Anika Kunst and Nick Höppner at Berghain Klubnacht, 19 January 2025

There’s a kind of meditation I do to techno on the dancefloor.

First, there has to be a good techno DJ playing, someone with whose sets you vibe: in this case, for me, it was Anika Kunst. Then, you find a spot on the dancefloor where you’ve space to dance without being bumped into: yesterday evening, it was back left, away from the roaming Tiktokkers, surrounded by bearded gays and the odd solo weirdo woman, where it was dark and I could feel the bass.

You start dancing. You dance till your body moves unconsciously, without effort. Then, you close your eyes.

You focus on the weird sounds, your body in motion (Kunst was playing a beautifully insane track, ‘Deceptor’ by MSDMNR). Eyes closed, you see faint colours and shapes. The visual impression ‘is’ the sound, because the sound and the image arise from one another, only exist for one another. The musical repetition’s hypnotic. Then, you start to become the visual you’re seeing, since all everyday references are gone.

Your everyday self is nullified—extinguished—and your visuals become your body. You tune into your body, a body with no face or identity, and the sound-image you’re seeing, as you move your body, becomes those parts of your body you rarely express or are conscious of: your right calf; the space between your neck and your left shoulder; a curved part of your back that has no name. They’re all voiced by the unfamiliar sounds and that transient inner-eye image.

And then, the image dissolves. You come back to your everyday self. You open your eyes.

Once again, you’re in a dark hall, surrounded by a hundred dancing bodies. Overhead, beams of blue light sporadically flash. Your senses are refreshed. You experienced (here’s the meditation bit) some kind of brief extinction of self, as you became that radiant inner colour whose expression was conjured by the techno’s sound in an immersive darkness.

All very weird and psychedelic. But what else could it be?

When I do this kind of meditation, then open my eyes and see things afresh, it strikes me that the techno dancefloor is basically a Burroughs cut-up, is a Gysin dream machine, is a Xenakis polytope, all melded within an immersive industrial artwork. So, yep, of course it’s psychedelic—low key psychedelic. But you have to make space for it. Which is why I go to the club, and why I often like being there alone.

Nick Höppner upstairs was hot and sexy and playful and fun. The shutters remained closed throughout, no need even to see the sunset. The light was pink and the dancefloor, foggy, became all pink mist. People were topless and people were ecstatic. I wondered why Höppner, one of the first Panorama Bar residents (at Ostgut), and the first director of Berghain’s in-house record label Ostgut Ton (RIP), isn’t playing more at the club these day. As evidenced yesterday, he gets the place in a way few others do, and his set was a no-bullshit celebration of Panne at its best.

Anika Kunst plays vinyl only. I love listening to her play with the two decks, because the dualistic sound palette is something she works with inventively. Shazam doesn’t work most of the time here, because the music is usually layered, one record over another. Towards breakdowns, she was spinning out delay and reverb and effects from the mixer. Most of the time, the set was hurtling like a horse on speed, relentless. In her presentation, there’s a punkishness that, as a Black Flag and the Slits and PiL fan (I was wearing a PiL t-shirt at the club yesterday, as it happens), appeals to me.

What else? I’m not a fan of the new lighting sculpture strung up at the back of the main room dancefloor. It looks like a bunch of tangled-up Christmas tree lights. The lighting person was on top form as ever: at one point, ten or twelve beams of blue light flashed and interpenetrated over the dancefloor, bisecting like swords, the beams suspending awesomely in this gesture while the alien sounds pelted. But in general, less is more. A warehouse rave should be the model, whereas the new lighting sculpture feels quite Las Vegas.

TikTok may be ‘going dark’ in the USA, but unfortunately it’s left its mark on Berghain, with all the cloneish TikTok techno youngesters who fill the club on Sunday afternoons. Often, it feels like they’re dancing the Macarena. But thankfully the door seems to do a good job of minimising them by Sunday night.

Nick Höppner, some tracks

Kat Williams, That Track By Kat

Chainletter, Lyric St. (K-65 Remix)

Hugg & Pepp, Mazarin

Tyree, Video Crash

Latino House Crew, Should Have Never Been (Spanish Version)

Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano, Traffic Jam

Alex Neri, The Symbol of Love

Enzo Siragusa & Nima Gorji, Foreal (Seb Zito Remix)

Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown & Dub Jamz, So Good

Anika Kunst, some tracks

Vinicius Honorio, Endless Love

Holden Federico, Myth

Sciahri & Hertz Collision, Entropia

Ed Davenport & Tee Amara, Like Gravity

Steve Rachmad, Divide and Conquer

Sharpside, Space Cruising

Marco Carola, Solare

Valentino Kanzyani, Rock The Discotheque #1

MSDMNR, Deceptor

Taiko, Silence (Minimal Mix)