Unscene Berlin

  Friday April 27 23:30: After a determinedly lazy day of lounging on the balcony in the sunshine, I head out to meet a friend at an invite-only party organized by her old-school circle of techno friends...  00:00 ...but first, I swing by Magdalena in Ostbahnhof.  I wanna be one of the first people at tonight's Zero 2 Nine party because they're handing out 100 free CD's.  If it's Berliners they're fishing for, they've used the perfect bait: freebies! 00:55 Shiny, new CD in hand, I leave for Kreuzberg where my friend's party is.  It's pouring rain but I'm unfazed; rain is typical weather for London in spring... summer... fall... winter...  It's one thing I can handle it with hardly any drama.  Unfortunately, one can't say the same about your average Berliner.  After being nearly run over thrice by drivers who seem to be hunting down a sacrifice to the weather gods - maybe in the hope that my squashed body will move the heavens to tur...

Overconsumption: not pretty sight unless you're hipster, right? I've read that 21 Types of Hipster article that's gone viral in Berlin's English communities the past few days.  And I can't help noticing that the definitions in there embrace pretty much everyone I see in the streets - whether I'm in London, Barcelona or Berlin.  The faux-retro truckstop caps, teamed with designer plaid shirts, teamed with H & M shades that cost ten times what they look like they're worth, teamed with Diesel skinny jeans, teamed with pre-stretched American Apparel sweaters and sloppy, scruffed name brand trainers. You could say that the hipster trend is a 'diverse' style, embracing 80s glam, punk, metal, biker, disco, hippy and goth.  Hipsters, generally speaking, are people who seem to have too many teetering piles of zany, mismatched accessories & clothing laying around their funky coversion flat, unworn.  They've gotta be blase about how...

The experience of putting on my first party in Berlin lived up to its name - Mind Smear - because it left my mind feeling pretty smeared.  Anyone who's thinking of 'making party' for the first time in Berlin should do themselves a favour and read on, to find out and what I learned from my mistakes. 1) There are no norms in Berlin's party market. I was given venue rental quotes ranging from 60 Euros to 2000 Euros per party, and the venues ranged in size anything from a 20 sq. meter cellars with leaks, to sprawling, hypermodern spaces that rivaled Tate Modern. Unless your bestie owns a cool space, expect to spend up to half of your organizing time finding a venue making it just right for the guests. Also unique to Berlin: there seemed to be no universal method of getting in touch with venues.  Some club managers are contactable by telephone, others by email, Facebook, SMS, YouTube video, telepathy, interpretive dance...  At times, I seriously considered sp...

In this interview, Mindgrrind settles the 'core' with Unscene Berlin , discussing her lov e of speedcore, splattercore, splittercore, breakcore, hardcore... basically, anything over 180 b pm! "You should never be told what you want, what to worship or who to be, yet in our society, we have been SOLD these ideals.  Do whatever makes your heart sing and sometimes it means sticking your middle finger up!" The green haired lead singer of Skat Injector is marauding around the stage with the mic, belting out a tirade of raw aural energy.   The restless crowd below her reels and ricochets off each other in a nonstop, chain-reaction of movement & sound.  To all appearances it is a punk gig, except for a few crucial details: the “stage” is actually the back of a sound system van at the Fuck Parade, one of Berlin’s biggest techno street parties.   While the drag queen's vocals belong in a grindcore band, the beats are machine-gun gabba.  Even the singer...

Abyss is the watchword for this weekend, it seems.  I blame the seasons, or rather the single season of winter which seems to have settled permanently in Berlin.  These last six weeks have illustrated exactly why the idea of global warming should leave us all cold: because, according to climatologist predictions , it's only going to warm places that don't need it - e.g. India, South America and Australia - while making Northern Europe and America colder than ever. In the face of unreliable seasonal warmth on the surface of Berlin, people seem to be instinctively retreating and burrowing deeper into the city's party abyss - maybe to search out more steady sources of thermal warmth.  (That almost sounds like a metaphor to explain why people move from mainstream to underground culture in the first place.) On Friday, Robot Army Meets Abyss mal @ About Blank.  Although I've slated its door staff on, oh, just about every single occasion that I've encountered them...