Dominik Eulberg

Dominik Eulberg’s music fuses the digital precision of minimal techno with the fantastical forms of the natural world. Born in 1978 in the Westerwald, a forested region in Western Germany, Eulberg grew up immersed in nature, in a home with no television. At 15, he heard electronic music for the first time and soon bought his own synthesizers, recording the sounds of insects to mix with his rudimentary productions. Eulberg went on to study ecology and worked as a park ranger in parallel with his early years as an electronic musician. His 2004 debut album, appropriately, is called Flora & Fauna, and the names of animals frequently appear in his track titles (like “Die Rotbauchunken Vom Tegernsee,” a reference to the European fire-bellied toad). His crisp sound design made him a darling of the minimal scene in the 2000s, but his music always stood out from that of his peers, distinguished by its unusually complex rhythm programming and brightly optimistic melodies. Over the years, Eulberg has doled out big-room techno bangers for Sven Väth’s Cocoon Recordings label and crafted Erik Satie remixes for Deutsche Grammofon, but what holds it all together is the sense that music, like the natural world, is a living thing.