A for Animism

Wata Igarashi at Berghain

Kilclooney dolmen

In the part of Ireland where I grew up—rural Donegal, by the sand-and-bogland Atlantic coast—there’s a neolithic monument in the middle of a field.

Kilclooney Dolmen is 5500 years old. As you approach it along a dirt path, it has an overpowering presence. It appears against the horizon like a stone whale, and it evades your efforts to understand it. You want an explanation but there is none; it’s just sitting there.

A few years ago I heard the author David Mitchell talking about visiting a dolmen. He called the dolmen, in neutral terms, a ‘being’. I liked that. Calling an object like Kilcooney dolmen a being grants it autonomy apart from how you or I perceive it.

In philosophy this is called vitalism. Vitalism allows us to decentre the human and to try to engage with what’s around us outside of anthropomorphism. The same might apply to what’s around you in the dark environment of the club.

I was thinking about this as, hungover (Möbel Olfe), I went to see Wata Igarashi at Berghain last Sunday. I’d been listening to his new album My Supernova a lot, and before that, his joint EP with Polygonia Cross Passage (particularly the febrile track ‘Fibre Axis’ with its stacked perfect-fourth harmonies). It was a day for Japanese techno artists in Berlin, as DJ Maria was playing at the RSO anniversary party at the same time.

Outside, it was a bleak day. The kind of November day when you feel the grey cityscape reflect back to you your grey soul and you start to become those grey tower blocks and that cheerless sky. I decided to walk to Berghain from Jannowitzbrücke, to energise myself before the club. On my headphones, Pixies was playing, and passing Kater Blau, I thought about some Irish friends who’d partied there not long back.

Wata Igarashi, My Supernova (Dekmantel)

When I arrived I sat talking to a friend in Säule about It’s Britney Bitch at Berliner Ensemble, which I’m going to miss, and Carmen at Deutsche Oper, which I’m going to see next week. Everything was dark and red. The pillars stared at us.

Upstairs I caught Jesse G playing a trippy close to her set. In front of the DJ box it was a mix of weirdos and Tiktokers. A man in front of me wore a t-shirt saying Godless Heathen while beside him a couple had sex. The lighting was deep blue and the blue lights were all directed to shine onto each other in a chain network above the dark dancefloor.

Wata Igarashi started elemental. There was an ambient drone that sounded like a turbulent tide hitting a shore, reminding me of the Gateway tapes and how they open. The fluvial wash was a tone-setting sound of natural energy. As Eliot writes:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable

One of the many lines that I jettisoned from Berghain Nights. Then, the beat kicked in on an Oscar Mulero track and away we went for what was a joyous four-hour trip.

Throughout, I drifted around the dancefloor. On a podium, a blonde woman danced in oscillations, hands raised like she was imitating a cat. In the gay men’s area, the bodies were slamming and I bumped into my friend again, and we smiled and shared a moment. Then I closed my eyes and tried to meditate and a circle appeared, a floating pineal eye at the centre of the maelstrom, and I imagined myself floating above the dancefloor. The closed-eye field shimmered and hypnagogia appeared, then I reopened my eyes and everything was blue and I felt refreshed and disoriented.

Wata Igarashi

So yeah, during Igarashi’s set, I was thinking about animism. I had been considering writing an A to Z of my techno clubbing experiences, of which this would be the first one. For a while I’ve been thinking about how the Funktion-1 speaker above the Berghain dancefloor, lit up in the darkness, becomes a steady focal point during the electronic-sound oblivion.

When I tune into the weird stream of sounds as if it were a communication stream from some alien intelligence, the speaker becomes the face of that intelligence, an alien grimace. The inscrutable face corresponds to the inscrutable sounds. The speaker’s magnitude and position, high up imperious, as well as its decapitation, supernaturally having no body, also lend to this impression.

Animism means granting objects autonomy. Back in the day it could mean that a huge river was worshiped as a God, as in Hinduism. It could mean that the sun and moon were personified, as in Ancient Greece. More recently, it could mean that the bleeping and buzzing telephone and television and fridge were conspiring against you, as in the schizo Philip K Dick (where it merges with pareidolia).

Funktion 1 stacks (from ostgut.de)

Animism is usually mytho-poetic. This means that in our age of scientific materialism, it’s supposed to be something we’ve graduated from, unless you’re mentally ill. Well, I demur. It might be just a metaphor to say that the hundred-eyed facade of the Berghain building grimaces at you as, dumb human, you trod the path towards it. But inside, the music can speak to you.

Techno addressed you in an incomprehensible language. Incomprehensible though it is, it’s still coherent on its own terms. It has sense. It’s a mode of address, just as when a dolmen addresses you. Certain objects around us (‘beings’) address us from an inaccessible elsewhere. They’re at once within and without the everyday. Opening your imagination to that can be a momentary liberation from the banal everyday.

Igarashi moved to Amsterdam two years ago (he’s at Berghain sometimes as a dancer, always a good sign for a DJ). He calls My Supernova ‘a self-portrait of me in 2025,’ and its varied techno character carried through to the wonderful four-hour set he played, which, ranging through different techno styles, was unified by its textural depth. Most characteristic were the rich resonant sonorities you got lost in.

The highlight of his set for me was when he played ‘Shockwave’ from the new album. It exploded in frantic scales and I went over and danced right underneath the speaker, body shaking. Some moments earlier, the lighting person turned the entire room bright red, the red of a photography dark-room. Then he hit the strobe effect, and the entire room became a huge red flickering strobe light, wonderfully slicing to pieces all those deranged faces, lacerations drifting on a river.

Wata Igarashi, some tracks

Oscar Mulero, Generator

Tièmoko Koné, Unknown Reasons

Marcal, Swindle

Metapattern, Micron

VSK, Ottimizzazione

Anfs, Pikro

Anfs, Aji

Neen, Autro

Dekeyden, Steam Vent

Lakej, Low Caliber

Dimi Angeli, Q2k

THEGOD01, Aurora Encounters

Temudo, Tsigalko

Takeshi Sato & MASARU, Kabuto (Cristian Varela Rmx)

Böhm & The Unborn Child, Tension

Taylan & Shani Zen, Geronimo (Kamilo Sanclemente Remix)

Wata Igarashi, Shockwave