Unscene Berlin

DAVE the Drummer Breakxit's   organiser Liam always manages to put together a lineup that lures Berlin's lurking, seditious UK expats out of their various nooks and crannies around the city. His third Berlin  event  will pull together many strands of the UK's dance music underground, to produce the sonic equivalent of one of those contemporary art pieces that looks like it's exploding and coalescing, all at once. DAVE The Drummer  will be headlining, this time around. Even before the days when  Hydraulix records were sticking up at the front of everyone's DJ bags, DAVE the Drummer's reputation was already affirmed by the very full dance floors that faced him wherever he went. With an almost mischievous, straight face, he'd transform digitally altered beats into legit percussion sections, live or in the mix. Henry, as he's known by partiers and non partiers alike, lives up to his DJ name well: he's also a serious drummer  - a skill that...

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 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...

The DJ in this photo is male but females are VERY welcome to apply! Club Alien has a vacancy for the role of Musical Chaos Co-ordinator, beginning on a randomly-designated date in Spring 2013. Duration of contract will be 2 hours. Salary according to experience (this is NOT an unpaid internship!) The Role: You will be joining a team of Acid Ambassadors from London who possess a solid track record of inciting disordered euphoria at a range of vacant & derelict locations. Working alongside them, you will deliver a set of trippy rhythmic techno / breakbeats to a open-minded, wide-eyed dance floor in Berlin. The Candidate: *Will be an unpretentious, Germany-based DJ that doesn't carry any minimal tunes in her/his record bag and wouldn't wear drainpipe jeans. Ever. *Will be a coinesseur of techno, street parties, graffiti, and radical thinking. *Should ideally have been to/played at free parties before and have connections within the Berlin techno scene. *Sh...

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...