Unscene Berlin

The " Reclaim Kottbusser Tor " venue looks as good as SFB sounds Berlin's club scene may be gritty and psychedelic but it is also strangely predictable, and often awash in disco-y house sounds.  Searching for events that have an underground, experimental feeling to match their underground, experimental decor can be a lot like exploring a three-dimensional "Where's Waldo" p rint ( or maybe' you'd call it "Where's Weirdo" instead?).   When I went to my first Sounds for Berlin openair party over a year ago, I thought I'd found the kind of party crew I'd been looking for since my arrival in Berlin.  They were open-minded, openair, friendly and native to the city.  They had a high quality sound system and high-energy DJs who played an unpredictable but balanced mix of sounds: tech house, hard techno, chillout.  T here was even a bit of dark psytrance in there, somewhere.  So clearly they can walk the walk, do they talk the tal...

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...