Boris and Honey Dijon at Berghain, Snax weekend, 31 March 2024
Throwback review
Arriving early on a misty Sunday morning, I entered the building in time to catch most of Boris’s set at Snax. Two bald men in overalls who’d been ahead of me carrying a ladder, who I’d assumed were in costume for the party, turned out in fact to be just two bald men in overalls carrying a ladder.
Boris is one of my favourite residents—his garden set last May was a joy, ending with the crowd singing along to Abba, ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’—but this time, I came without expectations, since Boris’s main room sets have recently been so eccentric. On a Sunday evening last September, he went full chaos, throwing out jolts of trance and hardcore and techno (summed up in the track ‘Rave Daddy’, his assumed identity for the night), not exactly to universal approval. At one moment that evening, Dylan Thomas reciting ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ even rang out in the main room.
On this morning, Boris was back in classic Ostgut mode for the occasion. Mostly minimal techno, occasionally melodic techno, and one passage where he played jacking-style stuff. The crowd was fun in front of the DJ box, dog masks and whatnot, though a fair amount of the bare-chested out-of-towner mob looked bleary-eyed and/or G-zombified.
As ever, there was a construction for Snax, though this one was subtle. The ground level in the Halle complex became a maze of rooms and passageways, mostly dark. Wandering there was disorienting to the point of psychedelia: you couldn’t remember which way was which. Lots of alcoves with cages, shrubs, spare tyres, industrial objects. In corridors, rotating single-bulb lights were directed onto concentric circle cut-outs, the rotar motion making circle silhouettes move around the walls, casting shadows of people’s bodies as they passed by. Later, I learned it was a reconstruction of the layout of the original Snax party at Bunker in 1994. Someone who had attended that party once described its aesthetic to me in detail, and I was impressed the club recreated it here.
The next evening, I returned to the club for Honey Dijon.
My friend Eric, a knowledgeable techno head and Berghain-goer since 2008, dislikes when Honey Dijon is programmed on the main floor. But I find it appealing. It's like she scales up her usual sound to match the magnitude of the room. So, she plays a deep machinic groove that runs underneath the whole set, making the most of the main room sound system and natural reverb, and she layers samples over the top, playing with the desk to add dub elements of delay.
I danced and sweated for four hours. In a way, Honey was playing trippy deep house, but because the sound in the room was so colossally big, it became more like dub techno. I find it hard to put into words, but I love how she knowingly blends and deconstructs genres this way. And of course, there’s always that deep well of Black music she soaks the room with, with R&B and disco and funk (a whole section was ‘on the one’), and which she combines with more pronouncedly synthetic European influences.
The set came to a head for me when she dropped ‘Love Desire’ by CASSIMM. In the breakdown halfway through the track, Honey stretched the femme voice’s paroxysm (a sample of Loleatta Holloway) even further, way way out, so that it lasted for about half a minute, like some limitless femme layrnx fusing with the enormous space. This cyborg fusion with the room and the sound system in part made me think of a bionic Grace Jones, rising colossally from the desert with eyes blank and pitiless as the sun, and in part of a quote by Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry:
‘I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves – you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live.’
Jack your body can take on different meanings here. Mother had arrived: mother sky or earth mother, the club a fluvial womb, birthing freaks. There was a raw sexiness throughout the dancefloor.
It was a treat to see all those sweaty muscle harness dudes, out of their minds at the back of the room, in the palm of her hand, submitting to that femme energy. Cormac and a Bergain VIP were both in the DJ booth alongside her at one point, nodding along to the groove. It wasn’t a perfect set, but a great return imo (she hadn’t played at the club since unexpecedly cancelling her 2023 CSD appearance). And it was a fitting climax to the Klubnacht on trans day of awareness.
Boris tracks
Hoxan, 'Control (Danilo Incorvaia remix)'
David Moleon, 'Sigue Tu Sueno'
Alessandro Cocco, 'Date Night (Maccari remix)'
Knuckleheadz, 'House Rocca'
PEIX, 'Athame'
Zisko, 'Making of a Desire'
Prime Mover, 'Perfect Organism'
Truxx, 'Yuki'
Franco Rossi, 'Flexio'
Warnung, 'Source'
Fhase 87, 'The Dancer'
William Marqs, 'No.0117'
Edvvin, 'Feel the Rhythm'
DJ Geto Man, 'Body Jack'
Mark Richardson, 'Life on Mars'
R-010, 'Pilla Pilla'
Rill, 'Fenz'
STIPP, 'Come, Get Some'
Honey Dijon tracks
Mike Dearborn, Black Circles
Cassimm, Love Desire
Uncertain, Cause
Mike Dearborn, Black Circles
Bleak, Code
Mochakk, Jealous
Genex, Cas Abou (Truncate Remix)
Anthony Selvaggio & David Pintó, Congarama (Glenn Gonzalez Remix)
Terrace, Magic O
Nicole Moudaber & Carl Cox, How it Makes You Feel
Inner City, Kevin Saunderson & Dantiez, Heavy (feat. Steffanie Christi'An) [Ramon Tapia Remix]
Sante, Sunset Bvd
Keinemusik, Thandaza