Episode 1: Punk, Techno and Protest with Alec Empire

Atari Teenage Riot was one of Berlin’s most incendiary groups during its late ’90s / early ’00s heyday. They took electronic music’s building blocks and gleefully deconstructed them, turning jungle into what frontman Alec Empire called “digital hardcore.” On this episode of Berlin Zwanzig – the first in the series – Vivian Host sits down with Empire to discuss how ATR’s “Revolution Action” came to be and why Berlin in the '90s felt a little bit like the end of the world.

Om Podcasten

The history of Berlin music in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s is well documented. Punk, new wave, acid house; the fall of the Berlin wall and the stellar rise of techno. By the end of the millennium, more than a million people raved at the infamous Love Parade events every year. Dance music had arrived. But then what happened? Who are the people and what are the sounds that shaped the Berlin we know today? To celebrate 20 years of Red Bull Music Academy, Berlin Zwanzig – “Berlin Twenty” in English – explores 20 songs that have defined Berlin’s musical landscape from 1998 to 2018, by way of interviews between Red Bull Radio’s Vivian Host and the artists, journalists and scene stalwarts who bore witness to this fertile period in the city’s musical history.