How Techno Became the Beating Heart of Berlin
Sometime in November 2021 I texted a friend in London,
“I think I like…..techno?”
I went on to explain, all I remembered was I was in a huge club the night before, it looked like a castle, the music felt like it was inside me, I was dancing with everyone and no one, I have no idea if I was drunk or stone sober, I couldn’t leave the dance floor. I felt like I was in the ocean.
She texted back, “Yup, that’s what good techno feels like.”
And that was, perhaps, my real introduction to the club scene in Berlin. People describe techno as a feeling, a unifier, something that translates through your body and replaces your own heartbeat with a 4/4. In my reality I could feel this too, I wasn’t able to say in too much detail what techno was but I knew I liked it, and I liked being in crowds with it pulsing out around the concrete. After clubbing I felt euphoric and hungry, connected and peaceful.
Berlin’s world famous techno scene, currently suffering from rapid gentrification and the effects of the pandemic, has applied for UNESCO intangible cultural heritage status. If granted, the status would protect the clubs and the culture surrounding it, forcing the government to support the clubs financially by way of lower taxes and protections on building and trading laws. While this award may be granted to any form of non material heritage, more modern types of cultural activity such as clubbing are less likely to be considered. Besides the current endangerment of Berlin’s clubs, what Dr Motte (the petition’s organiser and techno pioneer) believes makes this campaign worthy is its recognition of the unifying nature of the scene after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 where people could express themselves freely and creatively.
While today DJs from all over the world come to Berlin to play techno to crowds of thousands, the scene actually started with Detroit’s Afrofuturist techno DJs playing abandoned warehouses and illegal clubs in Berlin in the late 80s. There is something almost mystical about the way this type of techno made its way to Berlin from its home of Detroit. While the second summer of love during the late 80s saw electronic music scenes cropping up all over Europe and North America and techno’s electronic seeds were planted in the 70s by Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, the scene we celebrate today is formed by the alliance of these two cities in a state of changing identity.
In the late 80s the Afrofuturist dystopian/utopian philosophy of Detroit techno and the shoulders it was built on, of black music pioneers and workers, was transported to the warehouse spaces of East Berlin’s no man’s land during the liminal Mauerfall and Wende era. The alliance came from a physical embodiment in suddenly open spaces, a pathway between acknowledging the suffering of the past and a realistic hope for the future as the city of Berlin reunified and people came together to dance.
Detroit techno’s sound is firmly rooted in two very specific things; the city, the heartland of Ford’s American dream and its black community, which having had labour replaced by robots the former capitalist dream was now a dystopian reality. The machines and robots of Detroit’s motor industry along with black mythology birthed the radical otherness which informs the Afrofuturistic discourse of Detroit Techno. The space age sounds and imagery and influence of Afrofuturists such as George Clinton and black mythology of Drexciya gave Detroit a way of fusing a collective past with a dystopian present to create something entirely futuristic. This was thus a way to explore the identity of a group of people shaped by the effects of this industry. As Detroit Techno intimated the sounds of man in sync with a machine, the drum patterns could be compared to the drums of Africa and binary computing alike. As reported in High Tech Soul, these musicians, “Took technology and made it a black secret”.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the people of Berlin were in a state of temporary euphoria and the city, with strips of empty warehouses provided real life spaces to collectively celebrate sexuality, freedom and music. Detroit techno’s sense of displaced identity found fertile breeding ground in this temporary utopia. As Berliners unified under the same roof, the underwater and outer space sounds of Detroit had a place to land.
“When we first heard Detroit techno, we knew this is it. This sound describes exactly how we feel. On that basis, we wanted to find our own language,” says Berlin producer Alec Empire of the time. Likewise of techno’s repetitive four-on-the-floor beat pattern. Jazz scholar Fumi Okij states at the end of documentary Black to Techno: “It’s not the notes, but the space between the notes.” He was speaking about what’s missing as a way to collectively process trauma, whether the collapse of capitalist industry or political regimes or even the inherited trauma of slavery, or The Holocaust.
Techno speaks to a feeling and during Berlin’s turning years, events such as The Love Parade cemented the city’s scene as synonymous with a unified Deleuzian paradise where radical inclusivity was in. Expression of any kind was accepted, celebrated and individual participation benefitted the communal growth of the people. The Love Parade’s motto was ‘Peace, Joy and Pancakes’, to rejoice in disarmament, music and fair food production for the new Berlin. As with any good thing the distinct sound of the club scene of Berlin has grown and become commercialised and gentrified. The Love Parade, once associated with all shades of electronic music, took controversial sponsorship from Camel while forcing out the house and Gabber communities.
This change resulted in those branching off to create the anarchist leaning ‘Fuck Parade’ while the Love Parade itself ended in tragedy in 2010. Of course by this time Detroit’s presence had all but gone, replaced by international DJs and exclusive door policies meaning, anyone can try to go clubbing, but not everyone can. Today Detroit’s unique techno continues to exist in the small pockets of Detroit. It is very much an underground endeavour overshadowed by Hip Hop, while Berlin’s huge warehouse clubs still host a global audience of nocturnal tourists looking to get lost en masse every weekend.
I’ve only really known Berlin and techno as a tourist. When I first came to the city as a teenager I went sober clubbing on the banks of the Spree and in a club that doesn’t exist anymore and ate halloumi wraps on the way home the next morning. We encountered the Gabber-blasting Fuck Parade in the streets of Friedrichshain and dubbed Berlin ‘the city that built itself’, before we really knew how much the music had to do with its growth or how political any of these parades were, be it as a radical unifier or a counter-strike to the commercialisation of the former.
More than a decade later I was back in Berlin and talking to a Berliner friend about the decades before. “Back then Berlin was so full of clubs!” he reminisced — a toddler when the wall fell. I now understood what the nightlife of the city really meant to its residents in the years after the reunification. However, techno brought people together, and I hope there is a way to keep it.
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