Ellen Allien grew up feeling surrounded by the wall. Border controls on Sunday excursions, the rummaging through bags, the military. It was scary. And the quote “all quiet on the western front” still didn't really apply, as lots of things were hap¬pening that wouldn't have been possible anywhere else. At the time, the island of West Berlin was a desti¬nation for creative minds in search of alternatives. Music was and still is her outlet. Alongside tinkling on the electric organ, teaching herself how to read notes and her jukebox with a collection of singles in her room, her ears were first intrigued by the revolution of Neue Deutsche Welle. With time, she mixed her first tapes and suddenly became part of the emerging Berlin techno scene, which started out in empty industrial buildings, houses and cellars. Ellen became Ellen Allien.
Later, Ellen had her own radio show on Kiss FM, worked at the Delirium record store and founded her first label, Braincandy. It seemed as if music had swallowed her whole. With Braincan¬dy, she made a serious attempt at releasing the kind of abstract techno she herself liked best. She had had enough of compromising.
The closing down of the first big Berlin techno clubs was a setback for the scene, though Ellen Allien inter¬preted it as a sign to get something new going in the midst of disorientation. The party series BPitch Control proved to be a good start. Later, Allien felt the urge to hang onto the music played at these parties, to materialize it. And so she founded BPitch Control Records, which to this day is going strong.
For Ellen as a producer, music is a playback of her emotions and moods. She teases them out of her with alter¬nating technical devices. Music becomes a chronicle, each album is a work from a period of her life, which grounds her after the stress of DJ-jetting. Albums, to her, are like diaries. With her first album “Stadtkind” she wanted to express her close relationship with the city she lived in. It was like an explosion. “Stadtkind” was her homage to Berlin. The testing, work and experimentation with the structures and the sound spectrum of electronic music then quickly became more and more crucial for her. She used her various compilations and remixes to beam herself into the musical cosmos. On her next album, “Berlinette”, she processed what she had experienced after the release of “Stadtkind”. It was like a flash of lightning, she was everywhere and everyone around her was euphoric and supportive. “Berlinette” illustrates all that and it is also her very personal discourse on what is possible in the world of pop music and abstract sounds. Then, Allien released her third album, “Thrills”. It moved back and forth be¬tween constant excitement and playing the arp 2600 and other analogue instruments. In 2006, Apparat and Ellen decided to do an album together. They simply went into Apparat’s studio and had a great time - looking over the roof tops of berlin in winter, playing around on different instruments and synths, trying things out. This May, her latest album „Dust“ has been released.
