What strategies did the bars and clubs employ to survive in East Berlin? MC: In the beginning the bars and clubs were changing rapidly. Some lasted a couple of weeks, some a few years and you had no chance to know where they were. The only way was to move around. You discovered places on the third floor of an apartment building, a garage or an abandoned factory building. Some were open once a week, another was open only on the full moon. One bar would open every sixth day to avoid becoming too popular! They also did this to avoid attention from the police. There were some clubs such as Bunker and Tresor that became quite famous. The most interesting club I visited was Tresor. I felt like I was dancing alone there for hours because all you could see was smoke. There was the occasional shadow and sound for hours... boom, boom, boom, boom. At Tresor, I realised there was a special link between the music and drugs. Its difficult to think about techno without thinking about ecstasy. Strange opening hours, mixing music and art, how would you locate these spaces and what did they offer? MC: After a couple of years, I always knew a couple of places to go. The most interesting thing though, was to find something new. To do this, I would ride my bike, not trusting what I could see from the street. I would try to enter buildings and walk through to the first or second courtyard. Sometimes I did it systematically and checked every single courtyard in a street. When I found something, it felt like winning bingo! People would find a space and mix it with site specific installations, cinema, photography, video, performance art, maybe host a reading from a poet, while the central figure of the DJ would play music. You didn’t see a bar or gallery offering a singular concept. These hybrid spaces were not clubs because they would mix different artistic ingredients. I saw these productions first in Berlin and then all over the world. I was surprised because I saw very good work. In the late 90’s in the club Maria, I saw one of the best visuals I have ever seen. Maria was in an old East Berlin post office and they were really proposing what’s now called visual art and that was going on parallel to the rest. The nightlife developed in such a way that by the end of the decade it was producing high- end culture. The sound was different, the art was different. There were no entry fees and prices in general were low. Everybody was original, without wishing or wanting to be. The music was only starting to be techno, which was such a wide field. One of the most important things was the sound system. Is this high-end culture still present in Berlin? MC: Today in Mitte you can’t dance and there is nowhere in Prenzlauer Berg. Back then, no one was complaining that the music was too loud. Before the war there were almost 5 million people living in Berlin and today there is 3.5 million. After the wall came down, Mitte was empty. We were able to do what we wanted. I was crazy about looking at these people working machines on the table they called a ‘live act’. They were DJ’s! The figure of the DJ in Berlin became a star, a god.
MB: I came much later, maybe 15 years after Marco Canevacci. I came following an electro clash/trash wave from Berlin in the late 1990s and it was already more than over by the time I arrived. I discovered so many other things that really opened my eyes to music. There was so much happening and for me, it was all new. I was going out a lot, experiencing and absorbing new things that didn’t have anything to do with my music. At that point, I didn’t really know what my music was and what I wanted to do. I worked for a short time with a guy from the US, who was organising an impromptu sound festival that wandered through urban space in the city. We borrowed a trolley from Lidl, installed a radio, speakers and walked around town asking people to make use of it. I was jumping from one stone to another, trying to experience different types of music, to try to understand what it meant to see and hear it being performed. There’s still a cellar at Madame Claudes, a bar in Kreuzberg that hosts on Monday night a beautiful, small, trash jam session. There are maybe 20 artists playing one song each. There are a lot of people and right there, music, it’s happening. The city has offered you both considerable space to develop your own ideas, what was the catalyst to the development of the temporary architecture collective, Plastique Fantastique? MC: By 1999 the economic situation had changed. There was considerably less work and I had completed my architecture studies. The quality of architecture in Berlin during the 1990s was very low. It was a conservative mix of speculation and a bad sense of aesthetics that manifested itself in the most disgusting ways you could imagine. The idea to look for a job as an architect was more a pain than a wish. I started thinking about making some culture myself and this idea became a reality when I found a vacant, 2000 square metre factory. It wasn’t impossible to find spaces like this, but to squat something would have been difficult. It was close to Ostbahnhoff, the former main East Berlin railway station and two metres from the Spree, the river flowing through Berlin. I found it by chance and after some months of negotiation with the city government, we signed a contract for around 700 DM a month. It was called ‘club an der Schillingbrücke’. We quickly realised the space was too big to heat in winter and began to develop strategies to make it smaller. We installed an industrial sized fireplace on one side and began playing with plastic on the other. It was cheap and we could afford to heat a smaller area. We began with pneumatic architecture because plastic was the cheapest material we could find to cover a 100 square metre area for $100. We didn’t know how long we would be able to use the space for the club. I was always influenced by the temporality of Berlin. I saw the opportunity to intervene in public space as a way to make not only myself feel better about the changes going on around me, but to also begin to become a producer of culture in the city, not just a consumer. What changes you have seen in the contemporary music scene in Berlin since 2006? MB: On the weekend I performed at the Lover’s Festival, an event organised by Mind Pirates. I performed on the Jellyfish Drums, an instrument I also developed with Plastique Fantastique. The
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Marco Barotti, you moved to Berlin in 2006, what was your introduction to the music scene of the city?
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