Josh Wink, nd_Baumecker and Stefan Goldmann at Berghain Klubnacht, 29 September 2024
One luxury of living in Berlin is that, on a Sunday afternoon, you can just ‘pop out’ to Berghain for a few hours, like going to pick up the newspaper. I had other plans for the evening, which meant unfortunately I missed the live set by Thee Church Ov Acid House, already on my way home by 7pm with muscles pleasantly aching from all the dancing. But I did catch Josh Wink, nd_Baumecker, and Stefan Goldmann.
Sven Marquardt was on the door. There was a blue sky and no queue, and I thanked Bacchus or whoever that the summer was over, when club pilgrims flood Berlin and Berghain’s queues go mental. As I walked up the empty gravel path in the sun, the food kiosk was pumping out The Beatles’ White Album, ‘I Will’ and ‘Julia’.
I know as much about fashion as I do about Byzantine irrigation. But I found Marquardt’s current style impressive: yellow-framed shades; camo print top; enormous denim jeans; chunky boots. It seems, in the blink of an eye, that fashion has gone from valuing Giacometti-esque emaciation towards valuing the opposite, hyper-exaggerated baggyness: moreish silhouettes, OTT and huge. I was particularly taken with Marquardt’s spiky boots. He stared at me a moment and let me in.
I suppose if you wanted a theme to capture the vibe at Berghain this Sunday afternoon, you could do worse than traditions. In the techno room, there was acid legend Josh Wink (the ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ remixes CD was the first dance music single I ever bought); upstairs, Ostgut OG nd_Baumecker; in Säule in the evening, Thee Church Ov Acid House, nodding to both Chicago acid and to Genesis Porridge’s cult of personality thing.
Everything is cyclical, and cycles mean renewal; but everything is also iterative, and iterations usually mean degradation. Hard to know which you’re dealing with sometimes, the renewal or the degradation. But as I entered the club, Wink was playing Anthony Rother’s beautifully nostalgic track ‘Back Home’, which I took as a good omen, given this was my time in the club since July.
Inside, it was pleasant bedlam. The main room was already full of muscle men and naked people and quirky types like a guy wearing a beret over neck-to-toe high-vis yellow. Panorama Bar had that vibe I like when, smoky and warm, it feels like an after-hours where nobody remembers how long they’ve been there. Behind the decks, baumecker spun his usual cool mix of stuff, going from UK bass-influenced house to wistful synth-driven retro to more straightforward house. The music made me wisful as I thought about all the different Pano people I’ve known, going back to 2006, when my friends and I first started visiting.
This week, I’ve been revising the last chapter of my book (which, among other things, compares Berghain as it now to how it was when I started going regularly in 2016). Cycles or iterations? I’ve been trying to make sense of some current ambivalent feelings towards the club. It connects to my ambivalence about techno in 2024, as typified by the antithesis of two new albums this week, Rødhåd’s Fabric mix and Rrose and Polygonia’s collaborative album Dermatology.
I’m obsessed with Rødhåd’s early productions on his label Dystopian, and always love catching him at Berghain. For his Fabric mix, then, I had high expectations; but I found myself weirdly underwhelmed. Not that the technical chops are any less virtuosic than usual, but somehow the cuts feel stylistically predictable. Production-wise, contemporary techno is getting samey, and the album for me inadvertantly seemed to underline this (I’ll give it more listens, obviously).
By contrast, on their collaboration, Rrose and Polygonia give us an explosante-fixe of psychoacoustic resonances. Ignoring fashion, they lean into esoteric and eclectic musical influences, not only from other genres like contemporary classical and experimentalism but from older techno music. I think it’s the latter that I find missing in a lot of the younger, feted techno producers these days, like they’re all just listening to the same recent records too much.
Anyway, with Josh Wink followed by Stefan Goldmann in the main room, this Sunday threw up a good old-school techno versus new-school techno matchup.
Walking from Panorama Bar into the main room, I heard that Wink in his last hour was going for it. I mean, not many DJs would be able to play the Jungle Brothers’ ‘I’ll House You’ in the Berghain main room and pull it off. It took me a minute to get over my cognitive dissonance (a rap track?) and surpress my inner techno snob (the sonic muddiness!) and have an open mind. Of course, once I did, I realised Wink was launching into an outstanding set ending, an old master showing us how it’s done.
The main room felt like an old-school warehouse rave as, on the dancefloor, everyone lost their shit. High-vis clothing, naked skin, bald heads and tattoos and piercings and Adidas shorts, all churning about in the dark (no lighting pyrotechnics today, helping that warehouse feel). Hardfloor’s ‘Drug Overlord’ blasted out like a siren, followed by Underground Resistance’s ‘The Seawolf’, mixed in so subtly that it sounded like a submarine gradually emerging from the black sea, acid bubbling.
Stefan Goldmann came on and brought us up to the current day. His selections in the first two hours were largely by current hot names LDS and Stef Mendesidis and so on (there was also a hardgroove slot). It was a Sunday of wide-eyed flickering-light psychedelia, a treat to ‘pop out’ to on a Sunday, before putting on your outside-world-clothes again and going home to cook dinner and listen to Joni Mitchell.
nd_Baumecker, some tracks
Carry Me Higher by The Blessed Madonna, Joy Anonymous & Danielle Ponder
Everybody Needs That (Edit) by Elisa Elisa
Lift Me Up by Elisa Elisa
Percy by Medlar
TechMo by Emav
Memories You've Memorised by Gallegos
L.T.B.C.Y.B. by M-High
Josh Wink, some tracks
Back Home by Anthony Rother
I’ll House You by the Jungle Brothers
Drugoverlord (Overdose Mix) by Hardfloor
Don't Ever Stop (BK Remix) by Tony de Vit
Vamp (Fionn Curran Remix) by Outlander
Stefan Goldmann, some tracks
dino love triangle by Warnung
Rules That We Make Up by X CLUB.
Muffy by Fergus Sweetland
Glo3 by LDS
The Rite by Troy
Sexual Tension by UFO95
Red Alert by Stef Mendesidis
Apex (Rove Ranger Remix) by The Miller
Honky Tonk by The Users
Freeze by Ariel Me Llamo