The good old days: the early twenty-tens
After one day of reflection, every aching muscle is telling me that this was one night of my life. The type of night to tell your grandkids about. Obviously I have difficulties picturing what kind of music they will listen to. Can you imagine all those popping up post-genre dubstep derivates or even IDM, glitch, witch house and drumstep being nothing more than what rocksteady is to us nowadays? Appealing for knitting socks or having a cup of tea on a foggy winter afternoon, but certainly not as exciting to our ears and legs anymore as the drop of an atomic bomb would be.
I am willing to pick up our tradition of writing about astonishing nights of music and vibes, to draw the attention to outstanding events that were more than just a falling star in the middle of the clear and bright night horizon, about shows that should ongoingly sparkle in our minds and that should not be forgotten in our ever so often pleasure seeking and hectical – yet repetitive lifestyles. For the first time in a long period I feel that this has happened on friday in mighty Subland – one of the best and not satisfyingly worshipped clubs that contribute to form Berlin in the way it is.
First, we had some visitors from Dresden, Magdeburg and Krakow. Berlin is connected and apparantly gets smaller from week to week. Its brothers and sisters are awakening and good friends visit each other, not only from Australia and Cali. So you real berlin people, don’t enclose yourselves in the neverending maze of darkness the Big B provides you with, go out and spread the seeds of freedom throughout the world. You know that this sump is special and what we all need is more exchange, more sharing and more learning from others. Everything. Everywhere. All the time.
At a student party in Charlottenburg we slowly grooved into the evening. The sub was heavy and the dancefloor not overcrowded yet. Some dub, some bass, some jungle and at least when it got full the people asked me to play some Peverelist instead of the freshman crying for “Rock & Pop” music earlier while wondering why I didn’t accept wishes. I just wanted to turn up the music, sometimes it is not even worth the effort explaining. Nevertheless after a house DJ took over it would have been easy to stay: cheap drinks and cheap chats, smoking allowed in the inside and two floors getting more and more filled by a stereotypical berlin party crowd. I guess the night was just calling out for more and those little girls were just a bit too pretty.
So fortunately we got back on our way to Friedrichshain, literally at the other side of the inner city. In the metro, apparantly I was to energetic and in the mood for talking and jumping around – one guy started to comment on my behaviour and one little misunderstanding later the Hippieactive Man was born. I am sorry to remind you of that, but in the end we are nothing more than future monkeys. Came down from the trees to use tools – now we own quite a lot of those and it gets more and more confusing, annoying and simply an illusion to keep everything under control. Have we gone too far? The planet knows the answer.
Other people in transit shared their beer with us, they planned to attend the very same party. In the same time, Babylon representatives have held a team meeting (armed) on Warschauer Brücke, some infringed brothers told us that they wanted to go performing on that one party: “Dub something, on a red flyer”. Alright, them too. Suddenly I guess we all had the same intuition. It was almost two in the morning and we expected a queue like we have never seen one – or not for that time and for dubrelated music in a city where there are way to much offers for a given growing, but surely not endlessly growing demand.
So, without hurrying, we still had to do two things before: eat fries and take a picture in a photobooth, which you could not download in an AppStore. I know those machines and I know that their information policy is not the best one, but I find it cruel at the same time that most of the humans entering it do not have the patience to wait about four minutes for the small black and white strip with four pictures on. Even though the machine was obviously producing a sound that indicated its functioning, they didn’t believe me that it would spit out something in the end. It did, yet we were the stereotypical berlin party tourists, so please take this advice and never complain yourself about something that you are a part of.
Coming to the venue, we fell off our shoes. There were at least 100 people in the queue the moment we arrived. People in Berlin in general tend to go out late, but such a queue at three in the morning in a club where 600 attendees is the absolute maximum of still being able to breathe was a new territory for me, even though I experienced good nights as well as crowded ones in the same club before. I knew of one friend who wanted to meet me earlier this evening to prepare for that party. As he picked up (he picked up!) the music did not blast my ears away and indeed, he stood in the queue, right before the entrance. It was our lucky day and people that moan about your waiting behavior moan less agressively if you offer them chewing gum.
Still a lot more people were to come and as I was told later, quite a lot of them actually were not able to celebrate with us anymore, the club was filled until the last bit of air in the corner subwoofer. We arrived in the exact right time, everything was perfect, I took off my shoes, put on comfortable dancing pants (as they would get wet anyways and outside the temperatures where slightly above the freezing point in the early morning, I thought it was not the worst idea to have extra pants with me) and squeezed myself into a little hole on the dancefloor. Once there, dancing was more than possible, it was fun. Radikal Guru has just started and the audience was high on love, but not in that sexualized way, the atmosphere was chilled, no harassements, no dumb touchings, folks where you put your bag just somewhere because you feel that noone’s gonna steel it.
Back to Radikal Guru, this dude was audaliciously mouth licking. The crowd went crazy and even if or maybe because he mostly put hard and electronic steppas dub with some more uplifting dubstep versions, it was a pleasure to be in the front row at least for “Babylon Sky”, where the whole club sang along. In the end, there were countless MCs to support him and make this a family event. Every now and then some chilling and water was needed, so I went to the bar floor and for my own surprise there was Mighty Melody dropping some pure and thrilling junglists pleasures into the area. Hell yeah and off I went. It is a shame that I still have to point that out, but it was simply awesome and enjoyably different to see two ladies behind the turns and the mic. I wished that would be normal, but I guess without wanting to reproduce prejudices and just willing to raise awareness, it can mostly be due to boys pushing themselves into the front that female turntable artists are not yet to be seen too often.
The unity of the people, the music, the club and the atmosphere turned into an excitement about everything, that was hardly to keep down, but more dancing was the only solution. Finally it was Freytakt who brought this to a whole new level for me. I knwo that taste is differing and there are several techniques to play, but in the end it matters what the subject at the other side of the speakers perceives – and that sound stew he later explained to me as Mindstep – seemed to release long kept secrets in my bones. I startet to dance with the walls, the floor, the ceiling, my hair, the fence, upside down… I don’t know how, but the pain that I feel everywhere in my body trying to get up and walk to the toilet is comparable to running a marathon without being well prepared (which I already did). Maybe Mindstep means the movements break out of your mind. In that case, they succeeded, also when Faun joined for a B2B session. I hardly quit dancing at about seven in the morning as my body whispered for a break. While leaving the dancefloor I saw a nicely painted poster welcoming people on that floor. It said something like:
“””””
Welcome to Robot Country,
our lovely planet.
Bitte entledigen
sie sich allen unnötigen
Ballasts und genießen sie
die Vorzüge der
Schwerelosigkeit.
Welcome!
“””””
Indeed, I didn’t know that I was living in Robot Country before, but the advantages of gravity loss became understandable on that night, which certainly was a reference in global steppers culture.
Marching forward with conscious minds.
After the show of the year with Radikal Guru, the presence of (almost) the whole Dub der guten Hoffnung family, the unexpectedly tasty and (and partly feminist) Junglist vibes and finally totally taking it off into being taught new lessons about gravity, the only way to sum this up is to thank the organizers, the artists and the Subland by stating to be proud that this is possible in Berlin. And maybe only there.
Namaste!
_Links_
Dub der guten Hoffnung
Subland
Radikal Guru
Freytakt
_PS_
Some things I understand better after this night:
Party people do get younger as you get older, that’s the way it is.
As long as every person enjoys it in harmony, I see no problem about that.
Today are the good old times we’re looking back at in twenty years.
(originally by Karl Valentin)
Enjoying a good night with good music is always best with good friends around you.
Unity is better than insanity. Concurrence is avoidable. Dubunite!
