Mark Reeder is a Berlin-based music producer from Manchester, who moved to West-Berlin in the late 1970s. He became active in the Berlin underground music scene, serving first as Joy Division’s then Factory Records Man in Berlin. In the 1980s, he became the Manager and live-sound engineer for mädchenorchestra Malaria! and formed his own bands; Die Unbekannten and Shark Vegas.
Throughout the cold-war decade, he organised TV programmes about the city’s music scene and smuggled music into the East, culminating in two top-secret gigs for popular West-German punk band Die Toten Hosen in a Church, which subtly contributed to the cultural shifts that would eventually help initiate the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was classified as Subversiv-Dekadent by the East German State Security (Stasi).
In late 1989, Reeder was invited to produce what would become the last album of Communist East Germany (Torture by Die Vision) for the State-owned record label AMIGA, and therefore he became the first, last and consequently the only Westerner to ever have this opportunity.
In December of 1990, he started the first independent Techno-Trance record label in post-wall East Berlin; MFS (Masterminded For Success) launching the careers of Cosmic Baby, Ellen Allien, Mijk van Dijk or Paul van Dyk.
As a producer and composer of film music, he has scored movies such as Can Creativity Save the World? or Nekromantik2. As a remixer, he has worked with artists like New Order, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, John Foxx, Yello, or Die Toten Hosen, and has meanwhile become a respected figure in Berlin’s current underground music scene through the documentary film; B-Movie: Lust & Sound in West-Berlin, which depicts his life in the city during the cold-war.
