Ellen Allien’s Hill of Sound
Ellen Allien is an electronic musician, d.j., and producer who has adopted the mantle “the matriarch of Berlin techno.” In 1992, she was one of the first women to play a set at Bunker, known as the “hardest club on Earth,” situated in a former Nazi bomb shelter (which now, completing the cycle, houses a private art collection). She also had residencies at the foundational clubs E-Werk and Tresor. She launched her own label, BPitch Control, in 1999, and continues to make records and to stage parties around the world, as a committed maven of the nocturnal underground.
So it was beguiling to see her out in the sunlight on East Ninety-first Street on a recent afternoon, walking past the Spence School for girls, and close enough to the Russian consulate to hit it with a currywurst. She was with a friend named Markus Stich; they started a fashion line together twenty years ago. Allien had on black running shoes, billowy black hakama pants, and a black T-shirt that read “Sexy Genius.” She had a silver stud between her front teeth and blond pigtails and assorted tattoos. Stich—dark beard, curly hair—wore custom-cut denim and a purse over his shoulder.
Allien was in town to launch a new album, “New Life,” and to perform at Public Records, in Gowanus, but she’d been lured to the Upper East Side to see two exhibits at the Cooper Hewitt museum: one of industrial photography (machines, masses of shiny metal) and another called “Art of Noise,” full of bygone devices for listening to music. Together, the exhibits approximated a strand of techno’s origins.
“So someone was living here, in this house?” she said, as they entered the museum, which was formerly Andrew Carnegie’s mansion. A local tried to explain the concept of the robber baron. “This man was so rich, ja?”
In 2016, Allien performed a free concert in Cuba. “They all thought because I’m a d.j. I was born rich,” she said. “Keyboards, equipment, records, everything is so expensive. But you don’t have to be rich to be a musician.”
Allien, born Ellen Fraatz, grew up in West Berlin, before the fall of the Wall. Her father left when she was two, and so she and a sister were reared by her mother, who worked in social services and often left them home alone.
“My mom got us an electric organ,” Allien said. “I was singing and trying to find the notes. Wasn’t correct always, but it was fun. It is where my hobby started. I was, like, six or seven. I was listening to a lot of American music. My mother was listening to Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens. Also Nina Hagen, an important singer from the East. I listened to Michael Jackson, ABBA, all this pop music on TV.” She went on, “I remember the eighties. I felt like I was in a cage, because West Berlin was surrounded. I could hear shooting in the forests, military exercises.” In 1988, while spending an uncaged year in London, she came across the acid-house scene and heard electronic music for the first time. Soon after she returned to Berlin, the Wall came down, and the music and the ethos took root in the derelict tracts of the newly unified city. She made a life of it.
Techno wasn’t like rock or hip-hop; women weren’t so widely overlooked or scorned. “The scene was very queer. The women were very respected in Germany, because it was all women after the war,” she said. “My favorite d.j.s are women.”
Upstairs in the Carnegie mansion, Allien and Stich peered at old stereo equipment. A 1970 Brionvega cable radio receiver, like a silver cake box with knobs, stopped her cold. “I want to touch it,” she said. She leaned in toward an egg-white 1963 Dieter Rams radio-and-phonograph combo. “That’s an eye-catcher. I used to see it in the secondhand shops.”
Downstairs, in Carnegie’s wood-panelled library, an artist named Devon Turnbull had set up a “listening room,” with a handmade stereo system at one end. Allien and Stich sat on a bench in front of gigantic speakers, out of which came lush, hypnotic minimalist music.
“Steve Reich,” Stich said. “ ‘Music for 18 Musicians.’ I love this one. Very genius.” They listened intently. After ten minutes, they stood. A woman by the door gasped: “Ellen Allien! Oh, my God, I can’t believe you’re here.” Her name was Ruyin, and she was going to Allien’s gig the following night. She asked Stich to take a photo of them together.
When they’d parted, Allien said, “I think I’m going to start my set tomorrow with Steve Reich. Something to open the heart and to open the brain. It’s like climbing a hill of sound.” ♦