Unscene Berlin

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...

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...

"Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide." I just found out that I am going to be working at the Garbicz festival this year. This is good news! I've heard a fair few people around town whinging that it's too expensive / fancy / hippy / slow mo [delete as appropriate] but I found it to be a very experiential and grown up Bacchanal. By which I mean, it focusses whatever it's good at into a high intensity beam that illuminates a very personal, but alluring vision of what openair raving could be.  It's at a really lovely location on an ancient Polish river, with azure waters that look like something from Neolithic times... or a backdrop for a Neolithic fashion shoot, if you will. There are some very decked out modern primitives in this wilderness, as my dusty photos from last year suggest.  The place has a brilliant energy that feels right for working magic of whatever kind: dancing, delirious, holistic chaos magick, but without sacri...

Ah, the 1990's... ...a time when raves were getting banned, streets were being reclaimed, guerrilla gardeners were re-sculpting urban landscapes, Chiapas was being re-taken by peaceful radicals; a time of mass squatting across every urban centre. It was also a time when half of this blog's readership was still in its diapers! That sucks for them but this Thursday, January 24th, they'll get a second chance to see what the 1990's were like at On the Radical Roots of Rave #2 .  The fact is, even with photography and hand held video cameras - not to mention CD, vinyl, tapes - my generation couldn't capture all the best parts of the 1990's. There were too many parties, riots, happenings and actions taking up our time. And remember, camera phones didn't even exist back then! But this party and exhibit on Thursday aims to share a few of the 'stroboscopic artefacts' that we managed to grab; in particular, the parts that are relevant to sound...

Throw together a building without owner, opening times without curfew, people without limits, music without definition, and you have a squat party. That pair of words conjures up more images than any two in the English language.  Crowded night buses.  Roads to nowhere. Lorries. Dogs. Queueing and smoking.  Haggling. Drinking.  Snorting.  All just a preamble to the main feature: the dancefloor, and all the subplots that spin out of control on it. A stage of pallets and speakers, set for a chemical cabaret.  The fantastical, the fanatical, the enlightened, the dejected - a lineup of gems in the rough - all take their turns and bow out.  Next up: the Old Bill. Their stony-faced dispatch enters stage right: cue first intermission break.  Floodlights glare on flattened beer cans and electrified, blinking stares.  Rolly smoke pirouettes in the air. Eventually they retreat, freeing the party. Regular scheduling resumes: heavin...

I've finally started to recover from the last two weeks' worth of parties, but not enough to actually write anything coherent about them.  And that's fine, because their stories are best told in sights ( and sounds) anyway .   Enjoy ! July 23rd 2016 - CSD   30 July 2016 - Zug Der Liebe

While I was in England recently, I heard that some anarchists in London were putting on a Fuck Parade on May the 1st (see video above).  Now, anybody who reads this blog knows that I'm well into Berlin's annual Fuck Parade .  So it seemed like good news to hear that London's black bloc anarchists decided to swipe the idea of using a techno parade as a way of challenging gentrification, and named the event after Berlin's infamous street party.  So far, so good... But after watching the video of the London Fuck Parade, it seems that the similarity between the two events doesn't go much further than the fact that they share the same name.  The Berlin version of Fuck Parade is big and radical and hard, but it's also madcap fun.  It has a stated set of politics but anyone's allowed to participate in any way that they want, as long as they're passionate about the harder musical styles being played - gabba, jungle, hard techno and acid tek. It celebrat...

Fighting for the right to live, eat, breathe... and party ... at last Saturday's demo On the surface, the Stop TTIP & CETA demo last weekend was a mass uprising in all of the usual ways: there were signs, costumes, chants and dance tunes.  People marched and made demands.  But the demo seemed like it was more than just the sum of its parts. It wasn't just because there were more people there than at any demo I've been to in Germany. Their feelings about the cause were also tangible, full of new variety and depth. They were feelings shared by people that'd never meet any other way : families, kids, teens, pensioners, working classes, black bloc anarchists, ad-hoc hippies... and that's rare in a city where people tend to plan every detail of every social encounter, from the friends that they handpick to share it to the exact second that their train returns them home.  Maybe I'm just unlucky but since leaving England, I've rarely felt a multifacet...

When: August 1, 2015. Where: All around Berlin: in the woods, in an abandoned building and a few other sites. Why: Free Open Airs Day was both a celebration of free open air techno parties in Berlin, and a protest against police repression of open air parties.  For more details about the concept, please see this post.  Who: There were a number of sound systems involved in Free Open Air Day, but this particular party was done by Zuruck Zu Den Wurzeln (Back to the Roots).  They're a popular party crew which draws hundreds of idealistic Berliners (both indigenous and imported) to dance to techno, psytrance, and tech house in the fields.  Their events are very popular because they're well-organized and can easily beat some of the clubs in the city for the quality of their lights, sound and atmosphere.  What: Atmosphere-wise, the party was safe, child-friendly, liberal and had a mix of nationalities, races, genders and ages.  The dancefl...

Illegal open air party under Warschauer Bruecke With all the hype about Zug der Liebe last weekend, I almost forgot that there's another dose of musical mischief happening this weekend.  A collective of open air party sound systems in the capital has decided to declare this Saturday August 1st ' Illegal Open Airs Day '. Illegal open air parties are a vestige of that Berlin free party tradition that started with free techno raves in the early 1990s.   The music has changed over the years, from techno to tech-house, funk, hip hop and sometimes even occasional live acts.  Berline's free open air parties aren't usually very big, loud or obnoxious- or easy to find - but they have always been incredibly popular.  Some of the more intrepid tourists seem to come here just to track them down.  But in the last couple of years, the police became so adept at shutting them down that most of the sound systems have stopped bothering organizing them altogether. ...

If you were passing through the Wiener Strasse area yesterday, you might have noticed that it was not a day for 'business as usual', down at the local pool.  Semi-nude bathers inside the pool clustered by its windowed walls to goggle at a swirling pool of dancers outside on Spreewaldplatz, making waves of the sonic kind...  Yes, that's right: the Spreewaldplatz was briefly reclaimed by an underrepresented Berlin demographic: the ravers.  Not just the people who go to raves, but those who organize them, as well: living, eating, sleeping and breathing in the liberty that is found in the city's underpopulated, undiscovered nooks and crannies. Around 90% of inner-city Berlin used to be comprised of such nooks & crannies before the relentless march of commercialization began.  So it may be fair to say that many of the people at yesterday's Reclaim the Gorli party embodied the untamed spirit that put Berlin on the map in the first place. As often reporte...