Alec Empire was born in West Berlin.
Empire started making punk music in the early 1980s. When he discovered techno, he immediately developed an affinity for it and abandoned punk at once. When he saw after a few years that most of his friends were only concerned with partying all night and did not care about what was going on in the world (which is something that Empire expected his friends to do since they lived in a seperated Berlin), he kind of set up his own, new, anarchistic music style called digital hardcore.
He gathered two of his acquaintances and set up the band Atari Teenage Riot. When they got a contract offer from a record company that gave them a high advance payment, they accepted it. After this they quickly trashed their relationship with the record company and with the advance money, Alec Empire set up Digital Hardcore Recordings.
Free to release whatever he wanted, Empire's released quite a few records to this day.