Unscene Berlin

Last Friday, my friend Julian and I went to Atonal experimental music festival, which is starting to become an annual tradition. We saw about seven acts there. The whole night was amazing but just the first act alone cast a long shadow over the rest of what we saw. A duo called Belief Defect was just starting when we walked into that cavern of sound, a venue hewn out of the disused energy plant in Koepernickerstrasse that also houses Tresor. The soaring ceilings of Kraftwerk and the muted air had left some unsettling vestiges of a cathedral behind, but with the aid of intense visuals, the place was transformed into something more like a mystic temple. Their performance was designed to elude description with words, but I'll try! The music was a layering of ambient and industrial sounds, agitating people like molecules in the petri dish to shift and bounce. Flickering red interference patterns blended with the ambient smoke. Rorschach faces shifted in the wind. Eventually, ...

Yesterday, the weather was sunny and mild with a light breeze: perfect conditions for making a few waves about the upcoming G20 events in Berlin and Hamburg. The activist group Top Berlin organized a boat protest, " They Call It Partnership, We Call It Hell ",  to help raise public awareness about the hypocrisy behind two major G20 events that are due to take place in Germany this summer: the African Partnership conference happening in Berlin on June 12-13th, and the G20 conference happening in Hamburg on July 7-8th. Thankfully, cruising from Rummelsburger Bucht to Goerlitzer Park along the Spree's placid waters wasn't hellish at all. It was almost a trip to heaven, with smooth sailing almost all the way. Things got choppy at one point as a couple of police boats pulled up alongside us, but apparently they were just there to make we were safe and sound. I guess some pirates had been sighted in the area...? Not all boat trips can happen under such favourable...

The other day, I came across a report that the FBI released in 2002. It described a wave of deadly and random public attacks by 'lone wolf' shooters that had spread across the U.S. during the 1990s . The report had found that all these attacks had had several features in common:     •     They were rarely sudden, impulsive acts.     •     Most attackers did not threaten their targets directly prior to advancing the attack.     •     There was no accurate or useful profile of [people] who engaged in targeted violence.      •     Most attackers engaged in some behaviour prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help.     •     Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack.     •     Most attackers had access to a...

I've worked in tourism for most of my time here, and I've found that most people under the age of 35 who come to Berlin are coming here for the underground culture or street culture.  For 363 days of the year, they really do struggle to find it, but on the last day of April and first day of May, the entire southeast side of the city magically sheds its pretentious, stylish veneer and the underground breaks through the surface. You still have to know where to look for open air parties and, in some areas, their underground vibe tends to be diluted or even washed away altogether by the consumerist masses and vendors hawking tacky, overpriced party wares (see also: the MyFest) but the underground can be found fairly easily by anyone just stumbling around town, assuming they stumble far enough. There's a lot of chaff mixed in with the wheat, so to speak, so be persistent until you find it whatever sound or atmosphere you're looking for! May Day is a day when even the...

We shouldn't be surprised that a celebration that can be linked with both Taurus and Mithras - two Anatolian deities - is a big deal in Berlin's favourite Turkish district. But few people seem to realize that there is any deeper connection between them. In this article, I explain how the seeds of the May Day rituals we know and love today were sown in ancient Turkey.  When it comes to May Day in Berlin, the connections between the holiday and the city's Turkish population seem like they are mostly incidental. The aged, cynical patriarchs of the Turkish community seem reluctant to deal with the drunken tourist crowd, even as they desperately compete to entice it into their shops and restaurants to spend, spend, spend. But the Turkish community may well have more of a right than some Germans do to take more of an interest in May Day; after all, its connection to the spring holiday stretches back far beyond the Kreuzberg riots of the 1980's. In fact, it stretches b...

It's March and I'm too tired to stay up all night, aren't you? That's what makes winter & spring such a great time to explore Berlin's afterhour scenes... Same Bitches @ OHM DJ Handmade plays regularly at Same Bitches @ OHM Each time the door cracks open it admits some light, along with a few bodies from the huddle by the cash desk outside. Their shadows quickly dissolve into the dark sound chamber, wading into the music like ducks into water. Tiled walls and low ceilings gleam with damp in the retired bathhouse, making each watery analogy I dream up seem even more appropriate: people don't come here just to listen to the music, they come here to swim in it. The rhythm of the waves is being controlled by DJ Handmade who's playing sublime banging mix of techno, tribal house, hard house, acid techno, acid house... Far from sounding like a mishmash, though, these tunes are lined up with an intuition that makes them all seem part of a single...

Hard to remember that fact in February though, isn't it? Winter in Berlin means grey skies, grey streets and a grey-black mood. But at least we have our cameras and videos to remember the summer by, eh?  Just imagine this: up until colour photography started being widely used, even the memories that people used to keep of this city on film were grey .  That meant they weren't even able to escape into a vision of the summer that had been (and hopefully would be again) like we can. So we should probably all take a second to be thankful for our smartphones, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube - and for Blogger of course! Technology's transformed the camera since the black n' white days, and made it loads more accommodating to the mind reels of memories that all Berliners collect, to bursting point, each summer. There's never enough time to process all these memories at the time, so why not use the winter lull to try and catch up and make sen...