1970s and 1980s DJ Hell described his musical beginnings in an interview with
The European, telling them “I was socialized with German electronic music of the 1960s and 1970s. There were no commercial aspirations; it was all about experimentation.” Hell has worked as a DJ since 1978. Starting in 1983, he began working as a DJ at Club Libella in
Kirchweidach, Germany, near his hometown of Altenmarkt an der Alz. This would be his first residency, where he cultivated his eclectic style of mixing
New Wave,
Ska,
Punk,
Rockabilly,
Hip hop, and
Disco in the same set. Further residencies followed, at Park Café and Tanzlokal Grössenwahn in
Munich, where, as one of the first house DJs in Germany he regularly performed at house music parties. In 1987 he organized the first acid house party there, and in the same year at Grössenwahn deejayed at
Run–D.M.C.’s aftershow party. At the end of the 1980s, he developed his style at various Munich clubs and dance halls from
New Wave,
EBM,
Electro, and
Hip hop to include
House and
Techno.
1990s In the early 1990s, DJ Hell was resident DJ at Germany's first afterhours club
Babalu Club in Munich. In 1991, Hell was instrumental in establishing Peter Wacha's label Disko B, and until 1996 was closely involved as
A&R. The label's first release in 1991, Silicon Soul’s track
Who Needs Sleep Tonight was licensed by Hell, who produced a remix for the b-side:
The DJ G. Hell Remix. To sign the contract with the New York band, he flew to New York City. Disko B Records was launched for the release. Hell's first self-produced
single,
My Definition of House Music (on
R&S) became a club hit in 1992 with over 100,000 records sold, drawing recognition to DJ Hell among the first generation of Techno DJs who also released records. During his time with Disko B and until 1997, DJ Hell was also a resident DJ at
Ultraschall, Munich's first pure techno club, located on the site of the former
Munich-Riem Airport and later at the former
Pfanni factory compound
Kunstpark Ost. During the 1990s DJ Hell had further residencies in Berlin, at
E-Werk and WMF, from 1992 at
Tresor, and in the 2000s at Watergate. Parallel to his A&R work in Munich, in 1992 DJ Hell became A&R manager for the label Logic Records in
Frankfurt, and in the same year compiled the world's first trance compilation,
Logic Trance. In 1993 he lived for a year in
New York City, where was booked as a resident DJ at Limelight, together with
Jeff Mills. In 1994 DJ Hell moved to Berlin and worked for the record store
Hard Wax. Hell's debut album
Geteert & Gefedert (
Tarred & Feathered) was released on Disko B in 1994. In 1995, he moved back to
Bavaria. That same year, Hell was the only German DJ to be invited to be on a
John Peel Session, including a radio interview, in
London. The session was released that year on Disko B. In addition to his work as a DJ and producer, in 1996 he founded the label
International Deejay Gigolos in Munich, for which he served from the first day onward as the label mastermind, A&R, and art director. Parallel to managing the label, as a DJ and event organizer, Hell also curated over 40 Bavarian Gigolo Nights featuring international DJs and live bands in various clubs in Munich. During this period in the late 1990s, numerous releases on International Deejay Gigolos notably fuelled the 1980s revival in the German and international club scene, establishing DJ Hell as one of the founders of the
Electroclash subgenre. International Deejay Gigolos has released works by big names on the international Techno, House, and Electro scenes, including
Jeff Mills,
Miss Kittin &
The Hacker,
Dave Clarke,
Tiga,
Fischerspooner,
Dopplereffekt,
Vitalic, Bobby Konders,
The KLF,
Tuxedomoon, and
Laurent Garnier. According to the music magazine
De:Bug: “
Munich Machine feels like the result of a dynamic collaboration by Munich residents engaged in the club scene and who know how to work with it. Every aspect of it has been carefully crafted and sometimes it seems as if DJ Hell is using this kind of mega-mix to grow beyond himself. This is particularly evident when he mixes together very different sources.” In 1999,
Arnold Schwarzenegger sued International Deejay Gigolos for using his picture in the logo. Hell had to stop selling all records that bore the logo and pay a fine of 150,000 euros.
2000s From 2000 to 2003, he ran the disco and nightclub Villa Traunstein, located in the Bavarian town of
Traunstein, where he was responsible for the club's high-profile, international DJ bookings, including the likes of
WestBam,
Sven Väth, and
Jeff Mills. Since 2005, DJ Hell has been based in both Munich and Berlin, and moved the label office to Berlin. Since the early 2010s Hell lives again mainly in Munich and in his hometown Altenmarkt at the
Chiemsee. The
Guardian on
Teufelswerk: “With Hell acting as conductor, and Kruder, Prommer, and Roberto di Gioia playing a mixture of synths, acoustic guitars, Wurlitzers and ‘rhythm machines,’ the four sweep back and forth across Europe, mapping the psychic highways that link Kraftwerk's Düsseldorf and Jean Michel Jarre's imaginary, futuristic Paris; Pink Floyd at the UFO Club in 1966, and Café del Mar in 1987; cavernous booming dubstep nights in modern Berlin and Goblin's progressive 1970's Italy.” The countertenor and new wave singer
Klaus Nomi interpreted Henry Purcell's original composition from the opera “King Arthur” spectacularly in 1982 as an early hybrid of electronic and classical music. DJ Hell, who has admired Klaus Nomi since his early days as a DJ and has always DJ'd him, bought the rights to the original composition and released his reworked version of the song as a single on
International Deejay Gigolos in 2014. In 2015, DJ Hell gave a lecture together with Sascha Arnold at the Munich Chamber of Architects with a picture presentation about club architecture and culture in Munich during the 1970s and 1980s. In the same year, Electronic Beats by Telekom filmed a Slices documentary about DJ Hell. For the Design Hotel Flushing Meadows in Munich, DJ Hell designed one of eleven hotel rooms on the third floor in 2015. The room is designed entirely in black color and houses as a design element a life-size band of metal skeletons on keyboard, electric guitar and mic stand above the bed. For the 2015/16 winter collection of fashion designer Boris Bidjan Saberi, who now lives and works in Barcelona, DJ Hell produced the music in 2015, which can also be heard in an official promotional video by Saberi. In spring 2017, DJ Hell's fifth album
Zukunftsmusik was released. Like his studio album
Teufelswerk released eight years earlier, it was co-produced by
Peter Kruder in Vienna. On Christmas Eve 2016 appeared with
I Want U the first single release from the album. The accompanying video, produced by Hell, features animated gay comic artwork by Finnish artist
Tom of Finland, who was known for homoerotic drawings of masculine men. The press photos for the album were taken by photographer
Greg Gorman at his home in
Los Angeles. Sven Marquardt, the photographer and bouncer of the techno club
Berghain, was also involved with various photographs on DJ Hell covers of
International Deejay Gigolos. DJ Hell about
future music: “This album is largely to be understood as a homage to gay culture, which with disco, house, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and techno can be seen as the nucleus of club culture. Club culture as we know it today is based at its core on the gay house culture invented by dj Ron hardy at Chicago's Warehouse and paralleled by Larry levan at New York's Paradise Garage.” In Gerrit Starczewski's 2017 Ruhrpott road movie
Pottorginale, DJ Hell embodied a hitman. The sequel to the film, in which DJ Hell plays the pop singer Helmut, is scheduled for March 2021. At the
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen of 2017, DJ Hell's video
I Want U took second place of the "MuVi Award". The jury judged the 4-minute video: “A beautiful collaboration that elevates both DJ Hell's music and Tom of Finland's imagery to a common and higher level. Funny, sexy and intelligent in its use of graphic material, I Want U builds on a concept that is confidently sustained. The film is simple but not repetitive, using variations in the music to drive the imagery. Full of allusions to the history of the music video, this is an original look at a much-loved part of the subversive canon.”. For
Balenciaga Paris, DJ Hell produced a DJ mix for various 3D art videos:
Balenciaga Loop 05 - Nightlife and
Balenciaga Loop 06 - After Hours He also played at the 2017 & 2018 aftershow parties. The own perfume – Helmut Josef Geier – was released in 2018, under the name
DJ Hell “Techno”. It was presented at the Berlin Soho House store. "My first perfume is based mainly on incense components. It gets its freshness from citrus elements and earthy components. I can't reveal all the ingredients, but churches, like clubs, have always been meeting places for believers. I understand club music and club culture as faith, so a religion of its own.". DJ Hell composed the soundtrack for the film
Yung, which actor and director Henning Gronkowski shot in 2019. "The film," said DJ Hell in an interview with the
Frankfurter Rundschau, "portrays daily lives of girls in the Berlin party jungle, unvarnished, direct and sensitive." The soundtrack wa released on Hell's new output
The DJ Hell Experience. The film had its world premiere at the Münchner Filmtage 2019. In the late-night show
Ringlstetter (BR), DJ Hell was a guest of
Hannes Ringlstetter in September 2018.
2020–present In 2020, DJ Hell founded a new label called
The DJ Hell Experience. The Hamburg-based distributor wordandsound is responsible for distribution. For the first album released under the new label,
House Music Box, the artist
Jonathan Meese contributed a picture for the cover. The electronic music magazine FAZEMAG chose
House Music Box as the
Album of the Year 2020. The album's first video features a Hell avatar, which will also be used at festivals and shows in the future. Another collaboration with Meese is the album
Meese x Hell - Hab keine Angst, hab keine Angst, ich bin deine Angst, to be released in April 2021 by
Daniel Richter’s Buback, records Hamburg. In March 2021,
Soft Cell - Tainted Love Remix 2021 was released on
Cleopatra Records in the U.S. To the book
Mensch – Maschinen – Musik. Das Gesamtkunstwerk Kraftwerk, edited by Uwe Schütte (publication date February 2021), DJ Hell has written a detailed personal foreword. In the exhibition “Nachts. Clubkultur in München“ („Nights. Club Culture in Munich”), which the
Munich Stadtmuseum will be showing from April 2021 to January 2022, DJ Hell will play a significant role – he plans to make his record collection available to the museum for the show. The cultural-historical exhibition is dedicated to Munich's nightlife and club culture from the post-war period to the present in the form of a nocturnal foray. DJ Hell is one of the DFB ambassadors for the 2024 European Football Championship to be held in Germany, the
UEFA Euro 2024. DJ Hell is the designated curator of the nascent Museum of Modern Electronic Music (MOMEM) in
Frankfurt am Main. == Awards ==