One of the best, and most famous, club rooms in the world. Upstairs at Watergate (Falckensteinstr. 49) with it's iconic LED lit ceiling
There's probably only one airport in the world (Ed - Ibiza too!!) where upon arrival you find flyers promoting DJ Rush in between leaflets advertising museums and galleries. Welcome to Germany's techno-loving capital.
Once in two halves, this city has united artistic minds and revellers the world over. After all, who doesn't agree that the combination of cheap rent, solid clubs and affordable beer is the way forward if you want to make a living from creativity? From Watergate to Weekend, its reputation as a mean, lean, deep four four machine precedes. So why would someone visit for the first time and want to be disappointed?
Give us back our musicians, illustrators and producers. It takes a brave soul to relocate and assimilate in a foreign city. But you need real courage to shout out: “enough is enough”. The reverse Deutsche Diaspora has impacted two effects on Western Europe. Firstly, and particularly electronically, fewer and fewer tune and tastemakers are sticking around at home. Secondly, and most devastatingly, recent years have seen far too much techno try and emulate the sound most commonly associated with Berlin.
Of course this could have been avoided. Had Barcelona's council engineered a low cost of living perhaps everyone would be keeping it Catalan. The same goes for most similar towns. That said, it's difficult to imagine such extensive promotion of culture and creativity on the part of a local government, if its administrative area hadn't been split into two soon after war tore it apart, preventing decades of major investment and re-development. As a suburban resident explained over dinner: “Frankfurt is the financial centre, most industry is based in the south. What could Berlin be, other than a place of art and expression?”
Artistic, and creative haven, East Berlin has a lot of concrete
In our mind's eye it could be much more. Pretentious to the point of sickness, cliquey, and full of people with angular hair cuts, tight jeans and a face that says “fuck you, my job is to look like this”. In short, like every other cool place in the world, it would be difficult to imagine such coolness not having killed off what made it cool in the first place (see - East London). This is, after all, some time after the water began boiling.
So what did happen on our fateful weekend? Well, there were no bouts of rage, and no random attacks on stylistically aware migrant DJs. In fact, save for a few rather rude transport and café workers, there wasn't a single off-putting factor about the whole experience, disregarding painful mornings after little sleep. Imagine our faces.
What scandal! What a bunch of sell-outs! Well, no, not quite. The process of buying fine beer inside a subway station at 4am on a Sunday morning is euphoric, but there are no plans being hatched to up sticks and move. In fact, trying to navigate what could be the most confusing metro this side of Tokyo, daily, would surely see us circling the transport network, locked in perpetual purgatory on rails.
(Click to enlarge)
But there's certainly something about the place that seems to make perfect sense, though not in the way we are usually told. Because far from a metropolis wherein uber precedes every word, regardless of grammatical accuracy, Berlin is really just getting on with its own thing. Join if you want, go home if you don't, either way it will still be there tomorrow. The point being that Berlin seems less bothered about the imagined Berlin than most other cities with a scene are right now.
This notion was confirmed when we caught a rather special live set from Swayzak, several stories up in a centrally located office block. It wasn't really techno, house or breaks. Half of what we heard was pretty much just a rhythm, not to mention a crazy sample of some guy being interviewed. It wasn't in this pigeonhole, or that, and didn't sound like the beat this town's stereotype dances to. In a place people profess to be the home of future music it's a huge relief, and should be observed by those obsessed with looking abroad for all sources of inspiration.
Swayzak - Caught In This Affair:
