Alien Nation were originally a duo, formed from the remaining remnants of Shark Vegas, by Mark Reeder and Leo Walter.
They both decided to create a new electronic acid-house dance project after Shark Vegas split, and they saw this as an opportunity to inject some of their ideas and feelings into the sound of Alien Nation.
Mark and Leo had always been inspired by underground club dance music and during their trip to USA to play at the Danceteria with Shark Vegas, the high point of their trip culminated in a visit to see Larry Levan DJing at the legendary Paradise Garage.
Their production and mixing was very New York influenced (although it actually sounded nothing at all like NYC) by artists such as Larry Levan, Francois Kevorkian or Shep Pettibone.
The first Alien Nation release, was more like a LSD style trippy, yet very confused, acid-house track, called "House in the Desert" which was released on their own label "Orgon Records" in 1988, and later, an outtake from their session appeared on Dimitri Hagemann's BIG SEX record labels first release, the "Acid Generation" compilation.
Their early experiments with reel-to-reel tapes, early samplers and analogue synthesisers, gave rise to their second trippy single "Travis" which contained a strange mix of religious Byzantine vocals, house beats, analogue sequences and chopped-up-by-hand tape samples.
Indeed, the radio edit of Travis contained an edited version of over 70 literally cut slices of reel-to-reel tape.
Notorious Berlin photographer and publisher, Carlos Alberto Heinz, decided he really liked the experimental wooden sound of the tracks, so much so, he decided to release it, although Mark and Leo had only intended the track to be a demo-test for themselves, just to see how far they could take an idea.
Carlos formed his own label especially for the project, Preset Records.
The single "Travis" was released on "Preset" and Mark and author Dave Rimmer designed the artwork for the cover.
Needless to say, due to Carlos's lack of experience at actually running a record label, the single disappeared without trace and rumours abounded that hundreds of boxes of the vinyl were actually hidden in Dimitri's celler.
During the summer of 1989, Mark had been commissioned to produce an album for indie band "Die Vision" in East Berlin and had run into problems (after the bands drummer walked out of the studio on the first day of recording).
In an attempt to solve the situation, Mark and Leo sat up all night writing and programming their own drum computer, so the band could complete their recording session. However, that wasnt all, once the drum patterns were completed, the drum computer then had to be smuggled into East Berlin!
A few months after the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, they returned to their own studio, to work on an idea that they had been nurturing for a while after Leo had acquired a new sampler.
Undeterred by the lack of success of "Travis", their next project was the ecologically friendly love song "Lovers of the World" which had originally been intended to be a "Shark Vegas" track.
Leo, Mark and Carlos collectively recorded at Vielklang Studios in early 1990 with sound engineer Georg Kaleve during Mark's days off between the mixing sessions of the "Die Vision" album Torture.
This time the song was a much better composition and its charming poppy character impressed former Depeche Mode producer Gareth Jones so much, that he asked if he could make a remix and a new radio edit, and from the session he also made 2 more trancier dance remixes, together with Stefan Fischer (formally of Berlin based electronic project "Fisherman's Friend").
Alien Nation also had made themselves a longer trippier and trancier version of the track, which was another confused mixture of different musical styles, all jumbled up into one track and featured guitars by Ralf Leeman and Fred Thurley.
It was originally expected that this single too would be released on Preset, but Carlos had meanwhile closed his label and as Mark had recently formed his own label "MFS - Masterminded For Success" in December 1990 "Lovers of the World" was eventually released on MFS in early 1991.
Mark adapted the single's sleeve design from an idea he had originally submitted for the cover artwork design for Dave Rimmer's book, "Once Upon A Time In The East", which used socialistic imagery taken from photos he had made while travelling throughout communist Eastern Europe.
"Lovers of the World" was also the first MFS single to use the word trance in the title of the one of the trippier mixes (Tranceformed) and thus it was probably one of the first trance records.
Even though the vocal version was more a pop track than a techno-trance track, it was warmly received, even being voted as single of the month in one of Germany's leading dance-music magazines of the time, "Cut".
Paul van Dyk also used the beginning of one of the mixes, as the intro to his first DJ mix-compilation "X-Mix 1 - The MFS Trip" which was also released on MFS, in late summer of 1993.
In 1998 Reeder formed the short lived project "Ten Forward" together with Chris Zippel and Patrick Ense for one single and a remix of Denki Groove.
Alien Nation returned to being a duo, after Carlos was brutally murdered in December 2001. Unfortunately, his case remains unsolved to this day.
