Ellen Allien

For all the extraterrestrial associations invited by her stage name, Ellen Fraatz’s diverse musical activities as Ellen Allien are rooted in a particular place here on Earth. That’s the city of Berlin, where Fraatz was born and raised and where she developed her musical identity during the underground electronic scene that flourished after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Her own profile rose through the ‘90s thanks to her DJ residencies at now-legendary clubs like Tresor and the singles and remixes that established her sleek, hard-edged synthesis of minimal techno, dance music, and electro-pop. She experienced a wider breakthrough with 2001’s Stadtkind, a thrilling debut album on which she paid homage to her now-unified hometown. Over the ensuing decades, Fraatz has refined and expanded her vision of electronic music via her DJ sets at clubs and festivals worldwide, on remixes and collaborations such as her team-up with Apparat on 2006’s Orchestra of Bubbles, and through the stream of releases on her labels, BPitch Control and UFO Inc.