Unscene Berlin

Aside from the red Ganesh banner hanging over the decks, the bar in R19 is indistinguishable from the bar of any other after-hours club I've been to; think Sisyphos or Ritter Butzke at 1:00 p.m.  It's sultry, red-tinged and smoky.  The crumpled leather sofas and armchairs are full of grinning, blurry people swaying and resisting the call of gravity to assume a more horizontal position. A DJ is casually manipulating the atmosphere from an inconspicuous spot in the corner.  Tech-house beats slouch along at a sedate pace and drawling vocals are slowed to the speed of dark, cool treacle.  I am far too awake for this type of after-hours club but, luckily, R19 has an alternative variety on offer. A quickening pulse pulls me along the hall, away from the bar and into a second, bigger room.  Entering it feels like stepping into a hard trance all-dayer from the mid-nineties.  Everyone is on their feet in a fluro-washed darkness that's bubbling with spacey riffs...

I once read a column in a well-known Berlin magazine, in which the columnist attempted to review an illegal, underground venue. Though the article was well-written, the description of the venue was so vague and uninformative that I may as well have been reading an ancient Egyptian document without the aid of the Rosetta Stone. The article exemplified a dilemma that I face on a regular basis: namely, how do I report on the places I love best without giving too much away? To do so would be to expose them to the trend-hunters, thereby killing their edgy status. The conundrum of reviewing parties in Berlin is that the best ones must remain un-reviewed and unreported-on. They would be destroyed or, at the very least, seriously degraded, by the approval of self-appointed arbiters of taste (of which I am one). That's because reviews are written for people who wish to catalogue and cross-reference their pleasures in a clinical way. Meanwhile, the appeal of Berlin's best parties d...