Alec Empire (Alexander Wilke) was born in 1972 in West Berlin.
At the age of ten he was already a street hero of breakdancing.
Empire formed a punk band called Die Kinder, then started listening to
classical music and finally began to experiment with guitar and electronics.
After German reunification,
the stereotypical teenage rebel (and anarchist) found relief in the
raves of East Berlin's underground scene, far removed from West Germany's
commercial rave scene. He first played live at "Tekknozid" in April 1991.
Atari Teenage Riot was started in 1992 when Carl Crack (MC, from Swaziland),
Alec Empire (programming, shouts, drums and bass) and Hanin Elias
(vocals, of Syrian origins),
decided to revolt against the state of the techno scene and launch a creative
bybrid of industrial, metal and electronica, which they defined
(quote) "digital hardcore".
Their singles and EPs were as uncompromising and ultra-aggresive as their
manifestos:
Hetzjagd AufNazis (Hunt Down The Nazis, 1992),
Not Your Business (Phonogram, 1993), which includes
the epic riff of Atari Teenage Riot,
the childish spasm of Not Your Business (Phonogram, 1993),
the metal-industrial fit of Into The Death,
and Raverbashing,
Kids R United (Phonogram, 1993), with the nihilistic sermons
Kids Are United (Phonogram, 1993) and
Deutschland (has gotta die!) (performed with punk's typical
amateurish and noisy verve, augmented with loops and drum-machine),
the singles Raverbashing (DHR, 1994) and
the propulsive, booming techno of Speed (DHR, 1995), replete with
male rap, girlish female counterpoint and male choir,
were mostly boycotted by labels, stores, radio stations.
For those who had missed the singles,
the lyrics on their first album, Delete Yourself (DHR, 1995),
recorded between october 1993 and february 1994,
sounded like they were coming straight out of 1977 punk-rock.
The album's sound, a very noisy and chaotic mix of guitar samples,
distorted breakbeats, 909, manga samples and shouting, and its political
overtones
(with the declared goal of "not to reform the system, to destroy the system"),
virtually reinvented the mission of dance music in the wake of the triumph of
western-style capitalistic values.
The pounding, unrelenting, visceral call to arms of Start The Riot and
the epileptic orgy of title-track, accompanied by a generous selection
of the previous singles, terrorized discos and radio stations around Germany.
Empire's solo career, in the meantime, was much more prolific, including:
the single Tripmen (Force Inc, 1991), the EPs
Yobot (Force Inc, 1992), SuEcide (Force Inc, 1992), with
Terror Worldwide, Orgasm Addict and
the anthemic SuEcide,
the EP SuEcide Pt 2 (Force Inc, 1992),
the singles Das Duell (Force Inc, 1993) and
Bass Terror (Force Inc, 1993),
the EPs Limited Edition 1 (Force Inc, 1993) and
Limited Edition 2 (Force Inc, 1994),
the EP Pulse Code (Mille Plateaux, 1994), etc.
These early recordings, which will be partially compiled on
Limited Editions 1990-94 (Mille Plateaux, 1994),
show a techno artist still searching for his mission, but
Generation Star Wars (Mille Plateaux, 1994), the first proper
Alec Empire album, displayed an angry young man of techno and hip hop intent
on deconstructing the genres through a manic use of distorted breakbeats
and electronic noise.
The ten-minute Lash the 90ties opens with buzzing electronics and celestial drones before unleashing a storm of feral beats that slowly relaxes revealing
an undercurrent of African tom-toms but only to be swallowed into a black hole of distortions.
The album is a collection of musical "gags", the techno and playful equivalent of
Brian Eno's austere Before and After Science:
the propulsive drum'n'bass for electric shocks of Microchipkinder,
the frenzied cacophony of New Acid,
the galactic ping-pong of Stahl & Blausaure,
the irregular tribal beat wrapped into ghostly drones of Maschinenvolk,
the pounding surf dance of Sonyprotitutes,
the tenuous synth-pop of Smack
with orgiastic Caribbean echoes in Blutrote Nacht ueber Berlin.
On the other hand, Empire indulges in moments of absolute quiet such as
the sinister ambient music of 13465 and
the whispered chamber electronic music of Pussy Heroin.
The limit of this operation is that the pieces don't evolve. Each is a simple
Moebius loop that keeps repeating its puzzling shape.
The deluge continued with the EPs
Death (1994), containing the savage
A1 We All Die,
Suicide and
Bang Your Head,
The Destroyer (Riot Beats, 1994), containing
the hysterical Burn Babylon Burn,
The Destroyer Pt 2 (Riot Beats, 1994), containing only
Identity (5:20) and
Nightmare (6:08),
Digital Hardcore (1994), containing
Hardcore Gal,
Pleasure Is Our Business and
Destroyer Pt 2,
Berlin Sky (Analogue Records, 1995),
Squeeze The Trigger (1996), which was credited to ECP and signals the
transition from drum'n'bass to breakcore in
Squeeze The Trigger and contains the abrasive Silver Pills,
and The Wipe Out (Chrome, 1996), with
Two Steps Beyond The Terror.
He then released
the eight-song mini-album Jaguar (Force Inc, 1996), containing
The Past Stays and
Interplanetary Disco Rhythm,
and the 13-song compilation album
Squeeze The Trigger (Digital Hardcore, 1997), that compiles
several EPs as well as rarities like
the drumming orgy Euphoric (a 1995 single), the single The Destroyer (1996) and the robotic The Drum And The Bass (1996), which appeared on a multi-artist compilation.
The album The Destroyer (Digital Hardcore, 1996)
contains the EP Death and was
reissued in 1998 without four tracks and with three new tracks (Hard Like It's A Pose, What Are You Talking About, Down With The Shit).
This album is a milestone in the extreme drum'n'bass sound known as "drill and bass". Empire simply applied the ATR ethics
to individual, artistic, creative art. Part creative rhythms and part
political ego, the album created a personality cult of sorts for the
angry young man of techno.
Chaotic and wild pieces like The Peak
rip apart the tender flesh of dance music
with the shocking and blind hatred of a terrorist while
Empire's guitar playing, inspired by thrash-metal and aggro,
weds maliciously with the electronic bombast of the tracks.
Empire unleashes sheer musical terror:
the breathlessly epileptic I Don't Care What Happens,
the obsessive and distorted Fire Bombing,
the massive jackhammer dance Nobody Gets Out Alive,
the demented wall of beats and noise of My Face Would Crack,
and the thundering industrial music of Heartbeat That Isn't There.
The unusually sophisticated Low On Ice (Mille Plateaux, 1995) included the sketchy syncopated single 22:24, but the rest was more in the vein of Brian Eno's and Aphex Twin's most glacial ambient music:
the pulsating organic material of 37.2 Pt.1, the
cryptic subsonic events of Low on Ice,
the psychedelic reverbed dub hypnosis of Metall Dub,
the ghostly void of 2572, etc.
The only drawback is that each track has little development, something that
Eno can turn into amazement but not everybody can.
Empire's Les Etoiles Des Filles Mortes (Mille Plateaux, 1996),
a fully electronic
displayed the influence of electronic
pioneers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, perhaps
an attempt at carving from himself a space in the pantheon of chamber electronic music.
Naive and chaotic compositions like
La Consequence c'est la Revolte and
La Ville des Filles Mortes feel like tributes to
early experiments of electronic music.
There is even a symphonic and operatic Opus 28.
Alas, there is little to salvage here.
Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5 (Mille Plateaux, 1996), and its slower, relaxed,
self-indulging dance music, employed slightly out-of-time beats to
disorient the listener, yielding a sort of cubistic, psychedelic downtempo.
Rather than the doom and gloom of most of his work, this album display a
playful and witty mood.
The clownish electronic poem Walk the Apocalypse coexists with
the spaced-out intermezzo Get Some
and the awkward lounge-hop hybrid Slowly Falling in Love.
The ebullient breakcore I'm Gonna Die If I Fall Asleep Again stands out
in terms of energy, but the core of the album is anchored to jazz music, one
way or another:
the lazy rollicking jazz fanfare God Told Me How to Kiss,
the dub-tinged funk-jazz of My Funk Is Useless,
and especially the abrasive accelerated soul-jazz of Chilling Through the Lives.
Then ATR released the EP with Sick To Death (DHR, 1997), an inferior
work but boasting the supersonic title-track,
and their second album, The Future of War (DHR, 1997).
Not much had changed, as the disc was still dominated by songs like
The Future of War,
Heatwave, Fuck All and P.R.E.S.S., i.e.
wild, hard-driving punk-rock bacchanals, the rhythm is devastatingly loud
and frantic, Elias still screams like Exene Cervenka on speed and
the others concoct ferocious choirs.
Outside the canon, the heavily distorted Death Star
and, above all,
the hip-hop hurricane Destroy 2000 Years Of Culture, with heavy-metal
riffing and loud drumming, half Public Enemy and half Run DMC,
prove that Empire does not rely on only one trick.
If the result has less impact than the debut, it is only because the debut
also included so many of the early singles.
The best of ATR's repertory was then compiled on
Burn, Berlin, Burn (Grand Royal, 1997), which introduced a much wider
audience to the band's criminal career.
In June of 1997, ATR picked up their fourth member, Nic Endo, a
young Japanese-American who specializes in noises.
She is one of the reasons why 60 Seconds Wipeout (DHR, 1999) wants to
sound even harder that its predecessors.
But the tracks do not strike you as fresh and powerful. Empire and his cohorts
are stuck in the time warp of Western Decay (the anthem) and
Revolution Action (the riff). Guest contributions dilute instead of
compress the energy. The extended mixes display Empire's acquired mastery
at studio production, but are a far cry from his early rage.
In the meantime, Empire also released
We Punk Einheit (Digital Hardcore, 1999), credited to the
Nintendo Teenage Robots and entirely composed from samples of videogame music.
The Geist of Alec Empire (Geist, 1997) is a three-disc set collecting
material from Alec Empire's five LPs recorded for Mille Plateaux between 1990 and 1996:
four tracks from Limited Editions 1990-94,
five from Generation Star Wars, five tracks from
Low On Ice, three tracks from
Les Etoiles Des Filles Mortes,
six tracks from Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5 (1996)
five tracks from compilations, and four unreleased tracks.
Alec Empire, Techno Animal's Kevin Martin
recorded together
The Curse of the Golden Vampire (DHR, 1998),
a nightmarish experiment in post-jazz electronica.
The highlight is the pounding eight-minute maelstrom Caucasian Deathmask, possibly Empire's masterpiece, but Escape the Earth is no less
threatening and damaging, and the
nine-minute cyclone
Ultrasonic Meltdown
is a concentrate of fear and angst.
The sound is thick and heavy, with many undercurrents
colliding to create the sense of a detonation.
The sidereal journey of Anti-Matter, that ejects scores of toxic radiations in all directions,
and the catastrophic tribal war dance Kamikaze Space Programme,
complete a harrowing fresco of an alternative reality.
Carl Crack released only one solo album, Black Ark (1998).
Alec Empire did not collaborate to the second
Curse of the Golden Vampire album,
Mass Destruction (2003).
Atari Teenage Riot's
Live At Brixton Academy (1999) contained a 26-minute electronic
improvisation.
Alec Empire's Miss Black America (DHR, 1999) does not display the
violence of Atari Teenage Riot or The Destroyer. Empire is busy
reinventing himself as a genius of electronica, with mixed results.
The album returns Empire to his middleground, the
slower, atmospheric variations on Atari's music. Unfortunately, the album's
few good ideas are not fully realized, possibly because the album was recorded
too soon (or too quickly).
On her first solo, In Flames (DHR, 2000),
singer Hanin Elias sets the angry young woman's lyrics of
Girl Serial Killer and In Flames to a futuristic soundscape,
sounding like a Bjork who joined
a guerrilla movement.
Rage (DHR, 2001) is a single recorded by Atari Teenage Riot with Tom
Morello (Rage Against The Machine) on guitar.
Alec Empire's Intelligence And Sacrifice (Santeria, 2002)
is a double album whose two discs are devoted to different styles.
The first half is a set of ferocious,
desperate and brutal techno-hardcore songs,
starting with the unbridled destructive jackhammer of Path of Destruction
and peaking with the cannibal heavy-metal riff of Killing Machine,
sometimes reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails (The Ride,
Addicted To You,
Everything Starts With a Fuck)
and in effect borderline Ministry-grade
(New World Order),
and sometimes positively hardcore punk (Intelligence and Sacrifice),
with a feverish
instrumental intermezzo (the feverish Buried Alive) and
the ghostly And Never Be Found.
New World Order caps this first disc with a
ten-minute New World Order Finale that plunges into pure distorted
ear-splitting noise.
The second disc of the album is devoted to expansive and loose
soundscapes with more than a nod to acid-rock and free-jazz.
The tour de force of the album (and of Empire's entire career) is the 30-minute syncopated and grating machine ride of 2641998 which after 18 minutes starts sputtering and dissolves in a cloud of radioactive steam. By comparison,
the impressionist doodling of The Cat Women of the Moon is a relaxing moment.
This disc also toys with the dadaistic breakcore ballet Two Turntables and a Moog and with the
bombastic and cubistic variation on synth-pop of Electric Bodyrock.
There is much that is redundant, notably the chamber electronic music a` la Les Etoiles Des Filles Mortes, and the songs are unusually verbose for an artist who always favored the instrumental format, but the whole is imposing, the
artist's true testament.
Redefine the Enemy (Digital Hardcore, 2003) collects rarities.
Hanin Elias' solo album No Games No Fun (Fatal Rec, 2003)
is old-fashioned disco-punk bordering on synth-pop.
Live CBGB's NYC 1998 (DHR, 2004) documents a performance with
Merzbow.
Alec Empire's Futurist (DHR, 2005) harks back to the age of aggro
and industrial metal
(Nine Inch Nails, Ministry)
with little imagination.
Empire's
The Golden Foretaste of Heaven (Eat Your Heart Out, 2007) harks back
to synth-pop, as if each new solo album was meant as a tribute to a different genre of his youth.
After an eleven-year hiatus (due to the death of
Carl Crack in 2001),
Atari Teenage Riot's Is This Hyperreal (2011) tried to update their
digital agit-prop to the 21st century in grenade-rants like
Activate, but fared much better when trying new forms of sound art like
in
Digital Decay and especially in Collapse of History (pop refrain
and musique concrete).
Empire returned with
Death Rays (2024), which is mostly taken by the 33-minute title-track.
