The stories of other important spaces, which all deserve their own histories, are folded into that as well: Maria am Ostbahnhof, WMF, Raum18, Chez Jacki, and other spaces that never had names or permits.īack then, I was living in Wedding near Seestraße, which has now been my neighborhood for over 15 years. These parties were all focused on one thing: A kind of naive and forward-thinking eclecticism, experimenting with various trajectories of the hardcore continuum and derivates of soundsystem culture, all driven by the promises of social utopias inherent to club culture. All you need to know is that I worked my way up from occasionally working the door at a long forgotten avant-garde music venue called Zentrale Randlage in Prenzlauer Berg (they had concerts where people played folk music in the nude, a soundsystem that would overheat and drop out if people raved too hard, and a dog that would always sleep in the corner of the club on a sofa, no matter how loud the music got) to plugging off-kilter bangers from behind the counter of Dense Records, Berlin’s best record store at that time, to organizing parties (co-financed by the generosity of Germany’s student loan system). It’s awesome.Įxciting things happened in those first years, but since a majority of them were spent on me slowly turning from a small town kid with a chinstrap and an awful haircut into an OK-ish DJ and event organizer, I’ll skip that part. In case you don’t know what breakcore is: Imagine Aphex Twin, but on rancid LSD, with gabber kick drums and a rhythm that sounds like a drum machine spat out by a black hole. Funnily enough, this event was organized by club transmediale, now CTM Festival, which I co-curate. I came to Berlin in March of 2005 in a beaten up Mazda, a few days short of my 22nd birthday-with no plan, no money, and no real idea what I wanted from life, except for what I had seen on a poster on the internet a few months prior, advertising a breakcore party called Wasted. It all happened in the late spring of 2011, May 20th to be precise. Tl dr: It’s a story in which I organized a pretty damn good party that helped kickstart one of the most iconic music platforms of the last decade, and as strange as it sounds, I have Moby to thank for it. It’s a story about the incredible things that were once possible in this city that we all love so much, achieved by incredible people who, against all odds or better judgement, decided to pour their heart-blood into something most people would consider odd, an impractical hobby, or simply a nuisance (especially if they happen to be the neighbors.) It’s a story of a Berlin that doesn’t really exist anymore, of spaces that weren’t really meant to be and are impossible now… It takes place in a Berlin which I only experienced the tail end of, one that was just coming out of the confusion and the possibilities of post-reunification Germany. ![]() Not to say that this story is one of them, but it’s one of those anecdotes you’re compelled to tell whenever there’s a chance to speak about “that one time”-the kind of story that, despite a large cast of its characters having slowly faded out from the storyteller’s life, and some of the finer details having inevitably fallen between the synaptic cracks of memory-still feels as exhilarating as it felt when it happened.Ī short disclaimer though: This isn’t completely my own story. And sometimes the soundtrack is damn fucking perfect as well. ![]() That time in their life where everything seamlessly falls into place, when the stars align, and not only does it feel good, it feels exactly the way it was always meant to be. Everyone has their moment, their day, their year.
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