Tobias

Since 2004 Tobias. has served as the sole performing and production alias for Tobias Freund, encompassing analog acid, minimal techno, and ambient abstractions in both studio and live settings. During the 1990s and early 2000s his reputation rested chiefly on the playful trance and electro output issued as Pink Elln, several of which were co-produced with Uwe Schmidt under the Atom Heart and Atom™ names. The shift to his given name surfaced with material such as the 2006 track “Street Knowledge,” which fused minimal techno and deep house, and extended to more experimental work produced with Max Loderbauer as NSI. A longtime presence at Berghain, Tobias. has issued multiple lush, eclectic albums and EPs on the club’s Ostgut Ton label, among them the 2017 set Eyes in the Center, while also operating his own Non Standard Productions imprint.

Freund’s professional history reaches back to the 1980s, when he engineered sessions for Frank Farian, the producer behind the dance-pop acts Boney M. and Milli Vanilli. Throughout that decade he gathered technical expertise and gear, created experimental electronic and new wave music in groups including Hypnobeat and Sieg Über Die Sonne, and maintained engineering duties on assorted pop recordings. In the early 1990s he released rave tracks under the names Metazone and Phobia yet achieved wider recognition via the Pink Elln pseudonym. Under that name he supplied remixes for the industrial projects Lassigue Bendthaus (another Uwe Schmidt venture) and Bigod 20, and he also recorded trance material alongside Atom Heart and Dandy Jack. By 2000 his style had settled into a hybrid of minimal electro and ambient.

After relocating to Berlin in 2004, Freund revived Pink Elln solely for live appearances with Atom™, thereafter discarding the alias in favor of his first name. The EP Street Knowledge surfaced on Logistic Records in 2006, followed by Dial in 2007. I Can't Fight the Feeling appeared via Wagon Repair in 2008, the same year Tobias. contributed to split singles with Shed and Efdemin. Additional experimental partnerships included NSI with Max Loderbauer and Odd Machine with Schmidt and Ricardo Villalobos.

Leaning Over Backwards, his debut full-length for Ostgut Ton, arrived in 2011. A remix 12-inch and the non-album single Freeze followed in 2012; that year also saw the Mule Musiq release of the Atom™ collaboration Grand Blue, an album of piano pieces captured at a Japanese hotel. Two 2013 EPs, Physik 1 (with Atom™) and Test the West (with Margaret Dygas), preceded the second Ostgut Ton album, A Series of Shocks, in 2014. On the 2016 EP Helium Sessions and the 2017 full-length Eyes in the Center, Tobias. merged juke, drum’n’bass, and ambient techno. Around the same time he launched the improvisational project Recent Arts together with Chilean visual artist Valentina Berthelon. Archival releases arrived as 2018’s The Beginning (credited to Pink Elln) and 2019’s Studio Works 1986-1988 (issued as Tobias.), while a return to minimal techno occurred via the Atom™ collaboration Cuando. The EP 1972 appeared on Ostgut Ton in 2020.