Ekkehard Ehlers (born 1974 in Frankfurt am Main) is an artist working in the field of electronic music. In addition to his solo career, he has recorded under the monikers Auch, Betrieb and Ferdinand Fehlers and as a member of the duo Autopoesies and his band März. A BBC reviewer wrote of Ehlers music: Ehlers' music toys with your perceptions a little, opening up a space to think
Ehlers became interested in aesthetic theory, particularly the work of Theodor Adorno, as a university student in Frankfurt. He began working with Sebastian Meissner as Autopoieses in the late 1990s. Autopoieses was in part about the recontextualization of samples, and the duo released their well-received debut record exploring these ideas in 1999 on Mille Plateaux. Ehlers' tested the solo waters with minimal house released as Auch and Betrieb from 2000 to 2005 on Force Inc. and Klang. In 2000 Ehlers released his first solo album under his own name, the dark and abstract Betrieb. Constructed primarily of manipulated samples of Arnold Schönberg and Charles Ives, Betrieb is steeped in theory, as evidenced by the Ehlers-penned liner notes.