Unscene Berlin

I once read a column in a well-known Berlin magazine, in which the columnist attempted to review an illegal, underground venue. Though the article was well-written, the description of the venue was so vague and uninformative that I may as well have been reading an ancient Egyptian document without the aid of the Rosetta Stone. The article exemplified a dilemma that I face on a regular basis: namely, how do I report on the places I love best without giving too much away? To do so would be to expose them to the trend-hunters, thereby killing their edgy status. The conundrum of reviewing parties in Berlin is that the best ones must remain un-reviewed and unreported-on. They would be destroyed or, at the very least, seriously degraded, by the approval of self-appointed arbiters of taste (of which I am one). That's because reviews are written for people who wish to catalogue and cross-reference their pleasures in a clinical way. Meanwhile, the appeal of Berlin's best parties d...

Techno Deluge   At Sisyphos there is plenty to look at: fleshy drapes; giant glittering baubles; trellis towers; doll's heads; motion-sensitive light sprays in the halls.  Passing by crowds of people bedecked by all the above trappings in the outdoor yard, I head to the dark inside. The first room that I blunder into is saloon bar full of dancing lights, wafting ribbons, swaying bodies. Beneath the deco, I see the black ribs of a warehouse jutting in the dark like the backstage area of a theatrical set. Later, my friends and I search out a spot nearer to the techno that's booming down the hall from the Hammahalle.  We find a second room where our personal sphere is reduced to a crawl-space. The unyielding mass of people drawn towards its sweaty beat turn this cavern into a human labyrinth.  Normally that's the sort of vibe we go in for... but it feels off in here, somehow. It's oversubscribed, this word of mouth location. We're pushed back and forth thr...