Der Klang der Familie
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Der Klang der Familie

Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall

Felix Denk, Sven von Thülen

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eBook - ePub

Der Klang der Familie

Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall

Felix Denk, Sven von Thülen

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About This Book

After the fall of the Wall, Berlin is full of disused spaces and abandoned buildings, just waiting to be filled with new life. It is unclear who owns any of this, which allows the techno scene to take over these new empty spaces in both halves of the city. Clubs, galleries, ateliers and studios spring up – only to disappear again a few weeks later. Soon Berlin has become the epicentre of a new culture, attracting enthusiastic followers from all over the world to clubs like the Tresor and the E-Werk. Wearing gasmasks and welding goggles they dance the night away to the jackhammer sound of previously obscure Detroit DJs. Among them are writers, artists, photographers, designers, DJs, club-owners, music producers, bouncers and scenesters, people from the centre of the movement and from its peripheries – in Der Klang der Familie they all get to have their say and paint a vibrant picture of a time when it felt like everything was possible.

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Information

Year
2014
ISBN
9783738663273
Subtopic
Music
Edition
1

PART ONE

The ’80s

The soundtrack of feeling misunderstood

KATI SCHWIND When I first moved to West Berlin in 1981, I only lived in squats. That was totally normal in Kreuzberg. Back then, entire housing blocks were being occupied.
CLÉ When you got off the subway back then, it was really spooky. You were standing in the middle of sooty, deserted urban canyons. The smell of coal stoves was everywhere.
DER WÜRFLER You had the feeling the war wasn’t over yet.
KATI SCHWIND Everything in West Berlin was subsidized from top to bottom. Until the late ’70s, there was even some “welcome money” for anyone who moved there because the city had so many old people. This all-around care clearly rubbed off on the residents. The cost of living was low, and worry about how to scrape together next month’s rent was minimal. As a result, you had quite a lot of time to creatively live out your quirks and eccentricities.
DIMITRI HEGEMANN Back then, I was studying music at the Free University [of Berlin], heading out for field research at night. There wasn’t much. Risiko was a special place; I met Nick Cave and Birthday Party there. I wasn’t at Dschungel so often, they usually didn’t let me in. In 1982, I organized a festival at SO36. It was called Atonal. We wanted to break entrenched listening habits and show something new in image and sound. A ton of bands with great names played: Malaria!, Sprung aus den Wolken, Die tödliche Doris and the Einstürzende Neubauten. When the Neubauten took the stage, they immediately started to drill through the back wall. Sparks flew, and the guy who ran SO36 and was selling beer cans up front started running around like mad. I was sitting backstage and suddenly, a drill came through the wall right next to me. One year later, we had Psychic TV there. Genesis P-Orridge was already sporting a bald head with a braid and arrived like a cult leader with eight people in tow who looked like Hare Krishnas. During the performance, they showed a movie where an anaconda eats a rabbit.
MARK REEDER The Berlin punk scene was refreshingly different, not as commercialized as the one I knew from England, which by 1978, was already rock. I’d worked at a record store in Manchester and was friends with people like Tony Wilson, Daniel Miller and Ian Curtis. Then in Berlin, I was the Factory Records representative. I organized a few gigs for Joy Division and got to know bands like the Neubauten, who played with garbage, and P1/E, an electronic band with Alexander Hacke. Later on, the early house and techno stuff was similarly radical for me.
3PHASE Through punk, you got the idea that making noise yourself is a great thing. Bands like Throbbing Gristle seemed to be using everything from a toaster to a blender to make music. It didn’t matter whether or not you could play an instrument. The important thing was that it sounded interesting and was your own thing.
MARK REEDER The Geniale Dilletanten Festival, for example, was very humorous and creative. You could simply join in. Nobody could play properly, bands were formed for just one night, and people heard something they’d never heard before.
COSMIC BABY I started to listen to the rougher stuff at around 16: Throbbing Gristle, Der Plan, Pyrolator. I experimented a lot, recording radio static, then playing it alongside records or recording it back and forth with two tape recorders. I had a Roland 606 drum machine that I let run for hours, playing sequences on the piano to it. Everyone thought it was boring, of course – it’s always the same, there are no vocals, there are no other instruments – but I was happy. I loved the repetition. It always had something euphoric for me.
JONZON I was the drummer in a band. We were called Zatopek and played punk-funk and somehow also a little NDW [New German Wave]. We all wore winklepickers and loden jackets and even had a record deal with Polydor. I can still remember exactly how we were on tour and someone slipped me a tape recording of Frankie Crocker’s radio program, a DJ from New York. I listened to the tape exhaustively on my Walkman. It had things like D Train and Peech Boys. It was proto-house. The straight machine beat I was hearing fascinated me. I realized you could program things with a drum machine that as a drummer, you can’t even play. The tape was really well mixed, and I tried to analyze it. How many records are playing right now? Where does one track end and the next begin? Which elements belong to which record? When is something added? When is something removed? I had no idea about everything you could do with two turntables.
STEFAN SCHVANKE For me, everything always revolved around music. My first techno moment was “Los Ninos Del Parque” by Liaisons Dangereuses. Sequences that proceed along a four-four beat. This restlessness that I felt in myself, I also had to feel in the music.
DR. MOTTE Back then, I was addicted to anything new. Barry Graves had a radio program on RIAS2 where he always played mixes from New York. One DJ he played was called Paco. Graves always announced him in a very particular way: “And now another Pacooooooosssssssuper mix.” He always played his own edits. He re-edited and extended tracks like “Walking on Sunshine,” so then I tried to tinker together different versions with my two cassette decks. At one point, I could edit with pinpoint accuracy. I made “Radio Gag” from “Radio Gaga,” cutting away the “a” with the stop button. Then I did the rounds of the Kreuzberg bars selling the cassettes.
JONZON Motte was my neighbor on Lübbener Straße in Kreuzberg. Back then, we both made tapes with stupid names like “The Gilded Mr. Tape.” There was a competition between us – whose tape got more people dancing. I pieced together my tapes using modest means: a record player and a tape recorder. You could use the pause button to cut tracks together; it was almost like edits. You could even create staccato effects like with a sampler.
DR. MOTTE For a while, I lived by selling tapes. I always had some with me. Musically, it was soul, funk, post-punk. I didn’t do anything else on the side. That worked. My apartment cost 120 Deutsche Mark. The Job Center tried to get me a job, but I always refused, using all sorts of strategies.
THOMAS FEHLMANN I was in New York twice in the early ’80s with Palais Schaumburg, and I witnessed the burgeoning electro scene there. Seeing Afrika Bambaataa DJing at the Roxy was a formative experience. I was very interested in club music or disco, as it was called back then. Especially when the experimental and danceable met. I found the contingence between punk and hip-hop exciting. For me and the others in Schaumburg, disco wasn’t a dirty word. We loved Chic and Michael Jackson without qualification.
DER WÜRFLER Through disco, gay nightlife shifted a bit into the mainstream focus for the first time. It was totally unusual, after all, for homos and heteros to party together. I was a dancer in the late ’70s, the heyday of disco. I even performed with Liza Minelli, Diana Ross and Gloria Gaynor at Studio 54. It was around that time I started DJing at clubs like Dschungel, Metropol and Cha. Metropol was supposed to be the Studio 54 of Berlin – there were giant disco balls, something like two meters [80 inches] in diameter, and these balls were beamed with lasers. Back then, it all looked like Star Wars, as though fluorescent tubes were flying through the air. A UFO hung over the dance floor in front, emitting bubbles and glitter.
WESTBAM Metropol was known as a gay spot, but there weren’t only gays there. You can compare it to Early Christianity. There was the Jewish temple in the center, and the Greeks who wanted to be part of it were allowed to walk around outside. At Metropol, the gays were in the corners – really hardcore with leather and chains. The trippy kids from the Berlin suburbs were at the front. Maybe they weren’t sure yet if they were gay. Or maybe they just thought it was all wonderful, like I did the first time I got in at 17, standing there in a Hawaiian shirt among all these men in chains. It smelled of poppers, the new beat dropped, and everyone shouted out loud. The energy, the subculture, the hardcore thing, the menace – it was wicked.
DER WÜRFLER By 1984, the disco era at Metropol was basically over. Instead, there was Hi-NRG, a music that appealed especially to gay
men. It was also the time of New Wave and New Romantic. The club was mixed when it came to sexual orientation. You could wear whatever you wanted, even make-up if you felt like it.
STEFAN SCHVANKE I started going to Metropol at age 14, 15 – it was my surrogate family. At home, there was a lot of fighting; I lived in a youth institution for a bit. Early on, I took care to spend as little time at home as possible. By day, I sat around the Gedächtniskirche5. There were always young punks and New Wavers hanging around. At night, I snuck out the window. In West Berlin, nobody ever asked how old I was. At the underground spots, nobody cared.
DISKO Metropol was famous for its fan-fags. They danced swanlike choreographies with dayglo fans and were armed to the eyebrows with poppers. It had a little something of voguing and rave about it.
STEFAN SCHVANKE They wore light blue jeans, tight cut-off tops with their navels sometimes exposed and short hairstyles – these gelled-forward fag horns. They stood in rows of four. Hans, Leo, Tamazs and Lutz were the most prominent. The first three died of AIDS. The leather gays were in the corner, and on the other side of the dance floor, the New Wave kids. That’s where I was standing WESTBAM It was already totally clear to me back then where it was all heading, musically speaking. I wrote it down in Der Neger, an avant-garde journal based in Frankfurt. The text was called “What is Record Art?” and it was intended as a manifesto. I wrote that the new electronic music would be created by the DJs.
JONZON I was at Dschungel a lot; Juri DJed there. He was already mixing, though the mixes were really short, and individual passages were extended using two copies of the same record.
WESTBAM Back then, there weren’t any records with one perpetual beat, so you took the same record twice and extended the short part with the beat by cutting the spot back and forth. In hip-hop, they did it so they could rap over it. But I did it to create a new minimalist dance style. It was the thing back then that came closest to the later techno culture. An endless repetition of a specific line with an up-tempo beat. Of course, it didn’t run the whole night. These were facets. “I Feel Love” would play, and then there’d be another one of these mix numbers with the same record twice. It wasn’t techno yet, of course, but the rudiments were there. There were moments where you could already hear this idea – all I really need is a beat, a strobe and screaming people.
THOMAS FEHLMANN Westbam played good records, sure. But sometimes, Modern Talking was also played at Metropol.
STEFAN SCHVANKE After the Hi-NRG era, I liked EBM musically, but it was more like concert music. People just did this three-steps-to-thefront, three-steps-to-the-back dance. In the dance context, EBM was totally occupied by this scene. Unlike in Hi-NRG, there was no freaking out on the dance floor, no excess. Still, I often hitchhiked to concerts in West Germany.
MARK REEDER Berlin began to stagnate in 1985. There was no longer anything fiery. The freshness was gone, the spontaneity. I was frustrated. More and more people slipped into a kind of drug swamp. The booze flowed in torrents. Clubs like Ex ‘n’ Pop and Cri du Chat played mostly stuff like Birthday Party, Sisters Of Mercy and The Cult. Dark rock. My musical taste was different. When I said I liked disco in Ex ‘n’ Pop, people looked at me funny. That was a dirty word, after all. The music playing there sounded to me like synthesizer hatred.
KATI SCHWIND In the mid ’80s, I spent a year and a half in the States. I had the shock of my life when I came back to Berlin, totally excited about hip-hop, which was everywhere in the States. All I could think was: what happened? Sisters Of Mercy was the only thing playing in the erstwhile Neubauten orbit. Everything was bleak and depressing.
3PHASE Risiko and Ex ‘n’ Pop were underground spots for leather-jacket punks and avant-garde artists. The whole scene was basically on speed back then. It was rumored that the yellow crystals were smuggled from the GDR to get the Kreuzberg anarchists going. You can almost see Halber Mensch, the Neubauten album that came out at the time, as documentary. There’s one drinking song, and the rest is about the side effects of permanent speed consumption and sleep deprivation.
TANITH When I arrived in Berlin in 1986, the feeling was “it’s all over.” Punk was long since a pointless hanging-around, a single booze brigade. And the industrial people were whacked out on heroine, listening to Johnny Cash.
STEFAN SCHVANKE The only thing that mattered to them anymore was who had what and how they’d get through the week.
TANITH Everyone was an artist – often never recognized because far too genius. For them, music was less something for dancing and more something for suffering, a soundtrack of feeling misunderstood.
COSMIC BABY At the time, electronic music didn’t seem to be exactly what the city had been waiting for. The zeitgeist was Nick Cave and Blixa Bargeld; they were heroes and idols. Unfortunately, I didn’t look like that, nor did they reflect my attitude towards life. I was too thin, not addicted to heroin and didn’t have black hair. In general, I felt too small, too soft, too odd and too uncool for Berlin when I moved there from Nuremberg in 1986.
TANITH Clubs like Dschungel, once at the forefront, became totally arbitrary. They played chart trash meant ironically. The position they’d had in the early ’80s was gone. A strange anti atti...

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