Ferris MC

Ferris MC earned a notorious reputation among German rappers through horror-film graphics adorning his releases and through the bleak, confrontational verses housed within them. His rhymes repeatedly recount a troubled Bremen upbringing that involved an alcoholic stepfather and encounters with drugs during his school years. An early devotion to punk gradually yielded to an obsession with rap while he attended high school, where he encountered Flowin Immo and DJ Pee and together they assembled the crew F.A.B. (Freaks Association Bremen). The trio’s 1994 MZEE debut Freaks proved so potent that it shaped an entire wave of subsequent hardcore German MCs. Internal friction and ongoing substance issues caused the group to disband in 1997, prompting Ferris to relocate to Hamburg and launch a solo trajectory. There he linked with DJ Stylewarz and completed his first album, Asimetrie. Persistent drug problems severed that partnership before his second LP, Fertich!, reached stores in 2001. Audiobiografie followed in 2003, yet the devoted audience it had cultivated soon drifted away. In 2004 Ferris ventured into acting with a role in Timo Rose’s horror feature Lord of the Undead; Rose had previously issued hip-hop projects under the alias King Hannibal. The 2006 single “Düstere Legende” coincided with Ferris’s public declaration that he was stepping away from hip-hop. One year later he joined forces with producer Marc Deal to create Maniax, an electro-revival dance project steeped in the sound of the genre’s earliest recordings.