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All Music Guide:
A purveyor of digital manipulations of existing music, Ekkehard Ehlers released his debut, Betrieb, in 2000. The record drastically manipulates samples from such early 20th century composers as Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives, Ehlers seeing each piece as a closed system with which to experiment. He has worked on a trilogy of mini-albums on which he assumes the spirit of great artists from the past and applies it to electronics. The first in this series was Ekkehard Ehlers Plays Robert Johnson followed by Ekkehard Ehlers Plays Albert Ayler, on which he manipulated compositions for cello. The final record in the trilogy was Ekkehard Ehlers Plays John Cassavetes. With Stephan Mathieu, he recorded Heroin. In addition, he has recorded under the alias Auch, as well as with the duo Autopoesies and the group März.
Wikipedia:
Ekkehard Ehlers (born 1974 in Frankfurt am Main) is an artist working in the field of electronic music. In addition to his solo career, he has recorded under the monikers Auch, Betrieb and Ferdinand Fehlers and as a member of the duo Autopoesies and his band März. A BBC reviewer wrote of Ehlers music: Ehlers' music toys with your perceptions a little, opening up a space to think
Ehlers became interested in aesthetic theory, particularly the work of Theodor Adorno, as a university student in Frankfurt. He began working with Sebastian Meissner as Autopoieses in the late 1990s. Autopoieses was in part about the recontextualization of samples, and the duo released their well-received debut record exploring these ideas in 1999 on Mille Plateaux. Ehlers' tested the solo waters with minimal house released as Auch and Betrieb from 2000 to 2005 on Force Inc. and Klang. In 2000 Ehlers released his first solo album under his own name, the dark and abstract Betrieb. Constructed primarily of manipulated samples of Arnold Schönberg and Charles Ives, Betrieb is steeped in theory, as evidenced by the Ehlers-penned liner notes.
In 2001, Ehlers began recording a series of singles to serve as tributes to some of his aesthetic heroes. These singles, which included "Ekkehard Ehlers Plays Cornelius Cardew" and "Ekkehard Ehlers Plays John Cassavetes" were ultimately gathered together on the 2002 album Plays. This release brought Ehlers notoriety outside of experimental electronic music circles. He followed it with the far more abstract Politik Braucht Keinen Feind in 2003, and then with A Life Without Fear, which incorporated blues in a typically oblique way, in 2006.
Since 2000 he started working on ballet scores for the choreographers William Forsythe and later Christoph Winkler and theater music for Ulrich Rasche.
He remixed the Red Hot Chili Peppers' single Californication and collaborated with the band on a couple of their live sets. Two live recordings have been made called, Tuesday Night in Berlin and Thursday Night in Berlin. The remixed Californication and the 14 minute improvisation jam Tuesday Night in Berlin can be found on the second version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Fortune Faded single. The nearly 30 minute Thursday Night In Berlin has not been released officially although a bootleg has recently leaked onto the Internet.
