, and the rest of the population applauds this? For us, this was the point where like, “OK, now it is getting serious.” This is not some very small group of radical neo-Nazis. Now these ideas are becoming more mainstream again. I think what is interesting, a lot of people when we released this – because it put us on the blacklist of most raves – people were like, “How dare you? What is this message even?”

Hanna Bächer

Some of your music is on the German “index,” which means that you can’t play it on the radio and can’t sell it.

Alec Empire

You shouldn’t have even played it now.

Hanna Bächer

We can, we’re in a closed space, so that’s alright. I checked before actually!

Alec Empire

But still public in a way. OK.

Hanna Bächer

But “Deutschland (Has Gotta Die!)”...

Alec Empire

That’s another…

Hanna Bächer

Which is another track by [Atari Teenage Riot].

Alec Empire

Yes. So, where were we? Yeah, this is why we felt like that. So for us, I think what is interesting, this track from 1992, this is 170 BPM or something. It doesn’t have four-to-the-floor bass drums, because at that point we were going, “OK, techno as we knew it led to this really bad mainstream version of it.” Because everybody understood this dumb four-to-the-floor rhythm. Because also there was less funk at that point, in the techno stuff, I have to say.

Now when people look back, they always look at Chicago house and Detroit, they look at the good stuff, which is good, but this was like tiny, it was like the cherries on this ice cream of shit. It was horrible, horrible stuff. I remember having conversations with people in the record industry, the old school record industry. They were telling me, “Look, Alec, the Germans can never dance to funk rhythm like that. They need the four-to-the-floor bass drum.”

Hanna Bächer

Did someone actually say that to you? Who was that?

Alec Empire

I’m sure if you were to go through the archives with old interviews with DJs, they would even say that. They weren’t even ashamed to say it, they thought, “We got it figured out. This is what the German likes.” It sounds funny, but you saw... I remember the Love Parade, I think it was ’93 where the BBC – at that point, a lot of the international press paid attention to the Love Parade, and to techno in Berlin and Germany, because it was different to the dance music stuff in England, for example, or France. And I remember the BBC, every time they did a report they came to Berlin or the club scene or whatever, and I think maybe because my name starts with A they had me on this list [first]. “OK, there’s this one guy who disagrees with everything, we need to be kind of objective, let’s call Alec up.”

And at that time, I remember during the Love Parade, there were these DJs – Mark Spoon, I don’t know if you know this guy? He hung out with Böhse Onkelz, which was this really kind of, they used to be a neo-Nazi skinhead band and they became like a far-right rock band or whatever. So you had a lot of these DJs, they were suddenly really proud that Germans, we have our music now. And these people were proud of that.

The way I understood techno was like this, OK? Suddenly we can network with everybody around the world who shares that vision of “everybody can participate in this.” Right? You have the technology, it’s about your mind, it’s not about physical strength that you need to play drums or whatever, it’s just about the ideas. And everybody is part of that. It’s like a globalized, maybe international kind of music movement. And I think this is also how techno spread. Everybody joined in and they were all like, we can become a part of this. Suddenly you have people from Brazil or wherever, Japan.

But there was this other narrative that went like this. We were oppressed after the second World War. The culture from America, from England, was forced upon us. This is not our music, not our identity. Then Kraftwerk came, and Kraftwerk gave birth to techno. Then they do this jump, maybe they include Giorgio Moroder, somehow. And there was Munich, OK? There was not only Kraftwerk. And then they make this jump to techno and they leave out funk music, hip-hop, everything that influenced techno, and I think you see this narrative. If you read websites or books nowadays, watch out for this narrative. I think it’s very common that people repeat this, and I think they’re missing what techno was about in the beginning and what it should’ve been about the decades afterwards.

Hanna Bächer

Including what you said earlier that, actually, in the American sector, there were a lot of American radio stations that played music by GI DJs and for GIs. In Berlin, also around the areas of Frankfurt, Wiesbaden, Hanau, where you had a lot of US Army bases. And them actually playing funk formed one of the many sources that German techno developed from. That aside, also in the mid-’90s, you decided to relocate to London.

Alec Empire

Yes, I had to.

Hanna Bächer

Or at least partly relocate to there. You had to because you could not deal with living in Germany anymore?

Alec Empire

No, I didn’t want to do the national army service. I don’t know if that’s even interesting, but it was like this. In Berlin, you didn’t have to go to the army because we were occupied. When people, let’s say in western Germany, didn’t want to go, they sometimes escaped to West Berlin and it was this kind of weird gray area where, yes, the police could find them, arrest them and so on, force them, but I was the first generation where they said, “OK, the Wall is down. You guys have to go.” They really wanted everybody to go. There were people in wheelchairs who had to go.

Hanna Bächer

I cannot imagine you in the army.

Alec Empire

No, no, no. I’m really a... I could not believe this. I was like, “No. I’m not supporting the army, especially not this army.” The German army, it’s not like... I would never hold a gun to somebody’s head. This is not me. I’m not a pacifist in that way, but I was like, “This country killed my grandfather. I should fight for this? I should die for this country? What does it actually stand for?” I still have a problem with that because now, because I feel... People talk about this. What does Germany mean? What should we teach the immigrants and so on? But I don’t really hear strong values.

I think, for example, the Americans are at another level when it comes to that. They founded the country on certain values because everybody was a settler basically. In Germany, where’s that line? Genetically you are an Aryan, a Viking, whatever. I don’t know where is that line that people draw, so I think it’s very important to make it clear, what do we stand for as a country? But then I’m going, “Why do I even care about Germany? I’ve felt European all my life.” It’s this conflict maybe of my generation, but I really feel this conflict. For me, I never felt German at all. I feel European, if I even feel like that. Maybe that can change. If Europe becomes something that I can’t agree with at all anymore then I wouldn’t even feel like that anymore.

I think also, for example, what many people told me was interesting, I think now. People always say, let’s say internationally, I go to Japan or America or something, and they go, “This is so German, you’re the definition of this German, ’let’s tear everything down’ radical guy,” or something. It’s weird because nobody in Germany would actually give me a credit like that. They would go, “No, you move. Move somewhere else.” A lot of people were happy when I was in England. They were like, “Ah, this guy is gone. Now we can move on. There’s not this critical voice all the time.” Because for a while I still felt part of the techno scene. I always thought, “Hey, everybody should speak about the truth.”

For example, I remember in ’94 I think it was, ’94 or ’95, the first sexual assaults were happening at the Love Parade. Unthinkable before, but it was like, “Let’s not talk about this.” It’s like, “Wait a minute. It’s getting bigger and suddenly these drunken guys assault these girls?” It was larger numbers. It was like, “You need to address this. You need to at least say this is not what we want here.” It’s like, “Yeah, well, but then we have these sponsorship deals. Alec, why... You’re putting us in a bad mood again.” It was this kind of vibe at the time. I think if you don’t take care of these kind of problems, they will destroy your scene.

Hanna Bächer

How critical were you about the music industry at that point? What we listened to earlier was sort of the first release on Digital Hardcore Recordings. It was for you, right from the beginning, very important to have your own label, but then you also released on Mille Plateaux. Then later you released on Beastie Boys’ label, Grand Royal.

Alec Empire

I released on many labels. Also there is a lot of white label stuff that was under different names and so on. I did a lot of stuff. So what’s the question? Did I like the music industry?

Hanna Bächer

No, that’s very broad question, but I’m wondering, with you being critical of politics in many ways, did it matter to you to stay in a certain underground place? Because Atari Teenage Riot became really famous and you played big festivals. You toured the world. You played the US as much as Japan and released with the Beastie Boys’ label, still a very big label at that time. Did that ever pose a problem for you, or a conflict?

Alec Empire

No. No, because I’m not... If somebody in a more political environment would ask me that question, they’ll always mean, “Hey, wait a minute, you are some sort of leftist guy, and this is against your principles,” or something, right? I’m not saying that you are asking the question, but...

Hanna Bächer

I’m not suggesting that, I’m just curious.

Alec Empire

For me to explain that, and I made that clear right from the start, independence is super important. You have to control your career. For me, for example, selling a lot of records wasn’t a compromise or something bad. Of course, you always hear this. Let’s say you start out. You have these fans. They love you. There were there at the first shows. You need these people, right? They are great. Then comes the point, suddenly, your audience is way bigger and they go, “Hey, I went to the concert and Alec didn’t even see me,” or something. Then it becomes like a lot of people who were there in more of the underground times, they can get really mad.

Then this whole things starts, “Yeah, they sold out. Now, it’s just commercial music,” and so on, which is, I don’t know, I can only do the music I honestly want to make. I can’t think like that. I can’t go, “I make something less good or less of something, just in order to sell more records or less records or something.” I think as a musician, nobody should actually think like that.

I think, what is important? That you avoid certain repetition, because I think that’s a trap. What happens with a lot of musicians, they succeed with one track, right? It becomes their track. It’s a famous track. You get into this vicious cycle because no musician actually fully understands why it was that track or that track. That’s my theory. Some people are like, “Oh, yeah, but I did this and then I thought about getting these blonde bikini women in the video and I made that move and this. Of course, then it became the big hit.” We see tons of productions like that and they don’t become a hit, so it’s very chaotic environment and you can’t control every person. What do they like? What will they like? What will they like at that point in time when your record comes out and so on? It’s an environment that you can’t really control 100%.

That’s why I think you need to stick to yourself. You say, “This is what I want. I want to make... I want to challenge myself. I have different ideas.” I think a lot of the time when people try to repeat something, a success of the past, it never fully works. You can ride the wave a little longer maybe, but I never trusted that. I think that’s why every time I put something out, you would see, maybe now on social media, fans who love the previous record, they get mad. But I’ve known this since the early ’90s. I sold out tons of times to certain people’s minds. What you need to do I think is, also as a music fan, you need to set certain... You need to measure it somehow. And I think you can measure stuff.

Let’s say, if you have a track like this track you just played, “Hunt Down the Nazis.” Yeah, it is very fast breakbeats, the British stuff was all at 140 [BPM] at the time, so 30 BPM faster felt like absolute chaos to most people at the time. Now we’re used to this kind of tempo a bit better. But then, all the synth stuff was a direct influence, I never hid that from people, from Underground Resistance. They used these kind of Roland machines, like the MC-202 and the 101 and 303, in this certain type of way, very aggressive way, and I was like, “OK, we pair this with the sped-up breakbeats, this will be something interesting.”

I think, don’t be afraid to combine things in a new way. But that means you might offend some people, and some people expect you to deliver certain stuff, but you’re not their slave. I think that’s really important for me. As a DJ, I remember, I was like, “Yeah, I do my set,” and there is always this kind of interaction with the crowd. I think the idea of DJ set is an interaction where you move with the audience together, but you need to sometimes push them in certain directions. You can’t just only play what they want to hear. We see that in EDM, right, in American, mostly American EDM, people turn up with their USB stick, it’s a pre-recorded DJ set because it has to sync up with the fireworks and the light show, so there is no interaction, there’s nothing. It’s a top-down hierarchy. They feed the music to an audience and the original idea of DJing and techno, you could maybe even argue house and so on, but let’s just speak about techno, that’s not that idea.

You need to change your set while you’re doing it. You manipulate, it’s like surfing a wave, you need to navigate and you cannot repeat the same thing again, you know what I mean? It’s like if you see a rock band, they play their songs. Maybe they play them a little bit faster or slower, depending on how they feel. But I think a DJ set should be a musical statement and it should not just be, “OK, I just play some music to people and then I’m on my laptop surfing the Internet.” I think it’s a very dangerous thing. People say now maybe there’s more money in electronic music, especially events maybe. I think this laziness can [make] the whole thing fall. Because the music always comes first. If there is not the creation, the rest becomes meaningless, so people need to focus on that. Many DJs disagree with me on this point. They think they should be the entertainer, they want the fame maybe, to be on stage and on Instagram, and you see the photos with the big crowds cheering and stuff. But they see themselves as servants, like they serve the audience. I never saw it like that.

Hanna Bächer

Very early in our conversation today, you talked about wanting to manipulate people’s thoughts, and with becoming more successful later, did it ever get to a point where you felt like you may be manipulating people too much?

Alec Empire

No, no, I think there was a misunderstanding, I didn’t want to manipulate people’s thoughts, I wanted to take control over the sounds, so people’s minds, they would at least maybe hear something else, they would maybe look at the world in a different way. I don’t think you can manipulate people like that. You cannot go, “Here’s a song...” I can put it to you like this. I said very early on, I keep repeating this, and people ask me, “What’s your music suppose to do?” And the first answer is, “The music has to make people think.” This is what it’s suppose to do. And that means, I think, music is always reflection of somebody’s values. Even if they’re not aware of that.

If you hear certain music and you can’t agree with it, with the values, you will not like it, it’s simple as that. And that’s, I think, what music is. If you want to make a political statement, and I speak for myself, I say my opinion, if people can agree with that and they often do. But I can’t tell people, “Listen to the song, you must now think like I do.” And by the way, I’m very different to the industrial generation that came in the ’80s, where it was a lot about presenting power. People sometimes say, “Yeah, but the Alec Empire stuff, is it not a bit like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails and all this stuff?” And I’m like, “No, it’s actually completely opposite.” Maybe some distortion sounds similar or something.

But for us, when we use noise, for example, we never use noise as punishment, we always use noise as a sort of euphoria. If you speed up everything it’s like a sort of information overload, at some point it ends in this noise, with a lot of overtones and your brain... It’s very exciting. If you experience that, like really experience that, it’s like the peak of a musical experience. But a lot of industrial it’s like, “Duh-duh-duh–bruuuhh.” They even perform like that on stage, most of these acts. I mean, sometimes I can like music like that, but it has nothing to do with what we do.

Hanna Bächer

I’m gonna play just a tiny bit of you and Merzbow, Masami Akita.

Alec Empire

Yeah.

(music: Alec Empire vs. Merzbow – “The Alliance”)

Hanna Bächer

I wanted to play this, it’s a live recording by the way...

Alec Empire

From CBGB.

Hanna Bächer

In New York, yeah.

Alec Empire

Yes. I don’t know if people will remember that club. You know what CBGB is, that club? No? It’s this legendary punk club in New York where a lot of punk started. The punk purists would argue with me, but Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell, all these people, Suicide, all these people played in that club. It was not a big club, maybe 400 people fit in there. It’s closed now, but at the time we went there and did this show together, which was very unusual for this club, because it’s usually related to–

Hanna Bächer

To Patti Smith or–

Alec Empire

Yeah, it was punk stuff, so a very violent kind of show, in terms of the music. Some people vomited and it was very loud. Masami Akita, this guy Merzbow, he’s a legendary noise guy from Japan, I love his stuff. He’s done hundreds of releases and we worked together on some stuff. But this live recording, at that time we did a few shows together where I was on turntables and had a few machines, and he had at the time these weird instruments, like all analog noise stuff. So yeah, we did this show together and we actually did the first show in Berlin. What was the club called? It was some club in Mitte, the building is totally different now, I forgot the name. We turn up, it’s a packed club. Everybody’s like, “Oh my god, these two people, now they’re gonna play,” and we’re like, “Yeah, this is gonna be great.” We started and after one minute the whole PA was blown and it was a huge disappointment.

Then we were in Osaka in Japan a few months later, did it there, that was also great, but then CBGB’s in New York was recorded and that was a live recording. It’s an interesting snapshot of where we were at the time, because my stuff was getting more noisy and I was really connected with the Japanese noise scene that I loved. I think they were very innovative, it’s an underrated scene in the West. The Japanese scene, they were real innovators. They pushed stuff so far.

I remember, I think in ’95 I was in Japan, and I was DJing and all these guys said, “Ah, we’re going to open up for Alec,” and I was like, “OK, yeah, cool.” I knew some of them, Merzbow I knew, and Keiji Haino and people like that. But we were in the old Liquidroom in Tokyo, and at the time it was on the 14th floor or something, and that to me was already an amazing thing. You have 1,000 people go in an elevator that 10 people fit in, they go to this top floor... And then I experienced this, how people went absolutely crazy for noise. The beats you’re hearing there, these are my beats from my part. But they were just playing real... noise. I mean like pure noise, and you saw these people stage diving and flying, and I was like, OK. You know, it was funny because I was starting to get depressed about Berlin and techno, another death of a music movement and we always would fail. And I end up in Japan, I see this, I’m like, “OK, this is the future.” I mean, it didn’t turn out to be the future, but it was very exciting. Who knows, maybe in 50 years’ time...

Hanna Bächer

And everything has been the future at some point, so...

Alec Empire

Exactly, exactly. So maybe people, they will have had enough of the song structures, that’s my bet, that people get tired of the same thing. And maybe noise, the door’s open, you know, you just need to go through that door and have a good time.

Hanna Bächer

I also wanted to play it just to give people an idea of the very big variety of things that you were doing in the late ’90s. I mean, you also worked with Björk, and released Björk, which I think is super surprising for some people maybe, and I want to play a bit of this Game Boy-only double album that I know you’ve talked about many times. It also kind of sparked–

Alec Empire

I did, maybe 15 years ago, not many times. It’s just a joke. OK, but go on.

(music: Nintendo Teenage Robots – “We Punk Einheit”)

Alec Empire

[Laughs]

Hanna Bächer

I’m happy it makes you so happy.

Alec Empire

We talked about all these serious topics, but there’s also... The fun stuff is often the trolling, that’s how I call it. And there were a lot of examples, and that’s maybe one example. There was the Game Boy, there was like a little software created for it, you could have three sounds at the same time. It sounded like if you ever saw Space Invaders or something like that. You heard a bit of that, but this is actually three Game Boys running at the same time, out of sync, chaos. This program was on the market, it was already in the underground scene, and it’s like, “Hey, this is cool, you can do something with it.” And I was like, “Yeah.”

I released this double gatefold vinyl record from that, with only Game Boy stuff. This video, she got it from YouTube. A director needed this fun video at the time, it was part of a VJ mix that was on television during the night. He played three tracks on top of each other, so it’s a bit more chaotic than the record is. But then on the back there was this whole description, like a total diss. I have to say, we mastered all our records in the ’90s, and even the decade later, at Abbey Road in London. And it’s a bit childish, but a lot of the titles were these anti-Beatles titles. Actually, the mastering engineer, an older guy, a super nice guy who mastered all our stuff with us, and he was like, “Alec, I can’t do this here, I can’t even put this in the computer, this is an insult to everybody. What are you doing? The Beatles were the greatest band of all time.” And I was like, “Yeah, but now the Game Boy, you have to understand, the Game Boy is replacing your old history. This is done. Now music will be squeezed into little gadgets.”

Hanna Bächer

The Game Boy is replacing the Beatles.

Alec Empire

Now maybe it’s not as funny because you have the iPhone and the smartphone, but at the time people were like, “No, no, this is not what music will sound like.” What we didn’t speak about yet was at the time, when I started the small hacker community in Berlin, that was really part of my scene in a way. Often it was also about, “OK, we test something, we do something like that maybe.” Of course it has to be a double vinyl record mastered at Abbey Road. And you sent this out to all the music critics, and they already hate you. “No!” “Zero!” “Can we give negative review points to this?”

Sometimes certain people thought, “This is great,” this is the best record of the month or something. But there was always this little bit, like, “Hey, don’t have this heavy music history on your shoulder,” sometimes you need to shake it off. Don’t take these icons too seriously from the past. This was also part of what was going on at the time.

At the same time, I did this record, a mash-up record, Alec Empire vs. Elvis Presley, which was more like a bootleg, fun thing. I did this actually just for myself, to play to my girlfriend at the time who was an Elvis fan. I watched all the Elvis movies, over 30 or something, in one go for two weeks. I was never an Elvis Presley fan, I have to add that, I didn’t even listen to the records. And I was like, “OK, I take all these samples and make these tracks,” it was all kind of breakcore stuff, like really weird programming, and all the Elvis songs were time-stretched. A very strange record, looking back.

But I went back to Australia to do some shows with Atari Teenage Riot. I gave [it to] a DJ, he really loved this, he was like, “I need the burned CD-R.” I left it with him and then a year later I was in New York and I saw these bootleg vinyl records in the record stores and I was like, “Where did this come from?” Some Mexican label pressed this. And I was like, “OK, I need to buy some for myself.” My girlfriend split up [with me], she was angry, like totally angry, like, “How can you do this to Elvis?” But the interesting thing was, it was record of the week in New Musical Express, the British music newspaper at the time, so there was a certain recognition. Then there was a sort of video being done for some music show on MTV, and that ended up in MoMA a few years later.

Hanna Bächer

In the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Alec Empire

As this early “mash-up” or whatever, I forget the definition. But I was like, “OK, this is how sometimes things go.” Certain people, more from the art world, this [release] is why they even speak to me. Before that they would go, “Who is this punk? What university did he go to?” But then it was like, “Oh wait, he has this video. This was one of these early things, wow.” So sometimes people need that stamp of approval. But don’t try to go for that because you can’t. This is something that’s maybe out of your control. This is a very good example of how crazy things sometimes can go.

Hanna Bächer

You just spoke about the hacker community in Berlin and I think that’s a very particular characteristic about Berlin, there’s so many software companies here. A lot of the DAWs are actually German, like Logic and Cubase and Pro Tools. All those things go back to just a few people who started making that here, and now a lot of other companies like Native Instruments and Ableton are here. How close were you to those developments? Did you just beta-test stuff, or do you care about it at all?

Alec Empire

No, not this stuff, because I stuck to the Atari computer during the ’90s, and then we actually started using hardware recording, like for example the early Pro Tools, with four and then eight audio tracks you could have. I think what you’re describing is really 2000 onwards.

Hanna Bächer

Yes.

Alec Empire

When I wasn’t really in Berlin at the time so much. I was never such a fan of the studio inside the laptop. I felt this was sort of like leading to... How can I say this? To a sound where everything sounds very similar, you know what I mean? I think now maybe we’ve left that phase again, since a few years [ago], so it’s getting better, but at the time a lot of the glitch, clicks-and-cuts stuff... I felt, “OK, people are using the same software,” you could hear it immediately. My personal opinion was that I didn’t like the sound in general. Like, it was not physical enough. We can do this today. We could hook up an 808, a real 808 drum machine and anything that comes from your laptop, and the 808 will sound heavy and big, and the laptop will sound a little bit smaller. At some point, maybe it will sound the same. But so far it isn’t. And, for me, the physical impact of sound is very important.

Hanna Bächer

I would say that I’m pretty sure I know people who would argue that and would say, “No, the laptop sounds just as big if you have the right sound coming out with output.”

Alec Empire

They have two problems, maybe. They have one of two. Either their ears are not trained well, or what’s in between the ears is not...

Hanna Bächer

Is not trained?

Alec Empire

Because it’s a physical effect. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try and work on that stuff and get it better, because we also have a lot of advantages from the technology, but I think, going back to the link to the hacker scene, one thing I think that musicians should never buy into is that the latest gear is the best. We are in music here, we’re talking about music. Somebody can use a Gibson guitar from the ’50s and can write an amazing piece of music. So that’s a trap, I think. A lot of times people go, “OK, but we are doing electronic music, so always the latest thing will be the best.” I really would question that. That can be true, but it can also be not true. And you get to American dubstep and everybody suddenly agrees with me. You know what I mean? But that explains it. When something comes along that people don’t like, then it’s the fault of the gear.

There’s a certain gear fetish, and I think we talked about this before. I’m not really into that. I use the Atari computer for certain stuff because it has a very fast MIDI attack, and only does that thing quite well. There’s an interview, I think for your website, about the Atari computer, because I actually see the computer as a key factor that changed the studio. I’m often amazed by the fact that people leave that out. Often, when you hear about gear, people talk about all kinds of synths and stuff. But rarely about the computer.

Hanna Bächer

Or software, for that matter.

Alec Empire

Yeah. But it’s like, you have to master every tool you have available, and you have to find these ways to make it work for you. I think we know this. It’s very easy, especially in electronic music, you have certain stuff, like let’s say some software, and you start working with it, and I think it’s a mistake when you treat it almost like you’re playing a video game. I think we all know this effect. Suddenly an hour goes by, and what have I actually done? What’s the goal here? Yeah, I have produced something, but was that actually me, or was it just the machine suggesting stuff to me in a certain way?

Hanna Bächer

How would you get out of that?

Alec Empire

You need to think about it first. I think you need to leave room for experiments, always do that. But think about, what do you actually want to do? People who randomly do trial-and-error stuff, I think it often leads to bad music. Sometimes they can hit on something, but, well... Like the chance that if we dug holes outside this building in the ground [we would find] oil or gold. We could try that forever and maybe we find something. But you should be a bit smarter than that. You can save some time.

Hanna Bächer

We’ve soon talked for almost two hours, one and half, a bit more than that. I want to open it up to questions in a bit. There’s a lot of things that you’ve done that we’ve left out. Atari Teenage Riot split up.

Alec Empire

The good stuff you left out. You just played this joke, like B-side live recordings that nobody... OK! [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

Well, yeah, we want to play stuff that maybe people don’t come across that easy. Atari Teenage Riot split up, one band member passed away, Carl Crack, in I think 2001, and then you reformed. You worked as a producer with Patrick Wolf and you did many solo recordings, and also you did film stuff, and so I want to play a part of the OST of Volt.

Alec Empire

OK, OK.

Hanna Bächer

The “Victims of Authority” video.

Alec Empire

OK. The soundtrack came out as a vinyl record early on in the year, and this clip was done from footage from the film. So it’s not a scene from the film you see, it’s sort of like – I wouldn’t call it a music video, but just so you know what you’re watching, this is stuff from the movie with music from the soundtrack, but it’s actually not matched what’s happening in the film.

(music: Alec Empire – ”Victims of Authority”)

Hanna Bächer

It’s almost strangely full circle with the video that we watched in the beginning.

Alec Empire

Is it? I don’t know.

Hanna Bächer

A lot of German police uniforms in today’s talk. But that’s coincidence, because the movie is about, I think, a German police guy falling in love with the sister of a French refugee?

Alec Empire

Yeah. This is the nice way to put it. The cop is part of a raid on a refugee zone. It’s a few years into the future, this place. And he ends up getting into a fight with a refugee and kills him, and the movie is about... First he thinks he can handle this, and he’s trying to hide this from the rest of the police. But he’s very racist in the movie. Not all the police, but his team, because their job is always to control these refugees. And they can’t get any jobs and stuff, so of course there’s certain crime. So they have this very narrow view of these people who live in that zone.

The movie was shot in 2015, in the fall. I did the soundtrack last year, in May, and I think it became kind of like, I mean, people talked about it because it was the first film that had something to do with the refugee topic. It was not done while this crisis was going on. It was a little bit earlier, but I think because of that link, and also of course a lot of people were angry, some critics were saying, “Of course the police is all racist, again!” But, it’s like, that’s the story. Nobody said every policeman is racist. It’s just part of the reason why he, in the fight with the refugee, he goes that one step further and he later on actually regrets it, even though in the beginning, he felt like, “OK, well, I had to do what I had to do.” I mean, it’s more about that inner conflict, like, where do you actually draw the line? You’re part of a certain authority, you wear this uniform, you have certain orders, but you also should have some sort of responsibility for your own actions, you know? So, it’s interesting. Tarek Ehlail, the director, did this film.

Hanna Bächer

Usually when you write soundtracks you work with a finished film, not the other way around?

Alec Empire

Usually, yeah. I like it. This case, it was perfect, because they were under real time pressure, because they wanted to premiere it I think at the Berlinale, but the Munich Film Festival said, “We want this because of this theme, the topic.” So he was calling me up and said, “Actually I wanted to contact you in three months or something, but we have like five weeks, can you score the whole film?” I said, “OK, wire the money, get me Red Bull, sugar-free, and it’s gonna happen in time.” [laughs]

Hanna Bächer

You like time pressure, to work?

Alec Empire

In this case, I mean, what I like, in this case I had total freedom, and I think that’s actually good. When you know that somebody trusts you fully, and you can just completely get into the story and just write, and you don’t have to go through this whole procedure of like, “OK, maybe there’s another producer, and he thinks this is a bit too erratic.” I love it, yeah. Time is good, I think. Trying to reach something within a certain time is fun.