Music for a brave new world

How did a genre of music unique to Detroit find its heartland on the other side of the world? Thomas Theodore explores the early days of Berlin’s electronic musical landscape in the company of two pioneers.

During the 1980s West Berlin felt like an island. Adrift from the landmass of the Federal Republic, the city attracted a young and open-minded population, with the benefits of low taxation, immunity from military conscription and 24-hour licensing. ‘A special subculture grew by night,’ says Dimitri Hegemann, founder of Tresor, Berlin’s leading underground venue of the early 1990s.

Having been involved in the new wave, post-punk scene of 1980s West Berlin, Dimitri had been banned from crossing the border after writing a newspaper article criticising the East German authorities. The Wall had overseen a West Berlin demimonde circulating in the half-city's bars. Shoe box-sized clubs such as Turbine Rosenheim, Fischlabor in Schönberg provided a cramped home to a burgeoning acid house scene. The atmosphere and attitudes of these bohemian, freethinkers simmered and underpinned the developments about to take place. ‘We weren’t always drinking,’ adds Dimitri, ‘but talking, philosophising and sharing ideas.’

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, Berliners flooded across the ex-border. Dimitri confirms, ‘the first 11 months were complete chaos.’ The new authorities decided to delay confronting the administrative headache of property ownership in the former East until late 1990, letting incomers seized advantage of the sprawling, unoccupied buildings. ‘We'd apply for short term contracts, no more than two or three months, to open a “gallery” and we’d immediately start a club.’ At a time of tremendous upheaval – social, political, economic, bureaucratic – the state had more immediate concerns than shutting down unlicensed parties. Berlin was a Petri dish for a wild new culture.

Dance floors were the meeting places for Berliners from across the political divide. DJ Mijk van Dijk first worked as a music journalist and a music producer and recalls meeting André Langenfeld, a Fritz FM DJ born in the GDR, for the first time: ‘He'd never been to a club, but via radio he’d developed an unbelievably encyclopaedic knowledge of the music DJs were playing.’ The avant garde of the West had the vision; the East had the space and newly liberated, life-hungry locals. ‘Without the fall of the wall, there’d have been no techno revolution in Germany’, says Dimitri.

So life began for Tresor, which continued on the precarious basis of short-term agreements until eviction in 2005. Tresor’s early success was characterised by a DIY ethic. Dmitri speaks of an age when ‘you’d go to a flea market and bring home two ventilators; that was your air conditioning. Nowadays’, his tone shifts, ‘you have to pay €60,000 for that shit.’ Clubs established in large, former industrial spaces had, de facto, an otherworldly nature – ‘people were excited by the opportunity to escape.’

Keen to find performers to fill his newly acquired venue, Dimitri had heard an inkling of a riveting new electronic sound across the Atlantic and headed to Detroit in early 1990 to hear it for himself. Detroit had some parallels with Berlin. Both cities were experiencing industrial decline, where a streetwise nous carried more currency than cash or chic. As machines died down, their hard sounds were regenerated by raw synthesisers and drum machines in Detroit’s recording studios. Dimitri could afford to take risks with bookings, inviting musicians such as Final Cut and those signed to label Underground Resistance to perform at newbie Tresor.

Emphasis on the wall's factor is highly important, and although Dimitri was instrumental in bringing the first flush of techno artists from Detroit over to Berlin, he stresses the bigger picture – Techno’s emergence at the turn of the 1990s was not the soundtrack to social change but a symptom. Both cities had large, vacant spaces, but whereas Detroit’s were in decay, Berlin, a linchpin between former political territories, had life breathed into its spaces by hedonism with a mission. Under these conditions, and with a rabid audience, techno took on a new life; it emerged from a leftfield, experimental niche to become a bona-fide, large-scale dance floor genre. Visiting artists expressed surprise and delight at the wild reaction they received in Berlin’s clubs – until that point they’d rarely witnessed such driven, energetic dancing to their music. For Berlin’s post-communist community, the city was a recycled playground with an ultramodern, de-historicised soundtrack. Techno lacked a definitive history, and after Cold War conditions, something brand new was exactly what Berlin needed.

That’s not to suggest that techno was without roots. ‘We had the opportunity to see our heroes from the US in the flesh,’ says Mijk, just as ‘Mad’ Mike Atkins and Jeff Mills of Underground Resistance also got to see their own heroes Kraftwerk at Weißensee. Kraftwerk’s long awaited, dance-inspired record, ‘The Mix’, if not their strongest work, nods back towards the scene developing at that time and ‘felt like parents letting their children subtly know that their work was good.’ While its arrival in Berlin may have been a matter of appropriation, Techno had a ready heritage in its newfound home. 

It was a pre-professionalised, pre-commercialised era. ‘When DJs flew over we really looked after them,’ Dimitri says. ‘At Tresor we’d meet them from the airport, and they'd stay in private accommodation, eat with us, live with us, they became like extended family.’ These personal touches were the cornerstone of Tresor’s success, but also go some distance to explain why the whole scene rocketed. The sense of community had a gravitational appeal: there was warmth and homeliness and above all aspirations, which Detroit dearly lacked. Artists would move on to cities like Amsterdam, positive about their time in Berlin and eager to return.

Tresor was tucked in the basement of an old department store. Its minimalist interior coped with the repetitive beats cannoning from the speakers. The crowd was also mixed: rich or poor, from tower blocks or Brandenburg countryside, all found a second home on dance floor. Behind the scenes, adds Mijk, ‘Berlin had the fortune of good gatekeepers.’ Bookers and club owners operated a filtration process and only the best DJs performed, while shops were tastemakers on street level. ‘The record store Hardwax played a fundamental role in ensuring that only the correct music was made available.’

By July 1990, a generation was revelling in its summer of love. Mijk warmly recalls two-night-long, illegal parties in decommissioned factories. ‘It really was an age of togetherness, all the coldness of the recently bygone era evaporated. We had really grand perspectives: world peace was happening and it was happening here. First the conflict in Yugoslavia and then the Gulf War served as bloody reminders that the word was not yet a safe place, but the summer of 1990 was amazing. Everything felt possible.’

Steered by the avant-garde, techno’s impact rippled across Germany and, eventually, into the mainstream. Love Parade, the West Berlin electronic music festival, started out as a gathering of barely hundreds in 1989, and grew year on year as a hub for the country’s wider music community. In the pre-internet age, the festival enabled disparate musical communities to lend faces to radio voices, and Love Parade became an important meeting ground for collectives from Germany's other musically fertile cities, such as Frankfurt and Cologne.
 
By 1992, things were accelerating in Berlin and layers accruing. There was a Stussy scene of UK soldiers who danced to early breakbeat and both Manchester and Bristol sounds were influential. It was a period of rapid development where ‘music wasn't dismissed on the basis that it was old, but there was just so much groundbreaking new stuff to be heard.’ Dance floors rarely closed, which created a sense of supercharged progression and an all-inclusive music elite: ‘all the new sounds wanted to get in through the door, and they weren't prepared to queue.’