Unscene Berlin

Truth is like love: putting a price tag on it makes it seem... cheap. EIGHT YEARS' FREE (Scroll to Weekend Picks for the party suggestions) You wanna know one of the main benefits of checking out party recommendations on my blog? (Admittedly, I don't recommend parties as often as I used to, but bear with me please).  I don't get paid one red Euro-cent for the parties that I pick. That means you can rest assured that no cash incentive was involved in me recommending any of the following gigs - and that is a lot more than you can say for most electronic music blogs and websites on the Internet, these days. Some of those sites would probably say that I'm dumb for not capitalising on this space, maximising its traffic potential by renting my words out to hidden advertisers. They're wrong: I'm stubbornly idealistic. I believe that writing about parties is an art form - an end unto itself, not just a vehicle to fuel superstar egos in their aim of re...

Forget summer: in Berlin, the dead winter months of February & March are when the really silly season begins. At this time of year, you can see what a big part of the city's identity clubs are... and how tenuous they are, too, much like that identity (wow, how deep is that?).  When I check out the optimistically long listings on the party sites each winter  weekend, I can't help thinking that some of these places are just throwing out regular events with increasingly stranger names out of sheer bloody determination to exist and legitimize their own ephemeral, moonlit presence on this landscape.  Same goes for some of the pale & gaunt regulars who trek through the snow and the daffodils (thanks again, climate change) to get there.  In the summer, it seems all too legitimate to try and stay in Berlin all year, seeking your fortune and infamy in this city's party scene.  But come the winter, that self-assured sense of permanence goes away... taking...

Acid techno fan models his new ensemble The other day, I had a yearning for some new acid techno and started checking out various sites that have those kinds of tunes.  On one of them, I came across this line:  “Acid techno: a way of life, not a fashion statement!” For a horrible moment I imagined this meant that, somewhere in this world, legions of hipsters were actually donning acid techno costumes they'd bought at Primark and posting pics of themselves in Facebook groups, without ever having set foot in a squat party.   And maybe there are, but the above statement wasn't referring to them.  What it was referring to was the fact that the U.K. acid techno scene has always been style-free, and has stayed that way, despite the neverending growth of the fashion industry and its commodification of every other aspect of mainstream life.  (Admittedly, "it's not a fashion statement it's a lifestyle" rolls off the tongue much more easily than all tha...