Fall Preview: A Walk in the Dark

Cube Club

I just love this time of year: Hallowe'en, Guy Fawkes, roasting chestnuts, bonfires and fallen leaves painting the pavement yellow; it's as if the last sunlight of the year is being combusted all at once, in a flare of brilliance.  From the start of December  it's lights out in the Northern Hemisphere for a couple of months, so we better enjoy these burnished last days when we can be outside without thinking of nothing else except how to get back inside.  Here are some tips for doing that in the coming weeks.

Tonight, Friday October 26th is Switch Technique at Subland a night  of no-skool techno and more.  "Serenading the undead with dissonant offense until the early hours of the morning is what Skank, Ugly Funk and Subland do best" so dust off Orpheus' lyre and get down there, already.

Also tonight Oct. 26 there's a party at Heroes in Neukölln.  If you join the Facebook event page you get into this 2 room party for 3 euros.  Room one plays Witchhouse, glitch hop and trip hop.  Room two has horror films and visuals for people with strong guts. There is on-site face painting, if any of the viewers from Room 2 fancy a kind of gory ASOS makeover.

Toothfairyz Vendetta Groovez at Liquid Sky Berlin's secret eastern headquarters on Saturday Oct. 27th.  The lineup is "hard dark technodub / tekgrunge & industrial acid from berlins underground label djungle fever".  I've recently listened my way through about 50 tracks from Liquid Sky and they seem like self-assured surgeons of the electronic sound, grafting together different styles seamlessly to produce something stronger, more intelligent for us to dance to.   Dr. Frankenstein, eat your heart out.  

Onyx Ashanti

Tomorrow there is also Retune Open Source Music Festival at Krach  Studio in Kreuzberg, where you can "get lost in ambient sounds and dance to live-produced rhythms, and then take a look at the code and schematics that powered their creations, to remix or learn from yourself."  One of the highlights will be Onyx Ashanti, a bionic musician who has been "augmenting himself with open source software."  Awesome.

Sunday October 28th is Sameheads' Dead Famous Fancy Dress Party from 11 a.m. until they pass out (at which point, a swarm of undead paparazzi will undoubtedly swoop in to capture their shame on film).  But I'm curious as to why they've imported regular sausages and bacon (which are available in Berlin) for their breakfast fry fry-up, but not the vegelicious Quorn sausages and bacon (which are not).  Vegetarians get homesick too, you know!

October 31st is the Purge Hallowe'en party in Cube Club, which is costume-made for this sort of event: picture a vast bunker of granite and steel with crusty-Goth decor a-la Slimelight and you're there.  N.U. Unruh from Einsturzende Neubaten will be there pounding on "a ritual drum installation".  Mindpirates will be curating their very own haunted house, which should feature creatures far creepier than the peeled-grape-eyeballs and spaghetti-worms that the teachers used to 'horrify'  us with at the school's annual Haunted House. If  that doesn't spook you then maybe industrial punk artist Deathface will do the trick.

November 2nd is the Freaqwenz Fest at Brunnen 70, a night of full-on freak-quencies.   "Artists from different styles will play mechanical hardware techno/acid, deep mind diving electro, maniac dark ambient/drone, ultra funky dubstep, massive mutant drum n bass and raw breakcore from the guts."  Normally I'd have labeled this as a night of obscure electronica but in this entry it seems like it's just par for the course!

Same night is Gegen Masks, which will be headlined by Adam X this time around, setting the tone for a night of super-hot techno.  I expect that pool to fill up with hyperthermic dancers pretty quick... which might not be a bad thing in the psychosexual sweat lodge of the Kit Kat Club.

November 8th is Andere Bewegung an alternative street art show at ZMF  "The works on show are radically different form [sic] the one-liners, adbusting and soft porn pouts that are typical of the Graffiti scene."  Cue knowing laughter from anyone who's been following the development of Berlin's street art scene.  Want an idea what to expect?  Then look no further than the poster for Purge's Hallowe'en special on this page, which was designed by Ben Spalding, one of the three featured artists.

And on November 9th is a bass-heavy party by Hell Drop who say, "We go hard.  There's no slowing down the tempo or turning down the volume. Full speed ahead, from Dubstep to Drum'n'Bass to Breakcore and all the styles mentioned above. Limits? Not for us."

Let us be the judge of that!