Alec Empire

The idea gave me the enthusiasm to be able to make music completely independently of the other 'traitors'! In the summer of 1988 in Nice, I dragged the homosexual couple with whom I lived to my first acid partyI did not dance but was moved because it sounded somewhat like 'atonal pop' music. Very psychedelic. I returned home and was the only one at my school listening to acid. I started working in order to buy a sampler. At the end of the 1980s, the Left in Germany was only a laughable imitation of its former 1970's self. For me Personally, acid had an important political significance. Acid meant total protest, not letting anything in from the outside, no political lies, no promotion and therefore immune from the system.

Then the Wall fell in 1989 and the Left seemed to be completely done for. Cuba had collapsed, and so had Eastern Europe. In the new, large Germany, very right-wing, nationalist values were once again held up for praise. The Gulf War showed how powerful the media really was and how dreadfully this power was abused around the world. Terms like 'global village', 'cyberspace' and 'Internet' suddenly symbolised a total control coming from the state and industry. I never read Neuromancer to the end. Timothy Leary made himself look stupid at the Berlin Cyberspace Congress. The new Berlin looked as if it had just woken up from it's hibernation in 1945. Everyone hated communists, and more German flags could be seen than ever. On the other side, there were techno parties in the cellars of East Berlin's condemned houses where the people were mostly unemployed kids from the East and the gay scene from the West. It was genuinely different music and at this time was being rejected by many who considered themselves open minded.. It was at this time, as speed and heroin took the place of ecstasy, that I first played live at Tekknozid. That was in April 1991. And then Underground Resistance came to Berlin...