Paul Kalkbrenner

German electronic musician and producer Paul Kalkbrenner is a techno legend who starred in and soundtracked the 2008 cult film Berlin Calling. • Born in what was then East Germany, Kalkbrenner was 13 when Germany reunified in 1990. He soon immersed himself in the burgeoning techno scene that swept through Berlin. • Kalkbrenner began releasing music in the late ’90s as Paul dB+. He put out two singles and two EPs under that name before he began using his real name in 2000. • He released two full-length albums in 2001, the double LP Superimpose and Zeit. • Following Kalkbrenner’s 2004 LP Self, the German film director Hannes Stöhr asked Kalkbrenner to do the soundtrack for Berlin Calling, about a fictional DJ who loses himself in the scene. Stöhr ended up casting Kalkbrenner in the lead role in the 2008 movie. The soundtrack single “Sky and Sand” spent a record 129 weeks on the German singles chart. • In 2010, he launched Paul Kalkbrenner Musik to release his own albums, starting with 2011’s Icke Weider. The LP reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Germany Albums chart. • Kalkbrenner’s chart-topping 2015 album 7 included the track “Feed Your Head,” which samples Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 classic “White Rabbit.” • In 2017, Kalkbrenner released Back to the Future, a three-volume mix series exploring “his personal history” of the rise of techno in Berlin in the early ’90s. • He reached the Top 10 again in 2018 with Parts of Life.