Stephan Eicher

Stephan Eicher entered the world on August 17, 1960, and quickly became a sensation across the continent. The Swiss-born artist built a major career during the 1980s and 1990s by testing the range of his voice within electronic textures, yet as a teenager in Western Europe he had already embraced the raw energy of the punk movement that dominated the close of the 1970s. At seventeen he joined his younger brother Martin to launch the short-lived punk-techno project Grauzone, whose single “Eisbar” eventually moved close to half a million units in Germany and Switzerland. Around the same period he struck up a friendship with the girl group Liliput and crossed paths with the man who would later manage him, Martin Hess, developments that together marked the beginning of his solo path.

Eicher’s debut, Chansons Bleues, reached stores in the final months of 1983 and bore the clear imprint of New Order. One year afterward he broadened his linguistic range on the follow-up I Tell This Night, delivering songs in German, French, and English. An intensive schedule of European concerts soon lifted him into wider prominence. For the 1986 album Silence he deliberately set aside his familiar electronic palette, enlisting additional players to create a rougher, more confrontational sound. My Place carried that evolution still further; by then the singer’s longstanding admiration for the novelist Philippe Djian had begun to shape both his lyrics and his long-term artistic compass.

Entering the 1990s with four studio albums already to his credit, Eicher enjoyed genuine international stature. Engelberg, titled after a Swiss ski resort, appeared in 1991; the tracks “Hemmige” and “Dejeuner en Paix” helped drive worldwide sales to nearly two million copies. Two years later came Carcassonne, named for the historic city in southern France and again threaded with references to Djian’s writings. In 1994 Eicher performed more than one hundred concerts throughout Europe and Africa before capturing the experience on his first live recording, Non Ci Badar, Guarda E Passa. The studio album 1000 Vies followed in 1996, and Louanges arrived in 1999.