Unscene Berlin

Here in Berlin, it was a mixed start to the #coronapocalypse, as it is affectionately known on Twitter. It was a sunny and warm-ish Saturday for the first time in ages, so everybody was out taking walks, jogging, smiling, laughing, making daisy chains, preparing altars for Summer Solstice, etc. Typical spring stuff.  But as we all learned yesterday, everything that is unnecessary for the city's running will close down next Tuesday: bars, restaurants , nightclubs (yes  even Mensch Meier ). Schools and daycare facilities will close, too. So a lot of parents are panic buying at the moment. The rest of us are collecting bottles and going on a diet until we hear more about government compensation plans. I did all my shopping the other day but today, I had to go to the shops twice to pick up a few things I forgot: once in the morning at 11 am and once at 6 pm. In the morning, everyone was happy and relatively calm, like Sainsbury's before a long bank holiday weekend. People were...

Can any democratic society live up to its claims of freedom and equality when it forces masses of people into clubs, just to express themselves? A few days ago, I watched Radical Living's video  about the endangered Berlin club scene. In the comment section, I saw someone had made a comment to the effect that the club scene here will always survive, even if it has to move to the edges of the city. That's certainly the theory that many people here seem to be working on, but experience tells me that they are probably living in la-la land. The theory that the Berlin club scene will always find a way to survive - to pull in the 'market' and meet its 'demands' because it makes so goddamned much money - rests on the presumption that the club scene is nothing but an industry. If it's an industry, so the theory goes, it should function just as well on the outskirts of town, alongside all of the other factories churning out mass-produced crap. Right? Erm...

The adjective "overrated" is often used in relation to Berlin's clubs, especially during the tourist high season . It' s the time of year when do zens of pop -up parties suddenly appear, run by peo ple who are in it for nothing but quick cash, an ego injection or the c hance to play God for a while .   To illust rate, I'm republishing this early party report written about an openair party I went to in Apri l 2011.  T he party happened on the site where Kosmonaut club now stands but it was under different management then , so any resemblance between th e old club and th e new one is purely coincidental.  B e warned: this review is so bad that it's almost good agai n (i f you know what I mean). Please don't bother reading past this point if you dis like that sort of thing !

Berlin's club scene can be a bit blah in February and that's why, this week, I'm taking my hat off to party people that are making an extra effort to keep it surreal. It was bound to happen eventually: a night fusing clubbing with opera and classical music.  This Friday all of the above will be melted down into a fluid new concept at the abandoned pool venue of Stattbad Wedding , on Gerichtstrasse.     The clinical tiles of a pool space seem ideal for an hour-long original performance entitled Insanity, a " dark, disturbing tale of a woman’s descent into madness, as she struggles to deal with a mysterious and tragic event in her past," (well, the name was kind of a giveaway).  "The timeless theme of insanity will be explored, evoking the chaos of a tortured consciousness." Sounds like the average winter day's train ride to work, but at least this one should have a better-looking crowd. The opera will feature live music by Gesualdo, Hande...

Winter is the season when Berlin gets that famous post-apocalyptic look to it:   the streets are empty, the wrecked buildings that people used to work in loom visibly over the more discreet, tidy ones they now live in; everywhere you look, the city's mottled grey shell is exposed by bare branches.   In the streets, nothing seems to move except a few furtive pedestrians, camouflaged in dark clothes that blend in with the post-industrial grime.   The crows and sparrows are silent, saving their energy to keep warm; the pigeons sip spilled beer and peck fallen drugs outside of clubs to blot out their existential despair.   Even the trains seem to have a touch of winter blues as they sluggishly creak their way between stations.  It's a bit bleak, if you get my drift. These weather conditions are perfect for checking out an exhibition like X Lab’s solo show of Ken Plotbot's work , this Saturday the 26th.  The show's “ dark nuclear graphic and post industria...

I've been getting plenty of requests for New Year's Eve tips for Berlin and have been reluctant to provide any suggestions for two simple reasons: 1) I won't be around and 2) frankly, cheap underground parties are as rare as hen's teeth at New Year's Eve.  December 31st is probably the only time of year when the average Easyjet setter is actually better off staying home, as party prices rise enough to offset any of those great deals that they fly across Europe in the hope of finding.  It's a day when buses, tents, backyards and probably even large cardboard boxes sitting unattended in alleys will suddenly be converted, with the aid of a disco ball and a bouncer, into 'venues' charging for entry. New Year's Eve (Silvester as it's known in Germany) is all about finding a place that offers the best quality of experience for the relatively high price.  The Burning Man New Year's Eve party at Urban Spree seems to cover a lot of bases.  Altho...

Banksy, ducks and the Mayan apocalypse. Just another Xmas in Berlin! I have some appalling fantastic news: there's only two days left until the 2012Apocalypse Winter Solstice!  After Friday, everybody can breathe a sigh of relief because they'll never ever have to go through Christmas again the days start getting longer!  Better yet, the End Times carnage New Year's Eve is just around the corner! Sorry for all the scratched-out phrases.  I just wasn't sure whether this week's entry should be about the surviving the end of the world or about having a 'holly jolly Christmas'.  Should I be telling readers to stock up on stollen and head for the nearest Weinachtsmarkt , or to stock up on ammo and head for the nearest air-raid shelter?  Should everybody be singing "peace on earth and good will to all" or screaming, "OMFG the aliens just touched down we're all gonna dieeee"?   Sigh... every year writing these Christmas previews...

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....

" A journey thru techno, techhouse, minimal noize and industrial techdub... " When I get to M-Bia on Sunday morning it's late by yesterday's standards, and early by today's.   Half a dozen door staff are sitting outside, smiling tiredly and ushering me past the door, out of the chilly sunshine.  A very different reception than you'd get at Berghain, Kater Holzig, Salon Zur Wilden Renate. Like the inside of an industrial air vent, everything's warm, dark and metallic on the other side of that golden door.  Aside from the warmth, the darkness and the odd metallic gleam, no other features are visible till my eyes adjust.  Even the faces behind the decks are spectral half-visages, silhouetted from beneath by a smouldering orange glow. The dancefloor has black tiles, black tables, dark risers, dark walls, and the only light comes in gaseous spumes, descending like inverted flames from a dozen mini-spots that are dotted around the ceiling.  I don...

The annual demo against Mediaspree is tomorrow, starting at Warschauer Strasse U/S-Bahn at 14:00. In case you are new to Berlin, Mediaspree is the development project which is threatening all Spreeside clubs. It has already been responsible for the closure of 'legendary' club Bar 25 and local favourite Kiki Blofeld, and it is currently endangering all riverside clubs from Jannovitzbrücke to Ostkreuz (the stretch of river where many of Berlin's best  & most popular venues are located). In a public referendum on the project, more than 80 percent of Kreuzberg/Friedrichshain residents rejected it. The annual demonstration is a reiteration of Berlin's opposition to Mediaspree,which is being pushed ahead regardless of public opinion. When completed, Mediaspree will restrict access to the river, close clubs and raise living costs for the entire area with fast-tracked gentrification. So if you live in Berlin or just love partying here, come along! Click here fo...

It was a love of exploring unbroken tracts of urban jungle that got me going to parties in the first place, and a similar impulse seems to bring oodles of techno travelers to this city each summer, looking for uncharted party territory to explore. In a city the size of Berlin (890-odd square kilometers according to Wikipedia) finding out about all the little offbeat parties that pop up each weekend like magic mushrooms in a marsh - and then disappear just as quickly - can be an epic mission, even when you're only searching online! Take this Trulov party listing that I found for Saturday on Resident Advisor. The venue name was new to me, so I checked it out on Google Maps. It turns out that it's actually somewhere northeast of Hamburg . This can only mean one of two things: a) Berlin's city limits have recently been redrawn to include everything from here to the Baltic Sea (you go offline for one week in this city and everything changes) or b) that Trul...

Let me just start by saying that Berlin's party scene is not generally a druggy place. Unlike other cities with a 24 hour party scene, people in this city don't usually arm themselves with anything much harder than beer and ganja for a night (or day) out. That's one of the things I love about going out in Berlin: there's no pressure to be "out of it" in order to get into the music. In other major cities I've been to, people tend to use chemicals to force themselves into a higher or lower state, robot-like, in order to conform to strict opening times whereas Berliners are free to just ride with their own rhythms, whether they're going out at 5 p.m., 11:00 p.m. or 11:00 a.m. Still, it's not all that unusual to find someone in among all those tipsy, low-key smokers who is taking something harder. I was just reading on Spiegel.de that the rates of Meth use are going up each year in Germany (they jumped by 19.6% in 2011 alone). Personally, I ...

Read it  Auf Deusche At a club last weekend, I was talking to a Goa fan about some of the stuff we'd lost and found at parties in the past. "One night in the Berghain, I actually lost my shoes," he said. "Yes. One of them fell off on the dancefloor & I could not find it again so I took the other one off. Then that shoe also became lost." You may well ask how someone could lose his shoes on the dancefloor but really, what kind of person finds shoes on the dancefloor and then keeps them? The Goa fan continued: "I was walking the whole night with no shoes in this club and nothing bad happened to me. Then, in the morning, one of the staff from the Berghain saw me and said, 'You cannot be here without shoes.' And he threw me out." Wow. So Berghain really refuses to roll out the red carpet for anyone, even a shoeless Joe who might cut his feet without it! Losing shoes is surprisingly common occurence, though; my friend Katja also l...