Stasia de Tilly: UFo, OMEN, Ostgut xt al.

fliers advertising Performing Arts Festival Berlin
The fliers of Berlin paint the physical spaces of the city with its culture. This and word-of-mouth are the ways in which news of parties used to travel.

Electronic music, being non-lyrical, has the ability to penetrate geographic barriers. It reaches a primal part of the human essence which makes the genre unique. Electronic music, when listened to in its desired setting, is one that stirs a feeling inside me, one I’ve been trying to transcribe using our most imperfect technology of language. The very nature of all music is emotionally ephemeral. In an instant a song can peak in rapture, then in the next moment the ecstacy dissipates. How does one begin explaining to another human being the feeling of a song if said human being has never heard the song? The song that inspired this project does just that for me. It’s Farben’s “Live At The Sahara Tahoe, 1973” off of his 2002 release Texstar.

This is the view from a bridge that connects Kreuzberg and Fredrichain, the two popular districts for night life in Berlin and the location of many previous rave sites.

When I listen to this track I feel like my head is floating through outer space. A squelching synth appears in your right ear at 1:53. It sounds like it could be a sound effect from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It fade in and out through the left ear like a moon orbiting my skull, the synth wanes and waxes in my right ear twice before then fading back to the left. My personal peak is at at 3:29 when a melancholy horn comes in and the song takes a turn away from clacky toward an auditory tenderness. The softest “ohhhh” you’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering sways up and down the mix. The first time, and every subsequent time that I tune into this horn I simultaneously feel empty and complete. The warmth that it brings to the track turns the sharp edges round but that otherworldly synth is still there floating around my head. This explanation surely doesn’t do it justice.

Back to the research: I have narrowed my period of study to the post-’89 era of Berlin’s electronic music scene. The young pumping heart of the city, its flesh, cut down the center longed for a kind of rebellion to shake its core. Punk music was alive in West Berlin but electronic music offered something else. This primal sound emitted from the thunderous German sound systems into a room that could fit 100 people with a ceiling reaching 1.90 meters offered a unity of bodies. Young people from all over the city would come to these parties seeking perhaps an escape but also some form of community, a comfort found in 60 sweaty bodies in a room. It’s less lonely. East Berlin was desolate, but the rage of Acid House traveling from the U.K. and Techno, imported from Detroit, MI, U.S.A. created a new sound scape of trance and techno that enlivened a Berlin on the edge of change.

This was taken in the Boros Collection. The site is a former Nazi bunker that served as the original space of Ostgut (1998-2003), the first incarnation of Berghain. Remnants of the former tenants are still seen by the graffiti left on the walls and the former darkroom that still wears its chipped black paint.

“This is a serious place, where they’re serious about techno, and serious about partying. No detail is overlooked. The door policy exists to facilitate a proper mix of insanity and respect.” – Andrew J. (New York, NY)  Review left on Berghain Yelp page

I’m less than a week into my research but it has occurred to me that it is more challenging than expected. An interview based ethnography entails waiting on other people’s time, so I have been sending many emails and trying to get in touch with various musicologists and artists. In the mean time I have been keeping myself busy with the creative portion of my project. I’ve spent many evenings biking to former rave sites to collect sound byte. One space of interest is the building which once housed the famous UFo club opened by Dimitri Hegelmann in 1988 in the basement of a residential building near to Schlesische (Shlay-vicious) Tor. I wanted to go at night because, that is after all, when raves happen. The eerie quiet of the street where the building sits is a deafening contrast to the typical electronic music spaces I’ve experienced in Berlin. I am excited to hear how this interacts with my personal composition once I start working with these sound bytes in a DAW.

Sven Väth (AKA Papa Sven), a grandfather of German techno, opened OMEN Club in Frankfurt in 1988. Here is some footage from the 90s taken outside of the club…

2 thoughts on “Stasia de Tilly: UFo, OMEN, Ostgut xt al.

  1. ahhh I love that track! (that album, and most of jan jelinek’s discog really)
    It’s cool that you will be experimenting with stuff of your own as inspired by the process and the soundscape of those spaces today. Your topic is very intriguing to me and I think with all the coverage that the punk scene of that era of Berlin gets, there is sooo much depth to be explored on the electronic music front. I like the spatial and emotive description of the actual setting as a entryway into the experiences of the people that were there and I think it’d be useful to get your interviewees to focus first on recalling the sensory experience they had before sentimentally indulging in the recounting of the (I’m sure many many) cool stories of the time–especially with the nature of trance and techno as mediating mediums into less conscious realms. Looking forward to your findings!

    1. Aurela,
      !!! thank you for your thoughts. I will be trying to pull german techno heads out of their hard shells into an embodied emotive space, which will not be easy as the german spirit sways toward analytical over emotional. I have a super exciting interview lined up with the founder of Tresor so wish me luck. 🙂

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