music

Techno City Berlin

Berlin is “poor, but sexy“ Mayor Klaus Wowereit once said. Since then this soundbite has served as the spot-on description of the situation of the German capital.

Berlin is in debt to the tune of 61 billion Euro, unemployment is far above the German average, as is the number of those on social welfare. Nevertheless, in recent years the city has developed into a creative metropolis of world renown. Even in Tokyo and New York Berlin is regarded as cool, it has meanwhile become a city of fashion and the arts that sends impulses throughout the world. It is as a party city and trademark for electronic dance music, however, that Berlin is simply unbeatable.

Economic factor, cultural asset, location advantage

Tresor

Night life here is vibrant, diverse, sometimes even excessive. Parties that don’t end the next morning but go on until the next evening are not infrequent. Party tourists arrive on no-frills flights to trawl through Berlin’s clubs over the weekend. English, Spanish, Italian and French are to be heard in the night-life scene just as often as German. The lobby association of Berlin’s club operators Club Commission points out that the city’s clubs have long since morphed from dimly-lit dives to become “an industry, an economic factor, a social institution, a cultural asset, a location advantage.”

Vast network

Moreover the city boasts a vast network of small record companies. Deejays, record shops and producers as well as the most important German scene media Groove and De.Bug have settled in Berlin, often criss-crossing to form a tangled web. For example, Club Berghain meanwhile operates its own label Ostgut Ton, the record shop Hardwax emerged from a bubble of various labels such as Basic Replay and Basic Channel. Its operators Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald are, in turn, the worldwide-acclaimed producers of Dub-Techno that works with effects and reverb similar to the Jamaican Dub. Berlin Dub-Techno has long since become a trademark sound of international renown.

The fall of the Wall finally made Berlin the capital city of electronic music with a creative potential rivalled only by the famous music city of London. Other German cities that were once important in the electronic music scene, such as Frankfurt, Cologne and Hamburg, have long been eclipsed by Berlin. Labels such as Gigolo records from Munich, Kanzleramt from Frankfurt or Areal and Karaoke Kalk from Cologne have moved to the capital. The deejays Hell from Munich, Eric D Clark from Cologne and Heiko Laux from Frankfurt are all focussed on Berlin or have actually taken up full-time residence in the capital.

The clubs

The former Tresor

In the venues that emerged in East Berlin following German reunification music and dance cultures were able to develop in the early 1990s in the then still new techno scene that were unparalleled elsewhere in the world. In buildings where the ownership was still a matter of dispute people got together for illegal parties. A lot of fun could be had for next-to-no money. No wonder that even today the most important clubs are still to be found in the east: Watergate and 103 at the Oberbaumbrücke, Berghain in Friedrichshain, Weekend at Alexanderplatz, the former Tresor, which has meanwhile moved, in Leipzigerstraße. Soon another large club Rechenzentrum, will be opened in the east of the city. This feeling of having “risen from the ruins”, as an early techno-sampler from the Berlin Tresor label named itself, still pervades the scene as a myth and a point of origin.

Magnet Berlin

Techno and club culture have made Berlin a cosmopolitan city. From the very beginning the techno scene was internationally oriented. As a club and label Tresor offered producers and deejays from Detroit, who were regarded as the inventors of Techno, unimagined possibilities. Just as in the 1950s American jazz musicians, who found no acclaim in their own country, moved to Paris where they were celebrated as stars, the techno artists from Detroit were revered in Berlin while they were unknown in the States. And at some point the Americans began to move to Germany. Word soon spread around the world of the chances offered in Berlin, a city where the cost of living was, moreover, enticingly low.

Meanwhile deejays and producers are flocking from all over the world to the city on the River Spree. Many of those who were attracted in the beginning by Berlin’s flair have now become a formative element of its fascination, for example Jason Forrest. Under his own name and under the pseudonym Donna Summer he is regarded as one of the leading representatives of the so-called Breakcore, a fast and wild variety of techno. He now runs his own label Cock Rock Disco. Jason Forrest is a good example of an incomer who came here because of Berlin, but who also wants to change the city. “I’m driven by the idea of ecstasy,” he says, “and for this Berlin is simply the right city at the moment.” With Birthday Party he has recently conceived his own party series with which he wants to satisfy his search for ecstasy.

Electronic music from Berlin shines like a lighthouse on the international scene, luring deejays and producers from all over the world to Germany’s capital. It’s a little bit like the Hollywood effect. Anyone wanting to hit the big-time as an actor goes to the place where the stars already live. And many of the techno luminaries live in Berlin. Westbam and Paul van Dyk, German star deejays, but also Sasu Ripatti from Finland, who became famous under the pseudonym Vladislav Delay. Or Ricardo Villalobos, who moved to Berlin from Chile, and who is regarded by quite a few people as the most exciting deejay and producer worldwide. Then Richie Hawtin, who was born in England and grew up nearby Detroit, a pioneer of so-called minimal techno that focuses on sophisticated sound constructions rather than dramatic effects. This list could be continued ad infinitum.

However, among the cities vying for pride of place in the electronic music scene a new rival for Berlin has recently emerged: Paris. Since Daft Punk France’s capital has also become a scene metropolis. The Canadian Gonzales has meanwhile moved there, as has the part-time Berliner Miss Kitti and the Londoner Jamie Lidell. For these deejays and producers life among the other deejays and producers in Berlin had finally become, as they say, simply too normal.