Dour festival 12 13 14 15 JULY 2012 plain de la machine à feu dour

'Futurist' might be the title of his latest record, but it's a term you could apply as much to Alec Empire himself. Ever since he began his first transmissions from the Berlin techno underground in 1992, his career has been chronicled by a desire to push things forward. Often at relentless speed and volume, always with an intensity few have matched, never mind maintained, and only on his terms - terms which have traversed, incidentally, some wildly divergent terrain over the years. His accelerated fusion of punk distortion with breakbeat kinetics launched a new genre and record label - Digital Hardcore, his solo projects have embraced sources as diverse as electronic noise, musique concrete, hypervelocity techno and guitar mayhem, while the superheated anarcho-punk assaults of Atari Teenage Riot were possibly the noisiest recipients of a gold disc in the States. And surely no-one else has had their remix services enlisted by Bjork, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Slayer?
(Dour Festival 2005)