Unscene Berlin

Radikal Guru We only dropped in to Dub der guten Hoffnung at Subland to take a quick look, which is exactly how crazy nights usually start.  My friend had never been to the venue in the industrial Lichtenberg/Friedrichshain borderland and I decided that he had to check it out. "Where are you taking me?" he squeaked as we turned off of Gurtelstrasse and down a street that seemed to be made entirely of eroded pavements, ragged brickwork, rusting gates and graffitti.  I laughed evilly.  After a few minutes, he seemed about to make a break for it but just then, and with perfect timing, the venue appeared.  As we walked alongside it, the audible bass coming through the wall started to calm my friend.  I pointed to an iron-barred grill at street level with ghostly blue light glowing through it. "That's where the party is," I said, and his face started going pale all over again.    It was all I could do to drag him through the club gate and int...

A few weeks back I got an email from a reader asking for recomendations of a "few nice bars with good techy house tunes with a bit minimalistic sounds".  I sent them to Farbfernseher .   It was only after doing that that I realized I haven't actually been to FF yet, despite hearing rave reviews about it over the past couple of years.  The club is centrally located on Skalitzer Strasse, Kreuzberg, and it is better known than the place that I usually try to write about on this blog.  (Maybe that's why I never went; not enough of a challenge?). In the interest of keeping readers up to speed on the state of Berlin clubland I grabbed a friend and went down to Kreuzberg to check this Colour TV (which is what Farbfernseher translates to) place out. It was a rainy Friday night when we arrived but we didn't have to wait in the line too  long.  The security did hum and haw a bit before letting us in, even though it was still early and we had guest list entry....

Dance music's 2 choices: sell its soul to the Devil or die? by Julian Dourado www.juliandourado.co.uk I often get accused of taking clubbing too seriously but that's simply not true.  I find clubbing fun - and, at times, funny - but serious? Don't make me laugh (pardon the pun). In a club, I know I can go through the motions of change but that's all. No matter how far I get, I know that at some point, the lights will go up, the bouncer will shepherd me out the door, the floor will be swept and all traces of whatever transformation I experienced there will be removed. The club is not a community center, after all: it's a product and as such, it needs to be consistent. Any alterations by its users have to be removed, its original shape restored, before it can be re-packaged and re-sold. How could somebody who is committed to real change take that seriously? A recent article about the crisis of creativity in dance music made it clear to me that some DJs and...

I thought that my previous Preview would sum up the first two weeks  in November quite neatly.  Well apparently, I thought wrong!  Late additions to this weekend's party recommendations have been pouring in through my wireless router so fast that I think it's actually starting to melt... kind of like my brain, which has been working overtime to keep up. Experimental dub techno will join forces with wobbling, twisted vocals and confuse everybody in the room as one half of the Swedish duo Telebild takes to the decks tonight, at  Du Alter Schweder in Eschloraque. That should make for a good talking point - not that it's generally difficult to  talk to strangers and this comfy alt.Berlin lounge bar.  The flow of unpretentious out-of-towners is pretty constant, thanks to the Monster Kabinett underground-tourist-attraction that's situated next door.   Tomorrow, Zero2Nine will be taking over Cube Club in Neukölln for a night of pristinely erratic beat...

...but does it love me? I went to an underground techno party a while back.  There were a lot of guys there.  Guys playing great music, guys working on the door, guys hanging out by the decks and bar and even guys dancing.   I wanted to dance too, but I had a problem focusing on the music because I was distracted by the dance floor's only decoration: an inflatable sex doll hanging by her neck with her wrists tied behind her back.   At the majority of underground techno parties I've been to, decor was of the bring-your-own variety; whatever was there represented the views of people in the crowd.   After a few tracks, I decided that I didn't like the view represented by whoever had  brought this inflatable murder victim.   Their view seemed to be, “Violence against women is a sort-of sexy joke”.   Maybe a very angry man would agree that it is, but most women would not.  They would tell you that a cloud of potential violence already hangs ...

Computers, technology, music and counterculture have been intertwined since the days of rave (and earlier).  Last week's Open Source Music Party showed that their respective evolutionary steps continue to complement one another, like free-form dancers. Governments and big business have attempted to chaperone that dance through the privatization of the Internet and the aggressive-ization of Western piracy laws. Like a bad Sheriff in a Western, they mostly have their own good in mind: greater control all things digital allows them to vet new ideas and movements for subversiveness, weed out potential competitors and harness creative energy for the purposes of financial 'progress'. Open source music is about freeing those same energies for the greater goal of creative progress. The resourceful and versatile people behind the Retune Open Source Music Party have been keeping one step ahead of the legal and financial stumbling blocks that the Powers That Be have thrown...