Unscene Berlin

The 25th anniversary of the 'Mauerfall' (fall of the Berlin Wall) last Sunday was in some ways similar to the original fall of the wall.  Throngs of people gathered at the old checkpoints, and all along the path of the old political barrier between east and west. It was cold and everyone was tense. But instead of release from the GDR, they were waiting for the release of a  f*** ton of glowing balloons that lined the Wall perimeter.  The release had been meant to happen at 7 p.m. sharp. It was meant to be one of those magical, cathartic moments where everyone would tear up as they looked into the night skies and watched the balloons (which symbolised bricks, apparently) drift away on clouds of helium, dissolving like the Wall itself was meant to do. But as was usual for any Fall in Berlin, it was drizzly, dark, foggy, and people were lucky if they could see from one side of the Spree to the other.   The tourists throngs seemed  enrapt by the displa...

In Berlin, I've noticed that there are a lot more references to 'acid' going around the club scene, lately... and we're not just talking about the lick n' stick party favours.  Acid is a key ingredient of musical chemi stry as well as body chem istry .  The word refers to the looping analogue riff generated by a Roland TB-303, and it's present in many styles of music , not just those with the word 'acid' in the name. In Berlin today, you're most likely to hear the 303 sound in techhouse or psytrance but plenty of other per mutations have danced their way out of the primordial soup of acid house , the sound that rerouted youth cultur es of the late 1980s and took them in a radical new direction .  Even Prodigy, a band that people don't usually think of when they're talking about acid, has also laid down distinctive and uncategorizable 303 tunes , like Claustrophic Sting .     Another name that is not usually linked to...