Once the Melbourne club scene patriarch behind the EBM-Industrial/ dark mecca weekly club night Power Station, Kris Baha now resides in Berlin crafting the output of the label and telling tales from the lost party along.
Much time has passed since Kris Baha swapped the parched red earth and searing midday sun of the Australian outback for the brutalist buildings, communist-era apartment blocks and slate-grey skies of East Berlin. Now firmly embedded in his adopted city, Baha bas become known for a trademark DJ and production style inspired by sun-baked hallucinatory visions and the clandestine, concrete-clad industrial hum of the metropolis after dark.
Where once he was resident behind the decks at Power Station, a weekly EBM and industrial night in Melbourne, Baha is now a regular fixture at celebrated Berlin institutions CockTail D’Amore and Sameheads. There, and during guest spots elsewhere across the World, he dives deep into the void, returning to deliver extended sets of obscure, otherworldly machine music driven by emotion and mood, be it energy, joy, lust or sadness. The same rules apply to his hardware-driven, performance-based live shows, which were initially inspired by his love for the pioneering gigs of the first industrial era.
When not channeling the musical spirits to inspire dancers, Baha can be found lurking in the shadows of his secretive studio space. There, he performs mixing, mastering and remix duties for the likes of Die Wilde Jagd, Novo Line, The TWINS, Khidija, Eva Geist, Boys Noize, Bell Towers, Joakim and Red Axes. There has also been a noted collaboration with fellow Aussie outcast Dreems as Die Orangen, with the two joining forces for a series of thrillingly wayward “krautback” releases on Multi-Culti.
Yet it’s his own skewed, mutant dancefloor productions for which Baha is undoubtedly best known. Inhibiting their own sound space between industrial, EBM, minimal wave, early ‘90s IDM and krautrock, Baha’s releases have so far featured on such record labels as Bahnsteig 23, Pinkman, CockTail D’Amore Music, She Lost Kontrol and Power Station, the imprint he initiated back in 2015. We can expect more in the months and years ahead, including a debut album that distills his distinctive musical vision into palatable, marketable chunks. That is assuming, of course, that Baha would ever want to sugar coat his delightfully druggy, dystopian and energetic artistic ethos.
