Function, JakoJako and Mike Parker, March 2025

Sets at RSO, Berghain and Ohm

A techno club should be filthy.

It should be dark and decaying and it should smell of cigarettes and spilled beer, intense visions and sweat. Cold nooks should punctuate the warm industrial units and long corridors lit by red light should reverberate with distant techno, the bass droning and outer-space sounds thrusting as you wander in search of the dancefloor.

Or, maybe it was just that I hadn’t been at RSO in a while, and I was reliving my first time there. Reliving, too, Griessmuehle nights of yore.

I was here to see Function. And when I did get to the dancefloor, it was clear I wasn’t the only one. Amongst the mostly younger crowd, who were partying energetically in groups and in couples, there was the odd head—older, with say dreadlocks or some other unpretentious getup of t-shirt or jeans or bandana—who were here for David Sumner, seasoned clubbers attracted by the chance to catch a peaktime set by one of the techno greats.

And of course, Function didn’t disappoint. Speaking at a masterclass last Friday (more on which in a bit), Mike Parker was asked by a student what he thought gave coherence to his wide body of work. He replied, ‘I jokingly say that every track that I make should be, in a way, the sound of a flying saucer taking off.’ Well, Function hit that mark. It was a proper techno set, expansive in vision, ignoring whatever’s fashionable or trivial.

There were older tracks early on with ghettotech-style vocals, some recent classics (Alarico) and some of his own material (Burn), knit together with samples of software breaking down or haunting crackly voices. The bass and percussion were thunderous, propelled on a rolling kick-drum groove. Once you were in it, you were in it: it felt like being in that scene in Face/Off where the guy gets propelled down a wind tunnel.

Will Function be granted a Berghain return? Might he be added to the programme for the rumoured Ostgut Ton Nacht that’s happening next August? The RSO dancefloor was losing its shit, and I couldn’t help imagining Function delivering this kind of set for a Berghain closing.

Last Sunday afternoon I was at Berghain to catch JakoJako. For International Women’s Day, the Klubnacht lineup was all-female, with Steffi closing the main floor.

JakoJako’s one of the younger band of artists who emerged at the club over the past few years, alongside Quelza and Ogazón and others, designated successors of the older residents whose regular appearances are seemingly being phased out (Boris, Dettmann and co.). As a producer, JakoJako’s building an impressive body of work, spanning from downtempo modular synthesizer stuff on her own (as in her forthcoming Mute debut) and in collaboration (with the likes of Barker and Rødhåd) to techno that’s usually got splashes of experimentalism to it (as in her recent Segmente EP).

She crafted a fine set. It moved from slightly broken-beat techno, through IDM-tinged techno, through minimal techno, through trancey stuff. The stylistic evolution felt organic and well-judged. But wow, the Berghain soundsystem sounded truly awful for the first hour and a half or so: a huge flabby bass decay masked a lot of the midrange, sounding continuously, like an unwanted resonant frequency. Thankfully, it improved eventually and we could fully appreciate what JakoJako was doing. But bad sound at Berghain seems often to be expected these days, for whatever reason.

Mike Parker was in town for an ambient set at Ohm and the aforementioned Masterclass at BIMM University (full disclosure: I hosted him at the latter).

Parker—whose 2001 album Dispatches was recently called ‘one of the greatest techno albums of all time’ by Resident Advisor—teaches fine art at the State University of New York at Buffalo. At Ohm, he DJed alongside an exhibition of his serigraphs on the walls around the room. The serigraphs were also on sale, and you could see them being snapped up in real time as a curator-type woman stuck little ‘sold’ stickers beside some of them.

The artworks show bodies in motion, or what seem to be bodies: they are abstracted, monochrome, lines in motion, lines that could be generating natural forms—tree trunks and tree branches, rivers and tributaries, rock, avalanches—as easily as generating human forms. The images link the human, through dance, to nature. In more ways than one, the visual art complimented the musical art.

This night was the first in a promising new series organised by Heed Agency. Opening the night, Parker played ambient and noise and experimental and occasional techno tracks (the latter his own). I unfortunately missed the rest of the sets by Laima Adelaide, Tobias, and Lapien, as I was teaching in the morning.

At BIMM on Friday afternoon, Parker covered a wide range of topics. He spoke about the roots of his style and his first Korg MS-20 semi-modular synthesizer. He spoke about taking inspiration from the soundtracks to movies like Forbidden Planet. He spoke about the DIY ethos and the epithet hypnotic, which he accepts, though without any fondness for its suggestion of being in a stupor.

Addressing his career, Parker also spoke about how, when creating art, you should avoid inserting commercial incentive within your process. Instead, he said, you should stay true to your intuition and your vision: then, ‘the audience will come to you,’ he said. In which regard he mentioned how PRADA recently contacted him to feature one of his old tracks in its Menswear Spring/Summer 2025 Fashion Show, something he never at the time imagined happening.

Parker also spoke about his fine art professors when he studied at Carnegie Mellon, such as the abstract expressionist Sam Gilliam. Looking at Gilliam’s canvases—those colours generating lines, those lines generating patterns—the transfer of abstract expressionist visual thinking into the musical domain in Parker’s music was clear.

Function at RSO, some tracks

DJ Work, Check 1-2

Childov, Leave

Bruce Zalcer, Straight Up! (Uncertain Remix)

Contrast, Girls Rock the City

Alarico, AF 97

Jeff Mills, Step To Enchantment (Srtringent)

Christian Wünsch, Gravity Control

Function, Burn

JakoJako at Berghain, some tracks

Colin Benders, I Can't Feel My Legs

West Code, Alchemy Blade

Fran Lezaun, Deutsche Sprache

Dara Ashrafi, Hydro

Ocirala, Track for NIX

Hertz Collision, Concrete Skin

Rove Ranger, Millenial Millenium

Wants, North Warsaw

Mike Parker at Ohm, some tracks

Jack Dangers, Dream Controller

Lyonel Bauchet, Classic Sequence

Planetary Assault Systems, Angel of the East

Steve Roach, Essential Occurrence

Tangerine Dream, Remote Viewing

Seahawks, Tender Abyss, Pt. 2

Jon Hassell, Dream Theory

Conrad Schnitzler, Electric Garden