(This is part seven of an eight-part series published at magicaldancefloors.com/berghain.)

IīīīīI Breakthrough

It’s been a year since I started this series, and I won’t lie, it’s been hard to write this one. I’ve procrastinated because, in part, I got so much wrong in my first experiences and I didn’t have the advantage of being able to go back to Berghain over and over to figure things out in person. Instead of going back again and again, I’ve had to play the movies back in my head over and over.

That all changed a week ago, when I flew again from California to Berghain and figured some things out in the way that works best for me: experientially. I won’t be writing about that most recent trip in this note, but the trip allowed me to break through my writer’s block and complete this post, which has been sitting in drafts for about six months.

IīīīīI But First, Face Control

Like my other post on the darkrooms, this post is paid because I don’t want this writing floating around freely online without some sort of filter separating the curious tourists from the committed partiers. If you’ve made it this far in the series, you’re committed for sure, but the paywall you’re about to meet is a secondary safety measure that ensures a bit more discretion and privacy as we bump around in the darkness, with at least one of us figuratively (and at times literally) naked.

To set expectations, the visits to Berghain’s fabled darkrooms that I write about in this post were quite tame compared to what was happening all around me in that space. So any shortness of breath, any tightness in the pants, or any dampness produced is a mere side effect, not the main point of this writing. I’ve been encouraged to write erotic fiction, but this isn’t that.

And to be clear, I was (and still am) in a committed monogamous relationship, so I didn’t engage in the full gamut of darkroom activities at any point during my first 30-hour Berghain weekend.

Which begs the question: why even go into the darkrooms if you’re not going to use them to fuck strangers? The even bigger question is why write about the fabled darkrooms of Berghain at all? Should some places or things never be written about?

This post is an answer to all of these questions. But in short, for those who don’t want to continue reading, I think the darkrooms are an essential ingredient in the cocktail that makes Berghain such a heady and intoxicating life experience. I don’t think you can understand Berghain without understanding the darkrooms.

The other answer to the question is artistic. One of the authors I admire most, Karl Ove Knausgård, describes his commitment to the truth via unflinching honesty as an “act of love.” This article series is my act of love -- there’s no building on this planet that I love more, and I hope my obsession with it might contribute to greater love, understanding, and respect for the place.

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This is the story of a “white whale” of a song and how a group of people dancing together in a magic room in a Southern California desert heard it, were deeply touched by it, and tracked it down over the course of a three-year-long hunt that crossed oceans and continents.

The story starts three years ago when several hundred folks were dancing in a room where three DJs (brothers Stephen and David Dewaele and James Murphy) were about halfway through a six-hour vinyl set. They had just played Wally Badarou’s “Mambo”. They followed it with a whale of a tune.

You have to understand that any given Despacio party is a room full of heads -- people who chase rare grooves and quickly look at each other across the floor to check that we’re clocking a tune. A little nod from one of these folks tells me all I need to know: “yup, I’ve got this one.”

But there were no nods from any of the human Shazams in the room, just looks of confusion and surprise and joy on the faces of the people that I had come to rely on for song identification. I hadn’t been worried, but now I was.

Maybe you’re a human Shazam. Want to try your hand at it?

Give it a listen (sorry about the terrible-quality MP3):

As I looked around the room, I saw ID hounds attempting to Shazam the tune, but Shazam failed them. The tune had not yet been sucked into the giant commercial machine that populates Shazam’s database. Uh oh, this one was going to be a challenge. There would be no instant gratification here. My worry grew.

So I listened extra hard, trying to burn the song into memory. I worried this would be the last time I might ever hear it. I let the song wash over me, a mellow piano note plinking at the end of every measure of a heavily textured beat tapestry. When Gaye’s voice arrives, it lands softly, on cat feet.

Speaking to his biographer about making the record, Gaye said, “I felt like I’d finally learned to sing. ... I’d been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I’d been doing wrong. I’d been singing too loud.”

It’s easy to not hear mega-hits like “What’s Going On.” Through overplay, they become so ubiquitous that we stop hearing them. But remixes and edits have the power of making the familiar new again, of bringing songs back to life.

A room of people were essentially hearing -- really hearing -- Gaye’s song for the first time. The DJs had somehow found this rare edit and were gifting us the opportunity to hear one of the greatest songs of the 20th century for the first time.

We were overcome with the beauty and sadness of the song. And yet we were simultaneously feeling these pleasures while registering the agony of knowing we might never hear the song again.

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🐋The hunt begins

When you’re in this situation of hearing a song you must have, what’s your next move? Sometimes you can peek at the record as it spins, but at Despacio we couldn’t do that because the DJ booth is hidden, tucked away where nobody can see the records except the DJs.

Maybe you begin to rehearse in your head how you’re going to beg the DJ for the ID after they play the last song. “Amazing set. What was that edit of Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ that you played at about 6pm?”

But at Despacio, the DJs sneak out through the back door after the night ends.

Maybe you message the DJs on Instagram the day after, begging for any shred of intel they can share about the song that haunted you as you put your head down on your pillow that evening. We tried that, no response.

Maybe you message one of the crew members that put on the event. Tried that. The crew didn’t know the track. Maybe you go to LinkedIn to find the management team representing the talent and send them a message there. But still no luck. You offer a bounty online, and attach the audio snippet. No luck.

Months and years go by. But you’re not going to give up.

This is how it goes. Some songs show up just once, leaving a lasting mark on our bodies and psyches. We hunt these white whales to the ends of the earth because we can’t forget or forgive the injury, nor can we rest until the song has been captured. We must capture the song and play it over and over until we’ve healed the hole it left in our hearts.

A few days after Despacio, as attendees reminisced online, chatter returned to the Marvin Gaye track. One person wrote, “My first hour in Despacio in my life, and I was brought to tears almost immediately. Unreal Remix of the GOAT.”

Someone shared a brief video of the moment:

Another attendee wrote, “I was hoping to find a full version of the edit. This was my favorite thing I heard in Despacio that weekend and one of my favorites of the festival.” Me too, amigo, me too.

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🐋 Where the whale surfaced - Despacio

It’s no accident that the tune was played at Despacio. It’s one of those rooms built from the ground up that puts the dancefloor first, with an emphasis on music that’s rare in today’s hypercommercial world of VIP tables and made-for-Instagram DJ personalities. Despacio has no stage. It’s just a big dancefloor that fits about 2,000 people encircled by seven towering speaker stacks powered by McIntosh amps. A disco ball hangs over the center of the room. The room is kept dark, but occasionally the ball explodes, like so:

The people who dance together inside Despacio tend to form bonds due to the quantum entanglement of soul particles that occurs on proper dancefloors. And after the event’s over, part of the weekend never dies as attendees hang out on Reddit and on Discord to reminisce, chat, and hunt down song IDs during the months-long waits until the next Despacio.

Despacio’s DJs draw from a massive collection of tens of thousands of records, many of which don’t exist in any form online. Many of the songs they play in this room have never been released or have seen extremely limited release. White labels, pressed under murky legal circumstances, abound. The DJs delight in bringing their rarest vinyl to Despacio, sometimes bringing test pressings and fragile acetates for play in that hallowed room. The Dewaele brothers told Tim Sweeney of Beats in Space that they’ve played about 120 dubplates of their own unreleased music.

That’s why Shazam fails to identify many of the songs played at Despacio. Shazam claims to have 100 billion songs in their database, but the songs that make it into Shazam’s database have been ingested by the commercial publishing machine. Despacio’s tracks are often several levels below the sweep of commercial radar.

Naturally, given the power of these songs, the Despacio community dedicates significant human energy to hunting down the music that’s played there. They organize their finds into a crowdsourced spreadsheet they call The Spreadsheet of Truth. This group effort helps identify roughly 90% of the music that’s played on any given night at Despacio, but the Gaye tune eluded capture.

Long after April 2023, that remix of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On haunted the community, of which I’m a member. We searched and searched. Our desperation was so great that we’d pull out our phones in record shops and play snippets of the song for the employees who worked there. We did this in Ghent, London, Berlin, Miami, New York City, and Los Angeles. We circled back and played the track for Shazam again and again. We asked DJ friends. We even posted a cash bounty for anyone that could help ID the song. Still no luck.

🐋 Denlekke, Tune Sleuth, reaches out to Douglas Sherman

Then there was a break in the case. One sleuth, known as “Denlekke” in the Despacio Discord, went through every search result for “Marvin Gaye What’s Going On Edit” and found this online recording of a set played by Douglas Sherman (one of David Mancuso’s hand-picked back-up musical hosts for The Loft parties) at A-One record shop in New York in July, 2015.

Denlekke messaged Sherman and was able to get a picture of the label of the record. The strange image Denlekke received was some kind of glyph, hand-drawn with black and red Sharpie pens. There was no other identifying text.

Of course Denlekke immediately ran a reverse image search, but no results came back. He also extracted a low-quality MP3 out of the online recording, and he shared this terrible-quality MP3 rip of the track to assist others with their search.

Months went by, then years. The community started calling the track a “white whale” because it had been long hunted but never caught. Nearing the three-year anniversary of the track’s debut at Despacio, I posted a note to the Discord, “this is your annual reminder that we still don’t have an ID on this track.”

I posted the message as a joke of sorts, because by this point I was convinced that we’d never find the record.

But Denlekke saw that message and decided to try another reverse image search.

This time, the search returned one result, pointing to a discogs listing.

Denlekke couldn’t believe it. He shared the link to the Discord.

The first response arrived two minutes later: “What the fuck no way.”

Denlekke cautioned folks not to immediately jump to buy it, because he hadn’t yet had a chance to listen to the record. The marketing copy didn’t mention Marvin Gaye or “What’s Going On,” but it seemed to hint at the possibility:

“On the A side, “Profascination,” AJ From Philly explores a progressive, ethereal re-interpretation of a classic 20th century R&B anthem.”

Had Denlekke found the record?

The listing’s copy mentioned a Bandcamp page, and included a few unique keywords including a song title and a producer’s alias. Using these new terms, we were able to quickly locate the Bandcamp page:

I’d purchased one copy of the record from the Bandcamp listing, and one copy from Discogs. The Discogs purchase arrived first. I was waiting for the UPS driver when he knocked. I took the package, ripped it open, pulled the record out of its sleeve, dropped it onto my turntable, and set the needle down.

My ears confirmed it. Denlekke had found the record. He’d found the record!

Word circulated amongst the community. More than 40 copies of the record sold quickly over the next several days, catching the producer, “AJ From Philly” (whose real name is Josh Madoff), by surprise. He messaged buyers letting us know that it’d be a few extra days before he could retrieve the records from storage and ship them out. He shared this photo with the Despacio Discord prior to shipping:

Circling back to Denlekke, I asked him about this hunt and what drives him to put in effort to find song IDs.

He wrote, “I like to collect records that are under-appreciated in the modern era. There’s a real joy to hunting and “discovering” records without an online presence. Part of that is then being able to share it with others so that the music will hopefully be preserved for longer and the artists can hopefully get the praise they deserve.”

Through email, and then through Discord, I asked Madoff about the record and his creative process.

🐋 How AJ From Philly aka Josh Madoff made Profascination

Madoff and his artistic partner APA (who produced the B-side on the record) had self-funded the release of just 200 copies of the record in 2014, but Madoff had long since moved away from dance music production and built a deep career as a composer and sound designer for film and TV projects that have shown up on Netflix, Showtime and Hulu.

Magical Dancefloors was able to get in touch with Madoff to ask him a few questions about how the track came to be and how it made its way onto dancefloors.

Madoff and APA produced one song each for the record. They hadn’t priced it to break even, and initial distribution was limited. Describing the distribution, Madoff wrote, “We were just selling direct to mostly DJs and a handful of record stores before that, wanted to keep it this special secret thing. We mostly sold it to DJs. We were very lucky to get a ton of interest from a nice roster of DJs and producers that I really admire. I know Optimo used to play it as their closer a lot. Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin (Mister Saturday Night) def bought the most copies and gave them out to a lot of DJs. I was also told it was in rotation at the Loft NYC.”

Justin Carter and Eamon Harkin, who you might know from their wonderful NYC club Nowadays (I’ve written about that club extensively) were gifting copies of the record to their DJ friends, one of them being Douglas Sherman, which is how it came to be played in the set that Denlekke had found via his online searches.

This track is a great example of the sort of unidentifiable re-edit that dancers will probably only ever hear once in their lives and then spend the rest of their days searching for. The spacey satellite bleeps, jungle djembe, and staccato clacks add an electronic underlayer to Gaye’s silky vocals, like a cashmere-wrapped robotic panther. The track’s in no hurry. It arrives step by step with a stealthy sure-footedness.

Describing his creative process, Madoff shared with me, “I was always in love with this song. It sounds so sweet, but the lyrics are about how fucked up the world is. I wanted to take people on a journey from the sweetness of the original, to the dark hell-on-earth that it describes, and back to a place of redemption. That’s how the three main sections of the song are laid out. Everything but the vocals are 100% original and mostly live recordings I made at my home studio. There are around 100 tracks total that make up the song.”

As an example of his recording technique, Madoff shared that the drum sounds came from a djembe he layered with gaffer tape, played and recorded himself, then pitched and EQ’d until the sound took just the right shape.

Madoff’s got his hands full now with his work for film, but he writes that “I have thought about getting back into it.... have a bunch of music I’d like to finish and release. It’s just very difficult to find the time these days. I’m always chasing a score deadline or rushing to finish a soundtrack.”

Maybe the Internet beating a path to his door will convince him to give it another shot. We’d love to hear more from the brain that produced Profascination.

🐋 How Justin Carter (of Nowadays) shared the record

We now know how the track came to be played at Loft parties, how it came to close out Optimo sets, and how it came to be played at Nowadays, NYC. But still one mystery remained -- how did the track get into the hands of the DJs who put on Despacio?

In an attempt to find the final piece of the puzzle, I contacted an archivist at Deewee records was able to confirm that the track isn’t in the Ghent collection. I was now fairly certain that the record had been a James Murphy selection for Despacio.

So I contacted Justin Carter who had been an early superspreader of the record. I asked Carter how he discovered the record and whether he might have been the one to pass it on to James Murphy. Carter responded:

“Many years ago, a person on the Mister Saturday Night label gave me this record with a hand drawn whale on one side and a hand drawn bobcat on the other side. Red Sharpie used to draw both, every copy hand done and a little different from the others.

I was into both sides, but the “What’s Going On” remix is particularly special, one of those records that doesn’t get played often, but when it does, the impact is serious. It makes no sense on paper, but somehow it recontextualizes one of the most well-known and important songs by one of the 20th century’s most important musicians. Like who thinks, “I’m gonna flip this ‘What’s Going On’ song,” and actually succeeds in doing it justice? I have heard people gasp and laugh when the vocals initially come in, cover their faces in grief when a storm seems to arrive and the track rumbles in the break, and shed tears of joy when the bassline comes in and the clouds part toward the end. Every time I hear it, I think, “It may get hard, but it’s going to be okay.”

Not long after they gave it to me, I asked for more copies that I could share. I passed it to a few people and established a policy for myself: anytime I put it in my bag, I’d add extra copies. If I played it and someone asked about it, I’d hand them a copy of the record. I’ve never met James, so I’m not sure where he got it...

In early February, I pulled it back out and played it for the first time in a long time at a private gathering that I’m a part of, and thirteen(!) people asked me about it. I didn’t have thirteen copies to give out, so I got in touch with the guys who made it and got most of what they had left so I could carry on my tradition. In the meantime, Edowa Shimizu—a friend who is also one of The Loft gatherings’ current stewards and a musical host, who happened to be at the gathering where I played it that night—borrowed my last copy and played it at February’s Loft anniversary party. There was apparently another run on the booth with people asking about it. So the story continues.

Douglas Sherman, one of The Loft’s other current stewards and musical hosts, often reminds me of something David Mancuso used to say to him: “The music plays us.” Every time this record comes up, I think of that.”

🐋 The whale meets the dolphin -- how James Murphy discovered the tune

Carter suggested that perhaps Madoff had given the record to James Murphy, so I asked Madoff again if he remembered giving it to Murphy. The second time was the charm. He remembered:

“Dave P booked James Murphy to DJ at The Dolphin on Broad Street in Philly on a random Thursday in 2015. I used to live like three blocks from The Dolphin, so Alex and I walked over to hear his set. At some point in the night, I reached up to the DJ booth and handed James Murphy the record with no context, no email, and I didn’t even give him my name.”

Continues Madoff, “I had totally blocked that from my memory, haha. In retrospect, I think I was already trying to be a Film Composer, even though I didn’t know it yet. If you listen to the whole song, it’s really a short film in 3 acts. And the function of the music is to take you on an emotional ride that carries you through the story.”

So that’s how that specific piece of vinyl was passed from one pair of hands to another and played for Despacio eight years later at 6pm on a Friday in April.

If not for Madoff handing his record to James at the Dolphin in 2015, dancers in 2023 would never have heard that record at Despacio’s Coachella 2023 outing. And with the final piece of the puzzle in place, we’re near the end of our emotional ride.

🐋 What’s going on?

So far in this story I’ve resisted the most obvious temptation, but I can resist no longer. History repeats itself, and Gaye’s timeless words seem more relevant today than they have been in decades. I’ll quote the first two stanzas:

Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, yeah

Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today

To listen to this record today is to realize how little has changed. I’m a long-time misanthrope who believes humanity will never pull its head out of its ass, but songs like this briefly open my heart to the possibility that we might one day care enough about police brutality, war, the environment, and prejudice to do something real about them. These issues haven’t gotten any better in 55 years. In many ways they’ve gotten worse. But for a few brief minutes, we might allow ourselves to dream.

🐋 Post-script

At the time I initially published this post at noon today, there were 34 copies of the record remaining. Seven hours later, all 34 records had been sold. It’s now officially sold out. There will be no repressing, and the team have no plans for a digital release. Enjoy your records, folks! After you’ve given it a spin, would love if you came back and shared in the comments how it made you (or the dancefloor) feel.

… and finally, a quick request. Please consider leaving a like or comment on this post. It helps with visibility in the dumb algo game that we all have to play these days. Smashing that like button takes you a second, and gives my work visibility. Thank you!

Theatrical effects deeply shape dancefloor energy, and we don’t talk about that nearly enough. But as you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, “theatricals” are one of the seven elements in the recipe for dancefloor magic, and this post will dig into theatricality with a breakdown of a single lighting moment as it evolved over the course of a decade.

My first time seeing the Panorama Bar shutters open to allow in the morning light, as described in my Berghain article, brought me to tears. Absolutely perfect. The same goes for sunrise at Moontribe gatherings in Southern California deserts. Nothing manmade beats the way the first rays of light crack open a new day, spilling sunlit joy into dancers’ hearts.

Despacio, the dancefloor I’ve written about here in the past, doesn’t run all night long, so it can’t compete with dancefloors that do feature sunrise, but it does engineer a moment of figurative sunrise using the mirror ball as a sun in conjunction with a special, unreleased Soulwax edit of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.”

Over the 13 years that Despacio has been in existence, the DJs have played 60 sets, wrapping up about 1/3 of those sets with this “Here Comes the Sun” finale. Though the track has stayed (almost) the same, the climax moments have been lit by several different lighting directors over the years, and we can analyze the evolution over time to learn something about the the way lighting gives dancefloor magic a boost.

Here’s the earliest example of “Here comes the Sun” for which footage exists. This video comes from June 2014, just six months after Despacio’s debut event, so in all fairness the team were still working a lot of this out. This is probably only the second or third time that the song had been played at this point:

The DJs are at the end of a six-hour, vinyl-only set and have chosen this song as the closer for the second day of Sonar Festival, in Barcelona. Despite the terrible phone audio, you can clearly see a joyous crowd responding to the music as the lighting director executes four motions:

(1) Prior to the song, there’s the setup. The room was filled with haze to heighten the dramatic effect of the lighting effects to come.

(2) The beams from the moving heads are turned on with a bright, almost noontime daylight effect, drawing everyone to the center of the room and creating a central vortex of human energy. These are folks who have danced together for hours and this is the last song, they know it, and they gather in the center of the room to celebrate it. Despacio is usually kept quite dark, so this bright light likely felt novel to the dancers.

(3) At around 45 seconds into the clip, the moving heads begin to soften their focus, beginning their journey from a tight, narrow spotlight to a wider, cone-shaped effect that we see by the end of the video.

(4) At around 50 seconds, the beams move towards the center of the room, beginning their journey to illuminate the mirror ball hanging above the dancer’s heads. The lights reach their final point in this journey about 30 seconds later, and as they near their destination, the bright, midday white moves into to sunset-hued oranges and reds.

(5) The light bars at the top of the seven speaker stacks surrounding the dancefloor are brought in for the final moments of the song, pulsing to peak output with each repetition of “sun” in the final refrain of: “Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.”

There’s a lot of great design here, but it’s not yet fully baked. The intent is clear, but at least one moving head misses its target entirely (you can see it clearly in the video missing the ball like an errant shot off to the right, from the viewer’s perspective). Additionally, the “drop” of the song (at 1:05) doesn’t line up with the moment the lights all finally meet at the mirror ball, some 17 seconds later (1:22). This feels like a missed opportunity to further amplify the emotional high point of the song.

Just a year later, most of those complaints have been addressed, and a new sequence is in effect, clearly building on the first version:

The improvements in this version are numerous: There are at least twice as many heads, and the heads are cut entirely for 10 seconds from 0:51 to 1:01 of the clip, giving the explosion that happens at 1:01 greater impact due to the contrast between the darkness (“It's been a long, cold, lonely winter”) and the moment when the sun appears in the song. The yellow hue of the lighting feels like an improvement as well over the somewhat harsh white light of the first version.

The biggest improvement is of course the moment when the ball explodes with yellow light when the song transitions from build to climax.

But there are still a couple of opportunities for improvement. The beams are too sharp, giving the ball a bunch of hot spots, rather than the appearance of a star-like surface that’s aflame all over. The mirror ball looks more like a pincushion than the center of our solar system.

More problematically but also more subtly, the lights are late, coming in a half second after the drop moment. This might have just been someone hitting a button too late. It might have even been the DJs’ fault, as they do have a basic DMX device that they themselves are allowed to operate for some of the lighting effects. But chances are it’s a timing error in the DMX sequence.

Fast forward seven years to the post-pandemic version of this same moment. Post-Despacio, a new lighting director, Jonas Weyn from Ghent-based Arf & Yes, took over and further improved all of Despacio’s lighting, including this sequence:

Weyn makes two big improvements in this third version of “Here Comes the Sun.”

First, the blue light in the pre-climax build-up more closely matches the “long, cold, lonely winter” lyric. The deep blues are also shot through with a few purples to give the lights texture. Importantly, the blues and purples sit nicely across the complimentary color wheel from the yellow light that follows.

The timing’s also fixed in this version. The lights snap into place on the ball exactly on cue. The Robe MegaPointe moving heads travel the last few feet of distance in the fraction of a second it takes the music to make the transition from cold winter to sunny morning, and they flip from blue to yellow during that traversal, briefly flashing white on their way to the destination color.

There are other, more subtle improvements, but these two changes in particular show a lighting sequence that finally meets the music where it needs to be met.

Weyn shared with us some notes on how he approaches this one:

Here comes the mirrorball is the only programmed song in the lighting desk. I adjust it for each Despacio… because of a few things.

• mirrorball position related to the floor is not always on the same height

• fixtures are not always the same; some are slower or faster than others, so I tweak times where the lights slowly fade towards the mirrorball

• no lights can touch the ball before the drop, but they should be really close to it

It’s rare that we get to see a specific lighting moment evolve over time, and rarer still that we have video evidence of that evolution. As you know, I’m normally opposed to phones on the dancefloor, but in this case they at least serve as a tool that enabled this brief examination of dancefloor theatricality.

If you’re interested in hearing the full song, you can catch a much better recording of it in this bootleg recording of Despacio’s Ghent outing. The DJs start mixing in the track at 5:43:55 after a cheeky James Murphy selection of Jackey Beavers’ “Mr. Bump Man (Theo Parrish Re-Edit).”

If I had to summarize the lessons I’m taking away for myself from this as I learn to light far smaller dancefloors, the questions I’ll remember to ask myself are:

1. Lyrically, what does the song mean, and how might the lighting align to the meaning?

2. What are the pivotal moments in the musical arrangement, and how are the lights participating?

3. How is contrast being both heard and seen? Is the lighting stealing the show, or married to it?

4. What are the “key frames” of the visual animation and how do they line up to the music’s phrases, phrase changes, and aural subtractions or additions?

Perhaps the ultimate questions is how these moments make us feel. The right closing ceremony can take on a ritualistic importance, and can put an exclamation point onto the end of a ritual in a way that elevates the entire experience. Here’s another fan-submitted video of the final moments of the song, where the lights and music have stopped and everyone claps for the team that made it happen.

I was inspired to do this by two books in particular. The first of them told the story of Tony Pike, the playboy who sunk a boat in an act of insurance fraud in order to turn property on Ibiza into one of the Island’s best dancefloors:

I wouldn’t recommend the book. As with most autobiographies, this one isn’t honest enough to earn top ratings. You’d think that the author’s admitting to insurance fraud, drug dealing, and unprotected sex while HIV positive might be the sort of honesty that I’m looking for, but I never got a feel for who Tony Pike really was. He was a playboy, yes, and so charismatic that he (by his own count) slept with 3,000 women and at least two men including George Michael, but his charisma didn’t make the pages of the book.

But despite its failure as an autobiography, a detail stuck with me, and that was how Tony stubbornly took a pickaxe and jackhammer to carve a party palace out of Ibiza’s bedrock. His effort to will a party into existence made me want to do the same, and though I read the book as research for a trip we were planning to Ibiza, it ended up convincing me that I could make something happen, even if I had to take up a pickaxe to do it.

The second book:

This first-hand history, written by one of the principals involved in legendary nightclub The Hacienda, delivered a fat rail of eye-opening inside dope directly to my brain. The problem is (to extend and torture this druggy metaphor), a lot of the dope isn’t clean, is cut with who knows what, and is delivered by an unreliable dealer who is so high on his own supply that the reader can never be certain whether they’re getting an ecstasy-tinted bowdlerization, an LSD-fueled hallucination, or a booze-soaked reconstruction of snippets stitched together between blackouts.

I learned a lot about how clubs work, how not to manage the budget of one, and ultimately I decided that I would be nowhere as incompetent as the author or his friends as I shaped the plans for my own private club.

And so we opened our private, friends-only club in the late spring of 2025, announcing eight dates, then adding two more as the schedule came together. I wanted to battle-test my DPARTI framework against a real-world, soup-to-nuts dancefloor experience, and by that measure, we succeeded, attracting hundreds of dancers, dozens of DJs, and even just the right amount of notoriety as we danced our nights away.

Perhaps my proudest accomplishment came in the form of how we defined our sound. We coined the term Calearic to describe our particular mix of the Balearic mother tree to which we grafted California elements and sounds.

Balearic itself isn’t an easy genre to pin down — here are some example definitions. They’re kind of all over the map:

“Balearic was a response to a moment in time. A rebellion against musical and political constraints,” Jaime [son of DJ Alfredo, the ‘father of Balearic beat’]. “Today, it’s less about escaping systems and more about emotional honesty. It’s still anti-hype, still genre-fluid, but now it speaks to a generation looking for meaning, connection and timeless music in a world of trends. It’s about not boxing yourself into one style, but allowing your full musical culture to come through by reading the room and responding to the energy of the moment. Balearic is also about diversity of people, of social classes. It’s the freedom to mix simple but powerful records, melancholic soundtracks or even countercultural music that captures a specific feeling. At its best, it’s poetic.”

“DJ’s [mixed] together musical forms as diverse as ‘Public Enemy’ and ‘The Woodentops’, to create that eclectic, highly danceable, don’t care holiday feel.” #

“Balearic is a mindset more than a rigid, definable sound. This church is a broad one, welcoming everyone from Status Quo to The Orb, Marvin Gaye to Dire Straits, the Cocteau Twins to Mike Francis.” #

“A hippie-dippie, candy-flipping fusion of synth pop, yacht rock, acid house, faux reggae, and ambient music…the best contemporary Balearic music also conveys a spirit of innocence, openness, and adventure.” #

“It’s not a genre,” insists Pete Gooding, a veteran soundtracker of Ibiza sunsets and noted Balearic compiler for Hostal La Torre Recordings. “It’s an open-minded approach to how and what you play. Being more eclectic is the point.” #

Perhaps the very best definition of the Balearic sound comes from the book “Last Night a DJ Saved My Life,” in which Balearic is defined as follows:

“When it became clear that the very foundations of house and techno were built with records from continental Europe, snobby British musos started reappraising Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, even Belgian club history, re-evaluating the music these scenes prized and produced, and plundering them for unheard tracks. As well as inspiring such historical revision, by making lyrics largely irrelevant, house and techno further eroded the English-speaking world’s great pop-cultural advantage.

The Balearic spirit is a willingness to try anything in the service of your dancefloor. Forget music snobbery, an artist’s credibility is irrelevant. Forget the division of different genres, and the obsession with newness, you can even sometimes ignore the correct speed of a record. The established rules of DJing need not apply. All that matters is the power and beauty of each song in the context you place it.

Named after the Mediterranean archipelago which contains Ibiza, and originally referring to the music of Ibiza’s DJ Alfredo, ‘Balearic’ implies a musical openness, an anything-is-possible attitude. It was often born of necessity – the need to stretch a limited number of records to fill long summer nights – but it taught an important lesson to any DJ who treated music with too much reverence.

Balearic is ‘Flesh’ by A Split Second played at the wrong speed to turn it from gothic industrial to deep proto-house; it’s the indie guitar mash of The Woodentops energising glamorous queens in the open air at Amnesia; or trippy Klaus Schulze records washing over kids zonked out on heroin by the side of a gorgeous Italian lake. Balearic invokes the holiday defencelessness you get from warm sand between your toes and a horizon of sparkling waves.

Importantly, Balearic is an attitude to music more than a specific style or location. Or, as dance music writer Frank Tope quipped: ‘It’s pop music that sounds good on pills.’

Given the difficulty of nailing down a description of the sound, you can imagine that my attempts to book DJs to play to it were somewhat uneven. But we did succeed in attracting several accomplished DJs who did in fact nail the assignment. Here’s one of the sets I loved the most, played by DJ Joe Rodriguez, a SoCal legend whose Balearic, vinyl-only set set a high bar for all other DJs we booked in our first season.

This summer, we’re doing it again. We’ve got seven dates calendared from May through October, and we’ve improved and upgraded a number of elements over the winter season. There’s a new soundsystem, there’s an upgraded lighting rig with custom-designed DMX sequences, there’s a refined calendar, there’s a better sense of our sound and style, and we’re heading into the season with a mailing list of a few hundred friends rather than starting from scratch.

I will confess that our dancefloor isn’t magical yet. I’d give us a 6 or 7 on my 10-point scale. Our shortfalls are numerous. Using the DPARTi framework, our shortfalls are especially pronounced in three areas:

(1) PEOPLE: Though we’ve been graced by many awesome, kind, and friendly people who treat each other well, look out for each other, and who often volunteer to make the party happen. This is no shade on the friends who are showing up and who co-produce the event with us. But we haven’t yet reached critical mass of people who dance their hearts out. I can count on one hand the number of folks who really lit up the dancefloor in our first seasons (Gerardo was the star of season one). If we can find a dozen more folks like Gerardo, magic will happen with regularity.

(2) ACOUSTICS: I have champagne tastes and a Pabst budget. My soundsystem, from the Technics 1200 turntables connected to the DJM V10 mixer to the BassBoss Sublim8 three-way speaker columns isn’t shabby, but it’s no McIntosh-powered Despacio, nor d&b audiotechnik (Signal NYC) nor PK Sound (Shambhala) nor Void (Pikes) nor NNNN Audio (Public Records) nor even Funktion One (Berghain). One day I hope to have a spare six digits to spend on a soundsystem, but until then our system is in the mid five figures. Not shabby, but not anywhere near world-class.

(3) THEATRICALS: On the one hand, nothing beats mother nature’s light show. Sunsets in Southern California can’t be beat. On the other hand, once deep night arrives, our own lighting rig needs to carry more of the load. We’re still climbing the learning curve on that front. The addition of some Martin fixtures and a disco ball should result in a much-improved theatrical experience for season 2.

Want to attend? If you find yourself in Southern California this summer and would like to join our events, join the mailing list via website Badcat.fm. And if you’re a paid subscriber, shoot me an email to be added to the guest list for you and your plus one.

Andrés limits his contributors to just three records, but here on my own dancefloor, I’m happy to share with you the EP version of that list. There are five songs on this one. It’s the full playlist.

Three Five records I want played at my afterparty

There are just five songs I’ll request be played while my friends take a pinch of my ashes and sprinkle them beneath a well-lit disco ball.

Tame Impala - Let It Happen (Soulwax Remix)

The pandemic is over, and I’m 47 years old. As I shove candles into the buttercream frosting of my daughter’s eighth birthday cake the viscerality of the task reminds me that it’s been eight years and several months since I last slept with my wife.

I’m married, yet intensely lonely. I’m wondering whether I have it in me to “stay together for the kids” as friends have done. That would require another 10 years of celibacy. I’m wondering if I’m really going to blow up my marriage of over 20 years. These impossible math questions have swirled about in my head unanswered for at least three years.

That weekend, after the birthday party, I spontaneously decide to attend a music festival, drop acid, and dance my questions, a process that involves letting my body find through movement the answer to questions that stumped my mind.

And then it happens.

In the middle of the all-day dance party called Despacio, the DJs put Tame Impala’s Let It Happen (Soulwax Remix) on the turntable, and the song on that 100,000-watt soundsystem picks me up and turns me round, pointing me in the right direction:

I heard about a whirlwind that’s coming ‘round

It’s gonna carry off all that isn’t bound

And when it happens, when it happens (I won’t be holding on)

So, let it happen, let it happen

The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build a Home

‘Cause, I built a home
For you
For me

Until it disappeared
From me
From you

Building a home for my family was something I had to do.

As a newborn, I was brought home from the hospital into a home that my father had built himself from foundation to roof. He was a skilled carpenter and builder. He was also a violent alcoholic, so he tragically (but figuratively) destroyed the home he’d built by making it impossible for my mother to live in it with him anymore. In the middle of the night, she decided she’d been hit for the last time, and succeeded at leaving him, bundling her three children aged six, four, and two into her getaway vehicle at 3AM one winter morning.

I lived in that one home for the first six years of my life. Over the next 11 years, I lived in 19 other places, but none of those places ever felt like home to me.

So building a home, and then not repeating history by sabotaging it, was a personal quest of great importance. Here are my two children breaking ground in the dirt on which the home was built. Though I did almost sabotage it by initiating divorce, I’m happy to report that my kids are still living under the roof I built for them.

My kids have this home I built, until it disappears. It won’t go away today, nor tomorrow (I hope). But as this song so eloquently reminds us, everything becomes dust. Even the stuff we build out of stone or out of “forever” vows.

Capy - Manncool & Trol2000 edit of Capone - Music Love Song

A year after my decision to pursue divorce, the prophetic lyrics of “Let It Happen” have proven true. Like Dorothy, I’ve been sucked into a whirlwind of my own making, my everything uprooted. Routines shattered. Tears shed. Lawyers hired. Children knocked dizzy by the energy of our cracked nucleus. I’m fundamentally unmoored but also very much alive.

In the storm, I’ve found a community of fellow seekers. We meet on dancefloors for marathon-length parties a few times a year in locations such as Ibiza, Ghent, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, and Miami.

One of these parties -- happening just once or twice a year -- is Despacio. The dancers all have their favorites that they hope the DJs will play, but many of them look forward to “Capy,” an illegal vinyl pressing of an unauthorized edit of Capone’s Music Love Song by Manncool & Trol2000. The song is so iconic that some members of the community wear t-shirts emblazoned with the song’s chorus, hoping that it will be played.

When the song lands, the dancers look each other in the eyes and sing the lyrics to each other.

The Talking Heads - This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)

Another one on the theme of home. These lyrics do something I love. Though they’re simple they avoid cliches, using language that remains fresh and new in a genre that’s seen so much cheesy dreck.

The lyrics summon a feeling of home and love with language that’s presented in eight stanzas of varied rhyme schemes that start with structure and fall into organic irregularity, like the beating of a weak heart afflicted by disorganized beating:

ABCB
ABCB
ABCB
ABB
ABCD
ABCB
AA
ABC
ABCB
DEBFE

I could write several thousand words on the poetry of this song, but I’ll spare you and cite just two of my favorite lines from the song.

1. Is there a more perfectly romantic notion than finding someone you can ask to “sing into my mouth”?

2. Can you imagine a better death than being loved until the end?

   Love me ‘til my heart stops
   Love me ‘til I’m dead

RECORD: PACHANGA BOYS TIME (15:15)

On January 1, 2026, John Digweed played this song for me (and several hundred others) at Stereo Montreal on the occasion of John Digweed’s 59th birthday. The distinctive match/lightning-strike at the beginning of the song made my knees buckle. I wasn’t ready to hear one of my death party tunes on that magical dancefloor.

I did what I had to do to survive the moment. I put on my sunglasses, held my partner tight, and ugly cried while I imagined the monster time that would inevitably eat everything I love, including, eventually, my ability to dance.

Some years later -- none of us reading this right now know how many years, exactly -- my ashes lie in an urn as one of my loved ones lowers a needle onto the record, chosen for this moment by me because it’s a memento mori in a tidy package, a 15-minute opus that makes time stand still even as it slips and keeps slipping into the future. Minutes flash by, then years pass, all in the span of 15 minutes.

OUTRO

I’m counting on my friends to throw an afterparty for me where these songs are played for the last time. As one of my loved ones takes “Let It Happen” off the record player and prepares to drop the needle on “Capy,” I hope that they’ll get on the mic and read aloud the script I prepared for this moment. It’s my final request.

Grab a little baggie.

Take a pinch of ash from the urn.
Put the ash in the baggie.
Smuggle it onto one of my favorite dancefloors.
(Don’t act shocked. I know some of you have snuck baggies in before.)
Drop a pinch of me into the center of the dancefloor.
If you’ve smuggled me into Panorama Bar, you’d be putting my Arsch Asche on the Tanzfläche, and that’s some kind of poetry right there.

If you’ve smuggled a pinch of me into Pikes, Despacio, or Stereo, sprinkle it right under the ball. And then ...

Dance on me.

Dance with me.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Let it happen.”

The DJ will then be instructed to turn it up until my bone fragments rattle in the urn like dice in a cup. My bones take one last tumble under the disco ball.

First in a series! This is my first book review for MagicalDancefloors.com, and I’m starting with Michael Tullberg’s Dancefloor Thunderstorm, a document of Southern California rave culture at its late-’90s peak. If you’ve ever wondered what we lost (and what we kept), this one’s a time machine. And if you’ve got other dancefloor-related books I should read and review, drop them in the comments.

⛈️ Studying dancefloors with a lens

Michael Tullberg is a prolific North American music photojournalist whose work has appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, SPIN, and Mixmag. His photographs from the front lines of the Southern California rave movement during its peak era of 1996–2002 are mixed together here with interviews, essays, and supporting photography in a beautifully-bound, 308-page book titled Dancefloor Thunderstorm: Land of the Free, Home of the Rave. I can’t imagine that there’s a better book in existence covering this period and this region. If you know of one, please point me to it.

You’ve probably heard the old adage that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Where does that leave photojournalism of raves? Is it as useful as whistling about quantum physics?

I don’t buy the idea that music can’t be written about or studied. It’s obvious to me that a deep understanding of any subject requires that we sometimes pin it to a corkboard with a needle so that we can study it under stillness and with magnification. Whether the student (or critic or journalist) of music uses a pen, paintbrush, or lens, I believe they’re capable of revealing deeper truths than we might arrive at by simply listening to high-fidelity recordings of that same music. Photography and photojournalism likewise reveal truths about music that are otherwise inaudible, so I’m personally a fan of books like Tullberg’s, even if I simultaneously believe that ubiquitous phone cameras are a pox upon today’s dancefloors.

Tullberg says he wanted to show the scene from the perspective of someone who was actually there—and to capture the “little things…the almost unnoticed nuance” that cements memory. The book delivers on that promise.

I’m also thankful that it wasn’t full of portraits of DJs in heroic and egoic power poses—that’s in part due to Tullberg’s focus on the dancefloor and in part because the images in this book largely predate the era of the superstar DJ. There is a section of DJ portraits, but that section doesn’t feel as adulatory as modern-day DJ portraiture.

I came for a history lesson—and to see what the late-’90s would reveal about the rave present. Would the photographs reveal how much has changed, or would they reveal how much has stayed the same?

The answer is paradoxical: more continuity than I expected, but more difference than I wanted.

⛈️ Photos that show what it was like

The ravers of 30 years ago looked a lot like the ravers of today. They wore fun outfits, they sweated buckets while dancing, they took drugs (perhaps better ones than you’ll commonly find on today’s dancefloors, but certainly often without today’s harm-reduction norms). In some ways, though, these people from Southern California’s first rave generation look alien. For example, a number of Tullberg’s subjects have baby pacifiers in their mouths or hanging from necklaces. These once-popular oral fidget toys helped ecstasy ravers avoid the common side effect of chewing their lips into bleeding pulps, but they’ve gone out of style and are rarely seen today.

Likewise, the super baggy shirts and pants of the 90s -- often plastered with ironic brands such as mascots from sugary children’s cereals -- offer a marked contrast to today’s much more revealing, skin-tight outfits with understated logos, if any. The baggy clothing many of Tullberg’s subjects wear doesn’t look like the best stuff to sweat in, so we’ll give modern ravers a point for superior heat and moisture wicking, even if the prevalence of highly conformist outfits worn by the hordes of Temu Berghain, Pashbro, and Alo Yoga raver normies has resulted in less diversity of dress overall.

Another insight gleaned from poring over Tullberg’s photos: I learned that modern ravers tend to take better care of their ears. Few of Tullberg’s subjects can be seen wearing ear protection, likely resulting in permanent hearing damage that many of them would come to regret. Hearing protection hadn’t been normalized yet. Score another point for the health consciousness of modern ravers.

On the other hand, there’s far more evidence of dancing in these photos than one will find at many of today’s so-called raves. All of the photos in this book pre-date the smartphone era—starting around 2007—when being recorded made everyone more self-conscious, even afraid to dance. Tullberg’s lens wasn’t connected to social media in the same way that phone cameras are today, and doesn’t generate the same fear of being ridiculed online nor the same desire to perform for the vast context-collapsed, internet-connected audience as a smartphone does.

As a result, Tullberg’s lens reliably finds scenes of vulnerability. A blissed-out couple hold each other, eyes closed. He seems to be nibbling on her neck, she holds his hand and clearly seems to enjoy being nibbled upon. In another scene, a woman in a halter top dances, both arms in the air. The smile she wears isn’t performed for anyone else. She’s just feeling the music. On another page, at another rave, a woman in an Adidas tennis visor and an oversized Nike soccer jersey is caught mid-move, one palm down, the other palm up, and it’s easy to fill in the blanks to picture the rest of her dance move, because the shot has caught her at the exact right moment to make it easy for our minds to fill in the blanks thanks to the strength of the personality that shines through the page. Another photo features a cuddle puddle of Asian ravers decked out in kandi and tattoos, tangled happily and platonically in each other’s limbs.

The through-line in many of these images is unselfconsciousness.

In one of my favorite images (included above), Tullberg employs long exposure to capture the sort of ecstatic hands-in-the-air dancing familiar to pretty much everyone who’s ever gotten lost in the rave sauce. The central figure is having a moment, the strobe capturing his movement through time. The strobe flashes reveal an interesting game of peek-a-boo. In one moment, two faces look directly at the lens, in the next strobe flash, they’re looking away, reminding me of the ways in which dancers often steal looks at each other. These surreptitious glances are part of the social experience, and it wasn’t until I saw them in this image that I remembered the countless micro-moments of watching and being watched by the friendly folks all around me.

For me, Tullberg’s strongest images are those in which he tosses the photographic rules of exposure and clarity in favor of images that, like the image above, capture the ways in which light, movement, and mind-altering substances play tricks on our senses. These distortions of reality feel more true and more representative of what it feels like to be a participant in a rave than a straight or undistorted photo of the same scene could ever convey. The silhouettes above -- from a Sugar Beats party in 1996 -- were captured in what Tullberg tells us were sauna-like conditions in which condensate of sweat dripped from the ceiling.

Tullberg’s artful distortions sometimes convey intense solitude. At other times they suggest intense companionship. At times, his subjects look like blissed-out angels drunk on love. At other times, they look like burn victims, such as in this image that reminded me of all of the times I’ve seen faces morph monstrously under the influence of hallucinogenic lighting.

Such a trove of images could’ve only been captured through the trial and error of thousands of shutter presses and a deep understanding of the essence of a scene built by spending lifetimes lost in the intoxicating sauce of the California rave scene during its 1990s peak. As a photographer trying to figure out how to capture the essence of the scene -- the ways in which it made its participants feel aren’t readily captured by the physics of light entering a lens -- Tullberg developed a photographic style that turned challenges such as low light, flashing lights, and movement to his advantage.

⛈️ Stories, too

One standout chapter recounts what Tullberg calls the “mother of all LA rave busts,” a rave and a raid that demonstrated the era’s moral panic.

The “Seventh Heaven” rave of December 31, 1996, was busted by 150 LAPD officers who faced off against ravers chanting ‘Rave Till Dawn! Rave Till Dawn!’

Tullberg tells us that the LAPD used tear gas, rubber bullets, and concussion grenades to bust a rave that came to their attention after dozens of partiers were made sick by an industrial solvent-laced concoction being marketed as “Herbal fX” by an unscrupulous dealer.

His extended account here in Insomniac magazine is much more colorful than the version included in the book, and the event became news reported by the national media, part of a trend of alarmist coverage that ultimately culminated in then Senator Joe Biden championing the 2003 RAVE Act (Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act).

Footage of the raid was taken with a handheld video camera by someone who had been stuck in the adjacent parking structure.

Another story involves Prince bringing his test pressing of the Batman soundtrack to a club, where he asked Mark Lewis to play two tracks off of it so that he could hear it in a club-level soundsystem.

⛈️ The dancefloor was the heart of this era's raves

Some of the most important changes to raving over the last 30 years come out through the book’s ample texts. Some of Tullberg’s writing is featured, but I think the interviews with DJs of this period are particularly interesting. In his interview with Christopher Lawrence (”one of the original purveyors of the West Coast progressive trance sound in the 1990s”), Lawrence compares the ‘90s rave scene to punk:

Lawrence: “You can draw a lot of relations with punk. The punk bands were just guys doing it themselves, same as the DJs. You didn’t have booking agents back then. The promoters just contacted the DJs directly.... Everybody was just doing it for ... I dunno! It was about the parties, it was about participation. Up until then, you were always part of the audience, whereas at these early raves, if you remember, there was no DJ booth.”

Tullberg: “No, it was on the floor.”

Lawrence: “It was just a card table that they put the turntables and mixer on. And generally the DJ was never the focal point. There were no lights spotlighting the DJ. The lights surrounded the room and focused on, like, visuals on the walls and lights on the dance floor. There was no focus on the DJ. The DJ was usually in the dark and there’d be a group of kids hanging around.”

Tullberg: I have pictures of exactly that. You at the Alexandria (Hotel), with kids just surrounding you like that.

Lawrence: “They wanted to see how the DJ was mixing, or whatever. But generally, the focus was the party, and not the DJs. It was about being an active participant in the event. The kids would dress up and pick out their outfits. You’d be on the dance floor with your friends. ... The audience was a participant, they weren’t just spectators.”

I think this exchange captures one of the most important distinctions that I draw between a “dancefloor” and a “concert.” A dancefloor is co-authored. A concert is typically consumed. That difference changes everything.

Dancers are people who make the party happen by dancing. So much so that some clubs used to recruit and pay especially skilled dancers to come to their clubs because these folks inspired others to dance harder and longer.

In a rave, the DJ isn’t there to perform for an audience, they’re there to infuse the room with sound energy so that dancers can complete the chain by soaking in that energy and converting it into kinectic movement energy.

Look at a picture of a really good dancefloor, and it’s often impossible to tell where the DJ is, because there’s typically very little desire on the part of these dancefloors to face that person.

Concerts, on the other hand, involve a completely different geometry and chain of energy. Attendees may dance (or may simply stand and film), and while it may feel communal to watch a performer together with other people (just as it feels communal to go to a movie theater to watch a film with other people), there is no expectation of co-authorship, and creativity of movement is frowned upon because it can interfere with others’ ability to focus on the performer on the stage.

⛈️ Magical Dancefloors — An interview with Michael Tullberg

After two read-throughs, I sent Tullberg a handful of questions about technique and the evolution of the scene. Here are his responses.

MDF (Magical Dancefloors): Given the breadth of your work and the coverage, how did you decide what moments, DJs, and communities were essential to include?

MT (Michael Tullberg): I didn’t really discriminate between different sub-sections of the rave scene; I was looking to cover as much of it as I could. Part of this was driven by my desire to inject as much variety into my work as was possible, and another part was because I was trying to establish relationships with as many rave promoters as possible. That was key to getting access to all those different events—the building of my professional reputation in the scene. The more events I did and the more promoters I got to know, the higher my profile became, which led to me getting more work and increased access to the events and the artists. Of course, there were some events that I made the extra effort to get into, and many of these were the proto-festivals that grew into full blown extravaganzas, like “Electric Daisy Carnival”, “Together As One”, “Nocturnal Wonderland” and the like.

MDF: Can you walk us through the techniques you relied on to capture the lighting, motion, and energy in this shot? How did you do it?

MT: The shot I made of DJ Frankie Bones behind the turntables is one where I combined a number of my techniques to produce that vibrant, vortex-like image. That was done live at the old L.A. Sports Arena, during the 1999 New Years Eve party “Together As One”, where Frankie stole the show, as far as I’m concerned. As you can see, I was right up there on the stage with him. To produce the lemon coloring of Frankie, I had a yellow gel slapped on my flash head. I decided to do a long exposure, about one to one and a half seconds. I put the camera into a vertical position, opened the shutter, and while rotating the camera in a circular motion, set off the flash in a series of four pops, which produced the stroboscopic effect. The special effects lighting and lasers in the room filled in the rest, combining with the camera rotation to create the swirling energies you see surrounding Frankie.

MDF: If you had to pick one image from the book that you feel best represents the emotional core of the 1990s–2000s rave movement—which would it be, and why?

MT: It’s pretty much impossible to encapsulate all of the various aspects of the rave scene into one image, which is one of the reasons why I put DANCEFLOOR THUNDERSTORM together in the first place. There were just too many ravers, too many artists, too many gigs, and too many amazing moments to reduce it all to one frame. However, if there’s any image that personifies the transcendental moments that people experienced in the rave scene, the moments that elevated their own consciousness beyond the confines of everyday existence, I would pick the abstract shot I entitled “Metamorphosis” on page 128.

More than any other of my photos, that one best illustrates the spiritual expansion that people often underwent on the dance floor, when the energies within them were released in a joyous explosion of emotion. The light shining from within the subject’s heart really illustrates that in a way that a conventional photo can’t. I was actually considering using it for the book’s front cover, but I ended up deciding that it was too much of an abstract image for a casual viewer to immediately understand. That’s the thing about a cover—as an author, you need a shot that everybody can quickly latch onto, even if it’s not your absolute favorite.

MDF: In your view, what elements of the classic rave ethos were lost as dance music moved into the commercial EDM era?

MT: It definitely became more corporate, moving away from the underground ethos that was so vital to the rave scene at its peak. This was unfortunate, but also a bit inevitable, as a scene can’t remain underground forever and expect to survive in the long run. However, with that change also came expansion, leading to increased production values in the parties that could only have been dreamt of in those early days. The visual effects definitely were taken to new heights, as LED walls replaced analog projections, and lighting and laser systems became better and more affordable.

Also, the original rave generation was beginning to age out, while the new EDM generation—the younger siblings and cousins of those founding ravers—were beginning to age in, and bringing new musical tastes with them. This was the audience that would fuel the rise of the festivals, transforming gigs like EDC into the giant mega-festivals that they are today. However, the old DIY ethos of the original rave scene was being left behind, in terms of party production, musical creation, fashion and more. Things became a lot more manufactured, as opposed to being spontaneously created.

MDF: As someone who has shot virtually every music genre, what made the rave community different from other music subcultures you photographed?

MT: The main difference between the rave scene and other scenes that I photographed was that the rave scene was one where both the audience and the art form itself were not only tightly intertwined, but also growing and evolving at the same time. Just about every other scene was based on an existing template, where the audience were expected to come in a certain type of dress code, and listen to a type of music that had already been established. This was true of the Gothic, Industrial and mainstream pop scenes that I had been involved in.

The rave scene, on the other hand, was a grassroots creation that was continuously morphing in new directions that those other scenes couldn’t. Also, most of the established scenes still manifested the various social barriers that subdivide an audience, such as social status, money, sexuality, religion, fashion, geographic location, and others. In many cases, such as in the Beverly Hills club scene that I had frequented, this developed a very clear case of exclusivity, rather than inclusiveness. The idea was to keep certain types of people away, behind the velvet rope. The rave scene threw all of those conventions out the window, which produced a much larger and more diverse audience.

There really was only one criterion: are you a fan of this music? If the answer was yes, bingo, you were in, and you had no restrictions as to how you could express yourself on the dance floor. Sure, there was kandi raver fashion, but it wasn’t a uniform, you didn’t have to wear kandi to be accepted. You could wear whatever you wanted. You didn’t have to worry about being judged, or ridiculed, unless you did something that was really, really out of line.

You could find gang members dancing next to lawyers and accountants and plumbers and off-duty police, and there was no issue whatsoever. There was virtually no violence found in the rave scene, unlike several of the hip-hop venues that existed at the time, and sexual predation was pretty much near zero. It was the mainstream clubs that had the truly nasty date rape drugs like Rohypnol and GHB. I remember unconscious girls being carried out of exclusive high end L.A. clubs like The Gate, and that almost never happened in the rave scene.

MDF: What are your thoughts on the ubiquity of cameras (everyone’s got a phone) at many of today’s commercial raves? Do you feel these cameras have a quieting effect on the wildness of the parties where they’re omnipresent?

MT: I don’t know if the phone cameras quell the wildness of the parties, but they definitely reduce the spontaneous and special underground vibe. It’s like the party becomes just another social event to be seen at for social media, and gathering likes to build one’s online audience, rather than a refuge where you can just cut loose without any regard to how you’re going to boost your presence on TikTok. It’s gone from “dance like there’s no one watching” to “dance like everybody’s watching”, becoming all about “me, me, me”, and that’s rather depressing, in my opinion.

And yet, by the end of the festival weekend, the little name on the bottom of the poster had ascended to top billing in many attendees’ minds thanks to its unique combination of body-moving analog sound pumped out of its 100,000-watt soundsystem, meticulous track selection, rebellious design that hides the DJ, one very charismatic disco ball, and social proof that came in the form of lines that at times stretched across the entire festival grounds.

In short, Despacio was impossible to ignore, and for many who entered that tent, impossible to leave. The tiniest tent at Portola upstaged everything else at Portola.

Despacio ate Portola.

A massive system with an achilles heel

The warm reception Despacio received at Portola is in part due to the tireless work of a community who had previously experienced it, become Despacio truthers, and come together on Reddit (r/despacio) and on Discord (discord.gg/despacio) to devise ways to generate demand for an experience that was, since its debut in 2013, entirely too underground for its own good. Its underground status was in large part due to its rarity — it has happened just 21 times since its debut in 2013.

That’s because Despacio has a few huge flaws that make it especially difficult to put on.

The system is massive. The amps and stacks and the boxes in which they’re transported weigh some 66,000 pounds (30,000 kilograms), it’s expensive to store, ship, and set up. Whereas a modern DJ just needs to roll up and stick a USB stick into a “club standard” system, the Despacio system consists of custom everything: specific speakers, amps, cables, lights, turntables, and other equipment that, together, form an integral whole. It’s all or nothing -- there is no scaled-down, plug-and-play version of Despacio.

It’s a side project for the DJs. There are just three people in the world who have ever played on the soundsystem, and the three of them are kind of busy: James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem frontman and DFA Records cofounder) and brothers David and Stephen Dewaele (who perform, produce, and publish under monikers including 2manydjs, Soulwax, Waffles, and Deewee). Without being too explicit, the DJs have been on the record as saying that their fees for Despacio are much lower than they might earn through other appearances -- they’re not raking it in with this project and understandably prioritize more lucrative work. Getting these three artists into the same room, let alone the same timezone, for two or three consecutive days results in a situation where Despacio almost happens six or seven times for every time it actually happens.

It’s somewhat economically unviable. To bring Despacio to a festival, the organizers of the festival need to come up with nearly $350,000 for a 2-3 day run. Despacio’s Portola footprint could fit a maximum of about 2100 people, but was run leaner than that -- about 1,800 were allowed in at any given moment -- making it the most expensive production on a dollar-per-dancer basis at the entire festival. For Portola, a festival with a capacity of about 45,000 people, spending that much money on its smallest stage is a luxury that its talent buyer-in-chief, Danny Bell, could only afford after selling out the festival (and presumably achieving profitability) in 2024.

Imagine trying to make those numbers work out for a standalone event. An event costing $350k would need to gross $116k of tickets, merchandise, and concessions per night over the course of a three-night run. Even if we assign 30% of that to non-ticket revenue (e.g., alcohol and merch), that’s still 2,000 tickets at ~$40 each that need to be sold, per each of three nights… just to break even!

Bottom line, it’s really difficult for an underground event that most people haven’t heard about to muster those kinds of numbers. Despacio’s core team often reminds folks that every Despacio could be the last one, and that’s no exaggeration on their part. It’s hard to sustain a thing like this unless there’s a lot more awareness of it and demand for it.

That’s where the community felt it had a role to play. The Despacio community took it on themselves to see what they might be able to do to get the word out. When dancefloors came back to life after the pandemic, a small but tiny contingent of Despacio freedom fighters took on the role of evangelizing Despacio through bootleg merch (shirts, stickers, fans, kandi, etc.), pro-Despacio content (on Reddit, YouTube, Tiktok, Discord, etc.) and even Despacio-inspired dance parties. I was one of these folks -- in many ways patient zero of the post-pandemic Despacio virus after falling hard for it at This Ain’t No Picnic in August 2022. I’ve since spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours boosting Despacio for the simple reason that I wanted to see it happen more frequently.

To be clear, all of this community energy was driven by a fire Despacio had lit in the bellies of people who, like me, had at some point unsuspectingly wandered onto its dancefloor unaware that their lives were about to change. Despacio’s undeniable beauty wormed its way people’s heads and hearts and made some of us want to work very hard to help Despacio in any way that we could.

“THEY LIED TO US!”

The line for Despacio started an hour before the doors were scheduled to open. Glenjamn’s fine lens caught the first few folks who were lined up on day one. One of these die-hards (yours truly) would enter the tent and not leave it for seven hours. Not even for water.

Upon entering, we were struck by the darkness and coolness of the space inside the sound-insulated tent, a marked contrast to the unseasonably warm weather outside.

We were immediately struck by how quiet it was — the cross-chatter of sound-bleed from several of Portola’s stages disappeared as we entered, thanks to robust acoustical treatment. Despacio’s production team had thoroughly sound-insulated the Despacio tent to ensure that a repeat of the sound-bleed issues that plagued its 2014 Glastonbury appearance wouldn’t recurr at Portola.

Within 10 minutes, the room reached capacity and the queue outside the tent began to build up again. Over the course of that first day, the queue would wax and wane, snaking across the festival grounds and advertising to the broader festival population that there was something special at the far end of pier 80 that they might want to check out.

Meanwhile, inside the tent, the DJs had decided to pull a fast one on the gathered dancers. Despacio is named for the Balearic sound pioneered by Ibiza DJs — records are frequently played slower than their default setting, sometimes drastically so. Records intended for play at 45RPM might be played at 33RPM, for example. What’s more, Despacio’s DJs eschew climactic moments for the first hour or two. The lights are muted and the room is kept dark. The DJs play slower, moodier tunes under 100 BPM in the first hour or two. They take their time, slowly building the set.

Within a dance music festival setting, taking it slow is an act of rebellion. At Portola, sets were as short as 30 minutes and as long as 1.5h, with the average set duration sitting at around 50-60 minutes. Within the constraints of a 60-minute set, there’s no time for romance or “storytelling.” DJs given just 50 minutes will typically skip the foreplay and jump straight into their money shots, dropping big-energy bangers onto the upturned faces of their social media-addled audiences, then -- after a minimal refractory period -- splashing another big drop onto the audience while the DJ mugs or Christ poses for the phone cameras. There’s a tendency in festival sets for every song played to have drops manufactured in a studio to deliver a big dopamine hit in 15-20 seconds.

Festival attendees in the year 2025 have learned to reach for their phones when they hear a song entering the break, because they know that the “sick drop” to follow might help prove to their followers that they’re “ravers” with good taste. This drop-focused music is designed to be filmed by festival goers, increasing the chance that a producer or DJ’s set might climb the algorithmically gate-kept visibility ladder on TikTok and YouTube.

What’s happened to live dance music events isn’t dissimilar from what happened to the restaurant business once Yelp became a force that could make or break a restaurant. Understanding that how food looked on social media mattered more than how it tasted, chefs started to cook for cameras rather than bellies, and as a result, the stuff that came out of kitchens had a certain built-for-social media wildness to it, such as Bloody Mary cocktails with entire meals poking out of them:

This same trend has been happening to music since the advent of the smart phone put a camera in everyone’s pocket, incentivizing DJs to not just sound good, but look good, and invent antics that make people want to film them. Steve Aoki started throwing cakes in 2011 after smartphones took over, and Fisher’s notorious clown-like antics include descending to the decks on a wire harness, while Mestiza dance with castanets and hand fans, and Peggy Gou lip synchs and dances cutely for an audience who don’t dance, but only film. People who aren’t interested in dancing willingly shell out four figures to watch Anyma’s cheesy CGI music videos at the Sphere. This is the state of much of dance music today -- it’s all about visual spectacle, and dancers are converted into consumers who are taught to prioritize how things will look on their social media accounts over how things feel in their bodies.

We’ve lost dancing.

In commercial dance music, DJs are put on a stage, surrounded by pyrotechnics and high-resolution screens, and all of this spectacle inevitably commands attention. Dancers stop dancing with each other so that they can simply stand shoulder-to-shoulder next to each other while watcing performers on stages.

The dancefloor has been commercially perverted into a concert.

What had been a vibrant dancefloor ecosystem full of rich dancer-to-dancer interaction has become a sad and passive audience of consumers. The consumers pull out their phones to capture and share the spectacle so that more consumers are pulled in to the next concert. Of course the consumers are taught to stand still while filming -- dancing makes for shakey video, and shakey video doesn’t get likes, retweets, shares, or -- ultimately -- the social validation the consumer has been taught to crave.

It’s all rather perverse. Despacio was designed in explicit protest against this inversion of priorities. The Despacio team chose to re-center the dancefloor, and the key to this trick involved hiding the DJs in a booth tucked off to one side. They keep the room so dark that trying to film anything is usually a waste of time. They eschew the pornographic “drops” and short-attention-span theatricals of festival EDM concerts.

Many of the folks who wander into Despacio at a festival such as Coachella, Portola, or III Points are confused by it, at first. Many of the tourists enter and leave after only a few minutes, because they want spectacle and Despacio doesn’t provide it, at least not most of the time.

Take, for example, the college-aged boy who, upon entering, noticed that most of the dancers seemed to be facing the center of the room. He figured he’d found a Boiler Room-style setup with the DJ in the center, so he muscled and elbowed his way past the outer rings of people to get to the center. (Side note: good dancefloor etiquette says that if you can’t dance to where you’re going, you shouldn’t go there.) He and a friend shouldered past me and stepped into the middle, then looked around in confusion.

“They lied to us!” he shouted to his buddy. “There’s nothing here! Just people dancing!”

“That’s the point!” I said to them as they shoved their way back towards the exit. Never saw them again.

LIKE A DOG WITH A CHEW TOY

But there was some mischief afoot in the DJ booth. Just a few songs into the day, they eased into a 92bpm track that Despacio veterans recognized immediately due to its distinctive, synthy bassline. We had just entered Edwin Starr’s Whirlpool of Love (Eric Duncan Edit) and knew that this was a track that the DJs typically played much later in the day, when they were ready to bring the room to a frenzy. I checked my watch -- we weren’t even 30 minutes into the seven-hour set, and they’d just loaded up a track that was going to kick the party into a much higher gear.

If it sounds like I’m protesting, I’m not. I like that the DJs keep things unpredictable, breaking from their own conventions frequently. But they took us all by surprise when they dropped the needle onto a record that would have the disco ball at the center of the room ignite in fire. I checked my watch to be sure and caught another Despacio veteran doing the same -- we looked at each other, smiled and shrugged, our looks communicating, “so I guess it’s gonna be like this, then. Buckle up!”

By the time the song had completed its spins, the room had been jolted out of slumber. True to the song’s lyrics, we were now “just a lot of funky people with a whole lotta soul, dancin’ all over the place.” Folks had broken a sweat, the hand fans were fanning, and there was a post-climax glow on dancers’ flushed cheeks. Despacio Portola was off to a head start.

It felt like the DJs were like a dog with a chew toy. They’d grabbed hold of the room with their teeth and were furiously shaking their heads, knocking off the dust and ache of an 18-month hiatus since the prior Despacio in Ghent, Belgium. The way I interpreted it, they weren’t fucking around.

Perhaps the system wasn’t quite ready for them to go quite so hard. Shortly after Whirlpool of Love, I detected a loose and sloppy kick drum that sounded like a blown sub. Perhaps a plastic bottle had been sucked into the subwoofer. It was triaged quickly, and the sound returned to its pristine state, but it was a little reminder that perhaps gremlins take a while to be exorcised from systems that sit in storage for criminally long periods of time.

By the end of day one, quite a few of us felt like we’d blown an emotional speaker. We’d been ridden hard by the DJs, and the tears had flown freely, thanks to a closing hour that wrung every last drop of dance juice out of our limbs:

At the end of the day, as security worked on shooing everyone out of the room, the Despacio Fan Club gathered for a photo, this one taken by the legendary lens of Babycakes Romero, Despacio’s original official photographer.

Stories

There isn’t a Despacio — or any dancefloor for that matter — without stories. Here are some of the stories I became aware of over the weekend. If you’ve got one to share, feel free to reach out to me -- would love to add yours to the mix here.

The proposal. At about 5pm on that first day, a group of friends had been told they were to meet under the disco ball, but weren’t told exactly why. Once the group had assembled, a man dropped to one knee and asked his girlfriend to marry him. The song playing at the time was Ba Ba Go, Go by Topo, a funky, 1983 Italo-disco track with strange cat meows, a wonderful bassline, and the fitting lyrics, “I love you.” A cheer went up in the crowd when the proposal was accepted, and the DJs were quite confused, because they’d played the song several times at prior Despacios and it had never inspired such cheering.

There were two other moments where random cheering broke out.

They found Gilligan. One of these moments happened when a group located a long-lost member of their squad inside Despacio. I’d been dancing next to him for a bit and he was going for it. Lost in the sauce, totally locked in, just grooving his heart out. Suddenly, I hear someone yell “I found him!” and a group descended on him and started cheering and patting him on the back. Turns out, he’d been separated from the group for hours, and they had been looking everywhere for him. I don’t know the exact story, but I’d like to think that Despacio is like the realm where lost socks go. It’s a twilight zone where lost people can go to find themselves and disappear from the world for a while.

Marie Davidson. Marie Davidson, an artist with the Deewee label, spent hours dancing with us at Portola. She’s not the first artist to spend some serious time on the Despacio dancefloor, and she won’t be the last, but we were especially delighted when the DJs surprised all of us by playing the pre-release Deewee Dub of her Push Me Fuckhead record (the release of this version of the song is scheduled for October 31). The energy of that moment, her smiles, the excitement of everyone around her as they recognized what was happening -- it was a piece of dancefloor magic. Here’s a short clip of that moment.

A high ball. At another time, I heard some cheering, again coming from the center of the room. In this case, a man had brought a construction-style measuring tape and was standing under the disco ball, trying to measure the height to the ball. The measuring tape kept flopping over at the last moment, causing folks to cry out in anguish. Finally, the tape reached the ball and the crowd cheered in triumph. I of course needed to know the number, so I asked him for it. He had measured the ball at 8 feet and 3 inches off the floor. Turns out he was high (literally and figuratively speaking) and the bottom of his ruler wasn’t even on the floor -- so the number wasn’t exactly useful.

I don’t think folks should try to touch the ball, and so I’m not telling this story to encourage anyone else to find the actual height of the ball at a future Despacio. But I do enjoy a bit of play so long as it doesn’t undermine the dance party. This moment brought people together and seemed wholesome enough.

The music: The selections for Portola stayed true to the Despacio version of the Balearic sound that 3manydjs have pioneered. Jump into this spreadsheet to explore over 180 records that the community identified as being played at Portola. Maybe you’ll even be able to help us identify some of the music we haven’t been able to identify yet. One notable difference between the two days: on day one, James Murphy went missing for a couple hours to serve as frontman for LCD Soundsystem, who were also performing at the festival. On the second day, 2manydjs disappeared for a couple of hours to play a set on another stage at the festival. We had a lot of fun comparing the difference in track selection and energy when it was James only in the booth vs. 2manydjs only in the booth. Normally, Despacio is a blend of the two styles, but during these rare moments, we hear the blend pulled apart and we develop a clearer sense of what each side of the DJ team brings to the table.

At the heart of Despacio are great records played on a wonderful hifi system into a dark room to people who are down to dance to whatever the DJs want to play. The selections made by these three DJs redefine what it means to be a selector — there is very little in the world of DJing that goes as deep.

The original Capy. One of the songs that has endeared itself to many is Capy, the Manncool & Trol2000 edit of Capone’s Music Love Song. At Portola, for the first time in our recorded history, the DJs played Capone Love Song, pitched way down. The original is a beautiful song, and it shines in Despacio, but to be honest, doesn’t hold a candle to the Manncool & Trol2000 edit, which deeply improves the song by turning the “I love you” lyric into a chorus that repeats some five or six times. Without the repetition, the song fails to deliver the same emotional punch.

We spent some time wondering why the DJs would choose to play the less effective original version of the song, and we learned that the original had been re-issued by Sound Metaphors in December 2023, and that Sound Metaphors had, in 2024, issued some strongly worded cease & desist letters to folks who had published unlicensed edits of the music online. We don’t know for sure, but we’re guessing that the Sound Metaphors lawyers asked the DJs (nicely or not nicely) to stop playing the unlicensed Manncool & Trol2000 edit, and so the DJs played the original version.

So the first thing I did when I got home from Portola was dig my “Capy” record out of its crate and put it on my turntable. It was as good as remembered.

Another one bit the dust. In an example of the most spectacular sound glitch I’ve ever heard in my nearly 100 hours inside Despacio, a bit of dust got between the needle and Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust as the record spun. For a few agonizing seconds, the record skipped and sounded absolutely terrible. Dancers halted mid-move or contorted into an imitation of the tortured sound. A collective groan rose in the room.

And then, somehow, the record was back on track, and the party, reminded of the mortality of vinyl records, seemed just a little bit more thankful for the flawless sound that followed. I overheard someone near me remark, “whoa, this is vinyl?” Until that moment, they hadn’t even known.

Drawing in Despacio. Yes, the dancefloor is for dancing, but I love when an artist takes the time to stand on the sidelines to capture the essence of the floor, as redditor Lowfi_steve did when he sketched the dancefloor. “I’m an artist and designer and I invented this drawing board to draw on my bike rides (it attaches to the stem). Laaaaate Saturday night, I had the silly idea of bringing it on the dancefloor on Sunday. I easily spent half of Sunday in that tent dancing, drawing, and having the time of my life. It was definitely one of the most challenging and fulfilling environments to make work in, and I already know how to make it even better for next year.”

The heat. San Francisco was unseasonably warm on the weekend that Despacio made its debut there, and the tent Goldenvoice erected to house the happiest dancefloor on earth was not up to the task of keeping it cool. We’re surprised, because this was apparently the same configuration used at Coachella, where daytime temps are often 100 degrees or more. The HVAC system just didn’t seem to want to keep up with all the bodies sweating it out inside the tent, resulting in complaints that the room felt too hot, too swampy, and too crowded. Personally, I thrive in hot rooms because I’ve got a massive fan to keep myself and those around me cool, but I understand the complaints because it did feel a few degrees warmer than we’d want it to be.

Those of us with fans were super happy we had them, and — true to the commandments of the fan club — we were happy to share our breeze with others.

The cameras. Here’s where we get to the most negative thing I have to say about Despacio at Portola. I have never seen more cell phone cameras held aloft on a Despacio dancefloor, ever. (Miami to Portola: “hold my beer” -- we’ll get to Miami and how much worse it was in this regard in the next review.) This Despacio was located just a few miles away from the global headquarters of the companies that make Android and Apple smartphones, so perhaps it’s not surprising that these devices seemed to be in near constant use on the dancefloor.

Let me share a video with you:

This video was taken during a song where, for the most part, everyone was dancing without a phone in the air until the disco ball was lit up from all sides by dozens of Robe Megapointe light fixtures. Suddenly, the dark room became photogenic, and a number of folks stopped dancing so that they could film the disco ball in all of her glory.

But the problem is that this filming subtracted from the energy on the dancefloor. These moments where the ball lights up are chosen specifically because they’re peak energy moments and it’s especially problematic if someone stands still during what should be a moment of collective effervescence and shared climax. It’s like someone taking a knee during the national anthem, or someone remaining seated when a whole room rises at a ceremony. We can clearly see and feel the dead energy of the people who are filming in this video (including the person who took the video). We can observe how their stillness removes them from the scene and causes others around them to have to move around them as if they’re obstructions, rather than people.

I chose this clip because it shows the impact of just a few cameras. There were many other moments across the weekend when there were hundreds of cameras held up. During these moments I could look across the floor and see a stillness that had never existed when phone use at Despacio was rarer. Despacio’s dancefloor is being silenced by the creeping erosion of dancefloor etiquette.

This is a big problem for Despacio. There are a few ways for the team to handle this, but I’m going to go on the record as saying that I believe the solution needed is one that works at my favorite clubs including Pikes Ibiza, Nowadays NYC, Berghain Berlin, and Stereo Montreal. It’s simple: ban phone photography from the dancefloor.

Despacio’s next event is rumored to be a standalone event in NYC. I believe that this event should be announced as a “no photos” event, that cameras should be stickered on entry, and that security should talk to and/or remove folks who break this simple rule. Doing so would be consistent with the founding ethos of Despacio, where the first shows had a sign like the one pictured here that encouraged people to stay off their phones and simply enjoy the moment:

Such gentle encouragement no longer works, some 18 years after the introduction of the smartphone. There’s a whole generation of dancers who grew up with phones and who never experienced a dancefloor without phones. For these folks, the EDM concerts they attend are full of phones held aloft, oftentimes for the entire event.

But unless Despacio takes a stand, it will continue to see its highest energy moments undermined by tourists stepping out of the dance to take souvenirs and keepsakes. This is not what I want to see happen to my favorite dance party on earth, and yet it’s already happening. In the scorecard below, Despacio is getting a “RULES” score of 7 for the lack of a phone policy, and the PEOPLE of Portola are getting a (rather generous, considering the level of phone use) 8 for forgetting that the dancefloor is for dancing. I can see both of these scores trending lower over time if the organizers don’t put into place a more muscular set of anti-phone policies.

Despacio cannot maintain its prominence as one of the best dance parties on earth if it doesn’t do something about the phone camera situation. We do not need our Bloody Mary piled high with fried foods to rank better in the social media game of who went to the better party over the weekend. We do not need our dancefloor enshittified by tourists taking photos. Dancefloors are participatory. Dancefloors are for dancing, not for photography.

This request may be a tall ask if Despacio is going to be part of a larger festival where it’s now common for people to stand and film (and not dance). But for a standalone event such as the one being mooted for New York City next year, this request seems reasonable.

Despite the minor annoyances (e.g., the heat) and the major annoyances (the phones), Despacio made the festival for many attendees, me included. I was the first one onto and the last one off the dancefloor on each of the two days, and did not leave once for water or rest because I would not have been able to bear missing a single song played during the 14 hours that the DJs spun records over the two-day event.

Despacio changes lives

Hundreds of folks took to the internet after the event to talk about how the event had changed their lives. The Despacio Discord (discord.gg/despacio) gained a couple hundred new folks, all of them eager to discuss and process the experience.

Select quotes:

I like ending on this positive note before giving Despacio the lowest score I’ve ever given it. I think it’s time for Despacio to address the elephant in the room.

The DPARTII scorecard

Danny Rampling made sweet love to our earholes until the walls of Freddie's were sweating tears of relief and release. Primal, magical, feral, life affirming. We danced until 4am, then I lay in bed awake until noon because the heartstrings plucked by the night just wouldn’t stop vibrating. I finally understood (some of) Ibiza’s magic and why the island has a mythical reputation.

Backstory

The year 2024 started with the legal finalization of my divorce. In October, I celebrated my birthday week in Ibiza, where I danced all night (on multiple nights) with my girlfriend, candy-flipped, mushroom-tripped, and even allowed myself to cut loose and drink caffeinated cappuccino and alcoholic champagne -- two beverages I normally abstain from. In short, I cut myself loose from a 23-year marriage, then cut loose in a six-day party spree. Could I be any more of a walking, dancing middle-aged cliché of a mid-life crisis? We shall see. (That shadow you see is the year 2025 looking over 2024's shoulder and whispering into its ear, "hold my beer.")

Pikes Ibiza was created when Tony Pike (pictured above with George Michael on the set of Wham's Club Tropicana video), an international playboy, self-admitted insurance fraudster, small-time drug dealer, and self-described well-hung lover of men and women (notable lovers included Grace Jones and George Michael) purchased a 15th century finca (rural estate) and converted it into a boutique hotel.

Due to Tony Pike's influence and hard work, Pikes became infamous for hedonistic parties -- Freddie Mercury celebrated his 41st birthday there in 1987 (at a cost of £52,000 -- about $137K in today's dollars). The ample budget allowed for "lots of booze and coke” for the 700+ partiers according to Tony Pike’s memoir. Fireworks from the party could be seen over 100 miles away.

Pikes today, 40+ years on, has settled down a bit, but the energy of Ibiza still flows from the beating heart of the place, a tiny, dungeon-like dancefloor with walls of stone, low, wood-beamed ceilings, and a soundsystem loud enough and clear enough to cast a spell over dancers. This room, the magical wellspring from which Pike's party vibes gush, is named Freddie's room because it was Freddie Mercury's preferred suite when he stayed at Pikes. It was converted to a party space after his death in 1991.

Like Studio 54, Paradise Garage, David Mancuso's Loft, and The Warehouse, Freddie's has become a legendary dancefloor, revered for the quality of DJ talent it attracts and for the raucous fun people have had there over the decades. All of the nights at Freddie's have different themes, changing over the course of a season that runs from April through October. The reason I'd flown to Ibiza was to celebrate my birthday at its Manumission Monday night, where the DJ wouldn't be pre-announced, where phones would be stickered and forbidden from use on the dancefloor, and where, as Pikes management puts it, "like-minded partygoers and island residents alike come together to embrace the freedom of being in a Balearic paradise while dancing to the sounds of the world’s finest DJs."

It would be our third night of clubbing in Ibiza, and we had reasons to expect it would be the best night. After the horror of Hi Ibiza two nights before, we needed to dance ourselves clean of the vibelepsy we’d picked up at Hi.

Despite hyping myself up about the place, Pikes surpassed my expectations, and here are a few impressions from the night that attempt to capture what it was like to attend a dance party there.

Because great parties cause time to warp, slow, stop, and stutter, this is a collection of vignettes or moments when I realized that this party was doing the soul-cleansing job I had hired it to do. The night went by in a blur. Time dilated and the night went by in a halting rhythm of fevered forever nows. Some of what happened can't be published until the posthumous memoir because I still have to work for a living, my kids might one day read this. They don’t need to be scarred by dad’s party memoirs.

Freddie's backdoor

We started the night with 8pm dinner at the Pikes restaurant. Restaurant reservations include entry into Freddie's, so having reservations locked down allowed me to book flights and hotels with confidence a couple months in advance, whereas Freddie's RSVPs for free entry open up only two weeks before each event.

Restaurant staff were friendly and dressed for the party in Hawaiian-style shirts with graphic prints of disco balls, monstera plants, and guitars. The food was solid, even if we did send a fish entree back for being overcooked, and the sparkling firework in my birthday cake felt like the official kick-off moment for the party. While Freddie's is free to enter, dinner comes with an €85/head minimum which I figured was worth it to avoid the risk of flying all the way to Ibiza only to fail to get in to Freddie's on my birthday night.

The Freddie's dance floor and soundsystem

Freddie's is tiny -- I've seen walk-in closets in California McMansions that can fit more dancers. It's got room for maybe 200 people, with the total capacity for Pikes on a busy evening hovering around 800 people. There are other party and hang-out spaces secreted throughout the beautiful grounds.

Inside Freddie's room, A small portrait of Saint Freddie is pinned high on a wall near the elevated DJ booth tucked into the back corner.

We snuck into Freddie's during soundcheck, before it was officially open. At first glance looking around the cave-like room with its stone walls and low ceiling and tiled floor, I thought it would be an acoustic nightmare of sound reflections. I worried that reflections off the hard surfaces might make the music sound awful, but once the room was packed with people, the Void Acoustics’ sound system's impressive volume didn't muddy its clarity. It shouldn’t have sounded this good, but that system is nicely tuned.

After all, human bodies are great acoustic treatment for a room -- John Klett, the designer of the Despacio soundsystem, said in one interview, “I refer to people as walking water bags – with maximum respect and love,” he laughs. “Because the dancers are part of the experience, part of our acoustical treatment, they make the system sound better.”

The walls of Freddie's. Perhaps more than any feature of Freddie's, I know its walls best. Made of plastered and painted stone, their honest bumpiness felt like safety when the room reached the heights of Bacchanalian chaos. Pikes only allows attendees age 27+, so generally speaking, attendees have some experience and know how to hold their substances. Even so, I saw plenty of folks holding onto, leaning against, and generally using the walls for support and grounding because the room was so disorienting and confusing at times.

There were many moments when the room was pitch black or barely lit or so pumped full of stage smoke that I couldn't see even my dance partner in front of me. I could only surrender to the overwhelm and wash of beats and put my palms against the bumpy walls to steady myself and calm the sense of vertigo that I sometimes felt. Twice we tried to dance in the middle of the room, and on both occasions we felt like rowboats in a winter squall -- bumped and tossed from every direction. It remains to this day the most disorienting dancefloor I’ve ever been on, and that’s high praise. I loved the way it made me feel lost, but I needed to be able to hold the wall in order to not feel too lost.

Every once in a while, someone would appear from nowhere and bump into me. These wall sliders were trying navigate out of the room for a drink or rest, and in the chaos the wall was the only way they could find their way out. I have never seen grown adults slide along walls as a way to navigate a room, and loved that others appeared to be as disoriented as I was. At times, when the room was especially dark or fogged in, I dared not let go of the wall for fear of being pushed back out to sea and swept up in a current, unmoored and lost.

Sorry to all the wall sliders I made go around us -- I was at times in jeopardy of losing my own sanity and could not let go of the wall.

As the night wore on, I noticed the walls had begun to drip with condensation of so many sweating bodies. The place had been packed from opening, and the DJ — whose identity I still had no clue of — had us working up a sweat.

Communion

I don't know what came over me, but I had this feeling of being very connected to the room, to the wall, to the people, and to the music. I was overwhelmed with love for the space and so, naturally, I gathered some of that wall condensation on my index finger and touched my forehead, my chest, my left shoulder, and finally my right shoulder, repeating a familiar old motion I probably hadn't done in 40 years, re-baptizing myself with the sacred sweat of the gathered bodies. Sacrilege or sacred, it felt right.

As the water on my forehead cooled, I had another idea.

As a kid, I'd been fascinated when a teacher told my class that molecules of water that had once been in Julius Caesar had likely had time to make their way into every living human.

I felt the need to join my water right then with the water that had been part of all those other bodies -- after all, we move as one body when we move to the one beat of one song in one room. So I gathered more condensation from the wall onto my finger and licked it off.

No idea if the teacher’s tale was scientifically sound, but that old story made consuming some of the condensed sweat feel like the right thing to do. I wanted to both give my sweat to the air and take some back from the hundreds gathered in Freddie's on a Monday night. Maybe a molecule of water from Freddy Mercury himself had had time to make it into one of those sweating bodies and had found its way to the wall that I’d tasted. I’ll never know, but as of that moment, I became forever connected to a load of strangers I’ll likely never meet again.

The ceiling of Freddie's

With its bumpy walls and low ceiling all pulsing with the heartbeat of song and the press of human flesh, Freddie's felt like a womb. I regularly whacked the speakers and disco ball when I raised my hand to fan myself with the hand fan I'd brought along for comfort. The rustic ceiling beams made of painted tree trunks likely broke up the sound that might have otherwise reverberated unpleasantly. In moments when there was enough light to see the ceiling, these tree trunks showed themselves without pretense or artifice, unlike the high-tech sound paneling found in Ibiza's superclubs -- yet another reminder of the humility and humanity of the experience.

The lights and the mirror ball

The disco ball at the center of the room features circular mirror tiles and feels rigidly fixed to the ceiling. It doesn't dangle and spin like many disco balls. As opposed to some experiences, where the mirror ball is a rare treat, lit only for emotional high points, this ball was lit for 10+ minutes at a time at times, speckling the walls, ceiling, and faces with particolored circles of light. The ball is fixed, the people below it provide the movement. Freddie's lighting (controlled by technician and lighting director Lorenzo) goes through a range of effects, at times feeling like a romantic dinner lit by gentle caresses of candle light, at other times feeling like a dubstep or hard techno rave strobing between foggy whiteouts and inky, moonless night.

In the first hour of the party, the Freddie’s lighting rig felt underpowered for the room. Seeing the subtle sequences of the first several songs, I misjudged the lighting to be quaint, undersized, and perhaps out of date.

But I was wrong.

Lorenzo played his lighting cards close to his vest. Later in the night, after the drinks and drugs had kicked in, and after the DJ had scrobbled our brains a bit, Lorenzo played lighting sequences perfectly timed to musical phrasing and the emotional energy of the music. At times the lighting gave dystopian hellscape. At times it gave urgent finale to an orgy. At times it gave renaissance watercolor, full of blooms and color washes. Lorenzo, the resident lighting and sound tech, always present, is a lighting master.

Heartbreak and healing

One of the songs the DJ played in the first hour was "Movin' on Up" by M People, a positive break-up anthem that, to be honest, I'd never paid much attention to before. I'd enjoyed the song, heard it probably a dozen times, but I'm the type of person who doesn't really hear lyrics -- the human voice is just there like an instrument.

But this time was different -- I saw my girlfriend, also recently divorced, move to the song in a way that made me sit up and pay attention when I saw her singing along to these lyrics:

… 'Cause I'm movin' on up, you're movin' on out
Movin' on up, nothin' can stop me
Movin' on up, you're movin' on out
Time to break free, nothin' can stop me

These lyrics don't apply to my situation, but they clearly resonated with her, and I heard this song for the first time through the ears of someone who had broken free from the tyranny of a bad situation and found herself dancing in Freddie's room at Pikes Ibiza. As watched my girlfriend dance, I heard the 30-year-old song essentially for the first time, finally understanding it as more than just a pop-dance tune. I was about 20 when I first heard the song and hadn't had to deal with heartbreak, break-up, or any of that yet. How could I have possibly understood it as anything other than pop?

The patio

Just before 3am, we took a break for water, stumbling out into the patio to sit down near the back door of Freddie’s, the same patio where we'd eaten dinner seven hours prior. The dry night air pulled the moisture out of my sweat-soaked shirt, and felt gloriously cooling. The patio was a babel of people happily chatting in so many languages, laughing, and smoking. The high-frequency tinkle of ice cubes in drinks complemented the filtered-down rhythmic thumping we could hear from Freddie's.

"This is a fun corner," said a posh English voice.

I looked up, and a man with eyebrows like black bottle brushes smiled down at us. He introduced us to his friends, and soon we were chatting about birthdays in Ibiza -- he'd celebrated his milestone 40th birthday on the island earlier that year -- and, unprompted, he gave a review of his experience at Hi Ibiza that largely mirrored our own, "it's too fucking crowded. You can't leave for a drink of water or the restroom because you won't get back in."

One topic led to another, then The Englishman told us a wry story of a somewhat tragic breakup, but he told it well and we laughed. Then we decided as a newly enlarged group of instant friends that the best response to a helluva breakup story was to go back inside to dance. We got back in, no problem.

Frankie Knuckles' Your Love was the next song the DJ played, mixing into it from Hideaway (Classic Mix) by David Morales, a cover of a 1994 deep house track, followed by the synthy modern house track Dale Dale by DJ Tennis & Luke Alessi, a three-track run that catapulted us from early house to electronic/trancey house, laying the groundwork for a spectacular final hour. The dancefloor got tighter, as folks from the patio poured back inside for the finale and as the DJ transitioned from house to trance with a song that messed with my head and made me question who was in the DJ booth. More about that song in a moment.

The finale

Two months before we flew to Ibiza, I'd booked our night at Pikes without knowing (and without having a way of knowing) who the secret DJ would be, only knowing that Monday nights at Pikes had a reputation for being the best night of many great nights.

So we arrived at Pikes, ate dinner, and started dancing still without knowing who the DJ was. We never even looked into the DJ booth, as the true test of a dance floor isn't whether the DJ is dancing cutely for the socials or whatever, but what effect they have on the dancefloor. The modern desire to watch the DJ (vs. just dance and feel what the DJ is putting out) makes as much sense as watching a chef cook without eating the food coming out of their kitchen.

And so we danced to whatever the DJ played for four and a half hours without knowing who the DJ was, and without it really mattering to us. What mattered was his track selection, the vibes, and the energizing impact of his selection and mixing on the dancefloor.

So I mentioned that the trance song the DJ played that made me really sit up and take notice -- that song was Follow Me (Hidden Identity Extended Remix) by Jam & Spoon, a trance/techno number with a minute-and-half break in the center when all the percussion drops out and layered synth chords rose and fell, like an air raid siren. I could not see the rest of the dance floor, but the only answer to this was to embrace in a hug, and just sway as the warm, liquid ambrosia of synth bathed the creases and folds of my brain.

I’ve cued up the track at the right moment in the embed above so that you can hear it. Imagine what this might feel like on a soundsystem my phone tells me was set to about ~108dB.) It felt like the DJ was performing sound-based laparoscopic surgery through the ear holes in my skull in order to CRISPR my DNA into some evolved form of post-human super-being. I'm sure the science totally checks out on that tortured metaphor, but to put it more simply, it was a proper mindfuck that made me finally need to know who the DJ was. A minute-and-a-half break with no beat would empty a lot of dancefloors, but we were locked in to it. We were in a warm bubble bath. We were lounging in the rays of the sun. We were one with the bumpy wall. I pulled out my earplugs and just let the sound do its thing to me.

Tunes by Afrojack (Rock the House), Slam (Lifetimes), Hardfloor (Acperience 1), Frankie Goes to Hollywood (Relax - Jam & Spoon mix), A Split-Second (Flesh), and In and Out (Eric Prydz) followed. After the final tune, the crowd fell into chants of "otra" (as in one more song) but curfew was strict, and we were soon flowing out of the room.

Who? Danny Rampling

On my way out, I stopped by the DJ booth to thank the DJ, a gentleman who looked to be in his 50s.

"What's your name?" I asked, and stuck out my hand.

He took it, "I'm Danny Rampling," he said. British. Strong grip, tattooed arm, a five-inch beaded bracelet. Pretty similar to the photo above.

"Danny Rampling?" I repeated to make sure I'd heard him. I had no idea who it was. (Note: I'm fairly ignorant!) My girlfriend -- who grew up in the UK -- elbowed me and whispered, "Legend!"

"Where are you from? America?" he asked.

"California," I said.

Someone nearby watching our exchange asked, "LA?"

"Yeah," I said.

"God help you," he said, then he cackled . "LA's gone bonkers! Nice to meet you, brother."

Back in the car, I searched Danny Rampling's name, because I'd never heard of him. I learned that he's been widely credited as one of founders of UK's rave and club scene (in the early 1980s), and that he's been a host of various BBC radio programs, et cetera. The guy really is a legend, and I learned (when I returned to Pikes two days later to revisit the scene), that he's returned to DJing after retiring for a while and needing to take a break from loud rooms for hearing-related reasons.

I find it stunning that Danny Rampling is the sort of world-class talent that Pikes can book for a secret gig on a Monday night. I loved that the dancefloor had been packed by people who trusted that Pikes would put a great DJ in that booth. Unlike Hi Ibiza two nights before, or Pacha Ibiza the prior night, none of the folks in the room had attended with intent to stand and film the celebrity DJ for the purpose of building or feeding our social media followings. Freddie's was a pure dancefloor: just loud music mixed well, happy party people, ridiculous lighting, and pristine vibes.

[I wrote this before I’d come up with my DPARTII scorecard] If there were a Michelin guide to dancefloors of the world (there really should be), Freddie's was three star (the highest rating). The only other three-star dancefloor I've experienced is of course Despacio.

Pikes Policies. A big part of what makes Pikes work so well was the fact that Pikes stickered all camera lenses on phones as their way in, telling attendees that phone photography and filming wouldn't be welcome. The no-phones policy has long been part of Monday nights at Pikes, and earlier in the summer, the hotel extended the no-phones policy to all seven nights, writing in their post announcing the change, "Keeping your phone in your pocket and your mind on the music – and knowing that everyone around you is doing the same – opens up a whole world of freedom, not only on the dancefloor but all around Pikes." Right on.

What's more, Pikes requires that Freddie's attendees be age 27+, and a few other important rules:

Pikes is a masterclass on how to host a great dance party. They've got the basics just right: great music played loud on a well-tuned soundsystem inside a dimly-lit room with wonderful attention to facilities and safety. No intrusive security pat-downs at the gates, no extortionate pricing, and no cunts. Couldn't have asked for a more perfect birthday party.

Fatboy Slim has said, "Pikes for me is the spirit of Ibiza." True for me as well, now that I've experienced Ibiza's so-called best and compared it to Pikes' superior offering.

The Scorecard

When I originally published this review, I hadn’t yet developed the scorecard. Now, eight months later, I’m adding that bit in as I move this post from the old blog to MagicalDancefloors.com.

//|// Intro

For at least three years now, friends have been insisting that I get myself to Nowadays, the indie Brooklyn hangout that's hard to define. It's a club, a dancefloor, an Izakaya, a wedding venue, a place for ping pong tournaments, a chill spot for day-drinking in hammocks surrounded by lush greenery, for taking a nap while listening to ambient music, for dancing until you're in serious danger of forgetting the outside world.

It's my new favorite dancefloor in all of America.

We (my girlfriend and I) visited Nowadays for one of their increasingly popular weekly "Nonstop" parties, that ran from 10:00 PM Saturday until 4:00 AM Monday, like so:

• 22:00–01:00: Josh Steers

• 01:00–03:30: Alírio

• 03:30–06:00: TAYHANA

• 06:00–09:00: Maya Margarita

• 09:00–12:00: DJ SWISHA b2b Kush Jones

• 12:00–15:00: dBridge

• 15:00 - 21:00: Justin & Eamon Mister Sundays

• 21:00 - 04:00: JYOTY

Due to the fact that this is the same weekend we spent ~7.5 hours in Basement, ~4.5 hours at Brooklyn Steel (for Book Club Radio's Tinzo + Jojo tour finale) and ~6 hours at Signal, we only had time between our flight in on Friday evening and our return flight on Sunday night to experience about ~6 hours of Nowadays' magic, but that was enough of a taste to know that it's the real deal, and that I can unequivocally recommend it to fellow chasers of divine dancefloors.

//|// Entry

We danced until Signal NYC (stay tuned for a writeup on this experience) closed its doors at 4 AM Sunday morning. We pulled up in a rideshare, and stepped out of the minivan into a sidewalk in chaos. The Nowadays entry was a roiling mass of bodies where three streams of traffic converged. Drunks stumbled out of the front door after last call (4 AM in NYC), stared into their phones with an intensity designed to make their rideshares arrive faster. Nowadays Members and Patrons (more on them later) joined the short queue to one side of the building, while folks with no tickets huddled in a separate queue. We found our way to a third queue, falling in behind perhaps 40 people, many of them dressed inadequately for the biting chill of spring winds at 4:30 AM.

Bouncers were yelling at people to get out of the streets, cars honked at the drunks stumbling across the road to catch rides, and some folks just stood there smoking, taking it all in.

We were not dressed for this. I wore short sleeves and my girlfriend wore a tank-top. Though the temps were in the low 50s, windchill and evaporating sweat made me sidle up close to the brick house of a man whose wide back seemed to offer shelter from the wind.

He must have noticed us getting real close, and turned to say hi. We introduced ourselves and learned he was from Florida, formerly New Jersey, here for a weekend of fun with friends. Soon, those friends arrived, spilling out of cars and joining him in line -- perhaps six of them -- and then the party started. Small spoons were dipped again and again into small baggies that were passed around amongst his group, all of whom developed the sniffles.

Once Florida Man's friends were feeling properly revived, he turned his back on us to chainsmoke and chat with his friends. We welcomed his back as a windbreak again and eavesdropped on his conversation, little snippets of which the wind carried to our ears. Nothing salacious or interesting, just friends catching up after some time apart, plus discussion of drug prices, plus whining about the line, which I can't hold against them, because the wait was getting to all of us.

Behind us, an interesting couple on one of their first few dates talked about food, outfits, and their visible tattoos and scars. As they flirted with each other, he frequently giggled in a loud falsetto full of vocal fry, like someone imitating a teenaged girl, and it took willpower for me not to turn my head and verify that he hadn't morphed into a teenage girl every time that giggle clattered around us. His date was close to seven feet tall. Her leather-corseted chest sat well above his impressive, tied-back dreads.

I hope that sketch doesn't sound mean. It's instead meant to convey some of the diversity I saw in line at Nowadays -- this was by far the most diverse crowd we encountered the entire weekend of dancing at four different venues. The folks in line were majority non-white, a wider range of ages, and a wider range of body sizes and shapes, with far more expressive clothing than we'd encountered at Basement, Signal, or the Tinzo + Jojo event.

To put the contrast even more starkly -- there were more people of color in line at Nowadays on this one morning than Berghain sees in an entire year. This is a strength of this venue. The demographics and character of the folx in line suggested good things about the quality of the party inside.

About an hour after we joined the line, we reached the front of it. Florida Man and his crew had gone in as one group before us, and just as we were about to be let in, a bouncer appeared with Florida Man and one of his buddies.

"Laughing through the speech," he said to the outside bouncers, "These two are not going to be coming back in."

Florida Man's mouth hung open. He was in shock. The friend that was being ejected with him, a tall, good-looking 30-something man with a Vegas clubbing-style collared shirt and a Timothy Chalamet-ish bouffant -- we'll call him Tim -- immediately began to try to talk his way back into the club.

"They didn't take the speech seriously. Laughing and cutting up," the inside bouncer explained to the outside bouncers.

Scissors appeared, and a bouncer cut the bracelets off Florida Man and Tim. Tim kept talking, using pleading and apologetic tones to try to convince the bouncer that they weren't joking about "the talk." They would never joke about such a thing, he said. The bouncer looked at Tim and said, "When one of us makes a decision, we all stand by that decision. I'm not going to let you back in."

It was our turn to enter.

"Go in past the first door, and stop at the second door," we were told, and so we did, finding ourselves in a closet of a room where a nonbinary person with long, straight hair and big eyes waited until a few more people were packed in. You could hear a pin drop -- none of us wanted to be accused of not listening to the talk. Then they began the speech, reading from a clipboard to ensure they hit every important point:

"Hi, Welcome! Welcome everybody. Welcome back to some of you. Has everyone been here before?"

Mostly yesses, some nos.

"Well not everybody. Alright, so I'm just going to go over the rules quickly then I'll let you all go forward. We don't tolerate any harassing behavior here. Racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, unwanted physical touch, aggressive staring, anything creepy. If you experience something like that while you're in our space, look for our safer space operatives who wear these red lights or wrist bands. They'll help you out.

Also if you're on the dancefloor, we ask that you don't stand around and talk or use your cell phone. If you pull out your cell phone for any reason: check the time, Shazam, text, we're going to ask you to put it away and if we have to do that more than once, we're going to have you leave.

When you do leave, you don't leave through here. It's not an exit. Straight through at the bar to the outside gate. We have fentanyl and xylazine test strips, condoms, and masks here for free. Earplugs on the left and right side of the bar.

All that sound good?"

I don't know if this was the "full version" of the talk or the abbreviated version of the talk -- there's a version that's done when the line is backed up, and I suspect our version was the short version, as it was painless and quick -- about 40 seconds. Sometimes, the speech is accompanied by an encouragement such as, "I know most of you are regulars but today there are new people so show them how we party."

I personally loved the speech and wish more dancefloors onboarded people in this way. It set the tone, felt inclusive, and let everyone know how to protect their health and safety.

Once inside, I took a spin through the facilities -- dipping into the dancefloor for a second -- a 162 BPM hard-style techno remix of Jefferson Airplane's "(Don't You Want) Somebody to Love" was the first song I heard on entry, accompanied by excited cheers when the chorus dropped.

I took a quick lap through the outside areas while my girlfriend thawed herself out in the heat of the dancefloor. I saw the rest of Florida Man's crew huddled in a corner, discussing what to do about their split group. Initial survey done, we left for our hotel to take a nap. It was past 6am and we'd been up all night.

The dancefloor looked sexy as hell -- fogged in, ringed by hanging plants, filled with sweaty dancers, and gorgeous in the morning light. We couldn't wait to be back.

//|// dBridge

Caption: dBridge aka Darren White, in his studio. Photo credit: Native Instruments blog post

After a five-hour nap and mandatory NYC deli egg-and-cheese sandwiches, we checked out of the hotel and took our luggage to Nowadays. Re-entry was painless with our wrist bands, and coat check had no problem handling our luggage. The staff at Nowadays were, in all of our interactions, extra polite and friendly. The vibe we got from them is that they love their jobs.

We immediately joined dBridge in the indoors space, which I'm going to call the greenhouse, because that's what it feels like with its hanging plants ringing the dancefloor and its clerestory windows high up along two sides of the dancefloor.

It being daytime, the clerestory windows let in slanting light that sent solid-looking shafts of light through the heavy theatrical fog, giving the room a dreamlike quality.

dBridge's 2009 song "Wonder Where" was my introduction to the Drum & Bass genre, but he'd been going for nearly 20 years at that point, evolving in the early 90s from the jungle scene. In the early 2000s I was into Ratatat, Cansei de Ser Sexy, Aphex Twin, Crystal Castles and the like. I remember when I first heard "Wonder Where.” I put it on repeat for a week and dBridge immediately became one of my new favorites.

Finally stepping into a room with him at the decks was, for me, a dream come true.

And what a room! Immediately, I loved the look of the place -- the jungle-like plants, the sexy haze, the understated lighting, the beat-up disco ball. The sound system, initially built by Craig Bernabeu (aka Shorty) -- the same man who built the legendary Stereo Montreal soundsystem -- has over the years since Shorty's involvement, evolved somewhat, but still bears his marks. I saw a cabinet marked SBS behind the DJ decks, and I heard with my ears and body a system that sounded perfect for the room. The plants and bodies in the room surely helped reduce echo and reflections, as did the acoustically treated ceiling and the floating wood floor, plus other tricks I couldn't see or perceive.

After I'd picked my jaw back up and started moving, I noticed how nicely spaced everyone in the room was. I saw abundant evidence of great dancefloor etiquette: not a soul on their phone, everyone dancing expressively, and the density of dancers at the front of the room, near the decks, was no greater than the density of dancers at the back of the room. There were perhaps 40 people in the room, and it felt perfect, though I'd heard that it can get uncomfortably crowded on Friday and Saturday nights, when the normies pack the house.

Because the greenhouse wasn't packed, people gave each other space to dance, and I easily threaded my way between all of those gorgeously moving bodies as I surveyed the room, getting a feel for how it sounded in the middle, on the sides, in front of each stack, and on the benches in the back of the room. I found myself marveling at the skill with which everyone moved -- it seemed that every one of dBridge's dancers were dancefloor veterans. It reminded me of Berghain's Panorama Bar on Monday morning near the end of Klubnacht -- everyone blissfully expressing their connection to the music.

However, despite the excellent dancefloor etiquette, there was a strong forward orientation to the room. Most everyone faced the DJ during the two-hour period we danced there, and interaction between dancers was largely absent. This might be normal for the tail-end of Nowadays Nonstop, given that the party had started at 10 PM -- 16 hours earlier -- the prior night. Folks might've been spent and just looking to be in their own bubble at this point in the day.

Edit: Actually, Zinka noted in the first comment on this post that, “Most of the amazing morning crowd was away at a warehouse rave [ed: Earth Dog] thrown by some staff and other scene people that day, which is why the dance floor was a bit flat for dBridge. Sunday mornings are usually much more of a vibe.”

dBridge deejayed with a fervor that caused sweat to bead and drip off of his bald head. He whipped out a towel frequently and mopped his head before the sweat could land on the mixer or CDJs. He looked hot, so I gave him a few tentative blasts of air from the fan. He immediately smiled and stood taller, so I did it some more. When his hands were free for a moment, he pressed his palms together in thanks, so for the rest of the set I made sure to stop by the front occasionally and give him some air.

Next to him, on an empty concrete plinth where a turntable sometimes sits, potting soil lay scattered. It looked like one of the plants on top of the monitors might have been shaken from its perch by bass rumbles and had fallen onto the plinth, but there was no plant in sight. I trust that the fallen plant was repotted swiftly and returned to the dancefloor.

Fun fact I learned in writing this piece: "Low-frequency sounds, such as those produced by bass-heavy music, mimic thunderstorms, which have been found to promote root growth and overall plant health," according to Garden Culture Magazine. I've now made up the head canon that the Nowadays plants develop super strong roots that burst out of their pots when a heater of a set is played on this soundsystem that thunders so beautifully.

I'm here to factually report, then, that dBridge's set rolled through the room like a storm, causing at least one plant's root system to break through its terracotta walls in imitation of dancers' hearts pounding against their ribcages. Maybe it didn't happen exactly like that, but the dirt on the decks was real.

Question: we're all ultimately made of dirt, and to dirt we return. If the smell of soil after rain is called petrichor, what's the smell of dancers after thundering rhythms makes it rain from our insides?

It's not just sweat -- it's the byproduct of bodies animated by music played out by a DJ and made by an artist. This chain -- digital, physical, analog -- from an artist full of emotion to dancers full of emotion is a miracle, isn't it? Someone feels a certain way, then, many steps later, across vast literal and figurative distances, salt water beads on our skin or leaks from our eyes. Music is a technology for transmitting emotion across space and time. Music is a goddamned miracle.

//|// Wot dDridge played out

In a 2019 interview, dBridge talked about his desire not to be buttonholed into DnB: "I could quite easily roll out DnB bookings for however long and then become a nostalgia DJ or something. But that’s not something that inspires or excites me." Turns out, as he disclosed in an October 2023 interview, he was trying to get out of a stifling relationship with an agency that wouldn't let him play anything else that spoke to him: "I'm known—and will always be known for—drum & bass, but I've always felt like I'm more than that and haven't been able to express that for many reasons, either because I chose to or because of the agency I was with."

As far as I can tell from the track IDs I gathered (see below), he definitely didn't stick to just the tried-and-true DnB formula, but branched out, playing a wide variety of genres that, for me as a dancer, were fun and expressive tunes to dance to. Under dBridge's spell, I moved in ways I've never moved, and found myself just falling into whatever he played next -- I felt open, receptive, and entranced. It was a magical dancefloor, because everything about it was just right.

In the RA interview, dBridge said, "Literally, people come up to me and ask, 'What are you going to play?' and I say, 'I don't know until I get on, mate.' I feel lucky that I'm in that position now where people are still coming out to see me not having any idea what I'm going to play, but they're still willing to give me that hour of their time."

With great DJs, you can sit down at the counter and order the Omakase. In the world of sushi, the word "omakase" (お任せ) means "I'll leave it up to you." I don't need a great DJ to stick to a single genre or a single cluster of genres -- I want them to feel free to dig through their magical USB sticks and take me to places I never knew existed.

For example, dBridge played Oh No (Extended Mix) by Itoa from his label, Exit Records, home to some of the most creative dance music being produced today. The Spotify database describes it as "uk funky, j-rap, uk bass, jungle, japanese juke, footwork, drumstep, breaks, breakbeat," but I find the Bandcamp description tags more accurate: "160 drum & bass electronic footwork juke juke footwork jungle footwork juke jungle London."

Says the Bandcamp copy, "‘Oh No’ takes jacking acid to new levels, unleashing an infectious 303 workout not just for the feet, but the shoulders too. Go ahead and whip your hair to this one."

Regarding his influences, dBridge told RA, "I''m a Gemini and I do have that duality, that yin and yang side to me. It allows me to be open to all of that music: reggae, pop, punk, shoegaze, hip-hop, the lot, and I've got something from all of it."

We unfortunately missed the first hour of dBridge's set, but here are the songs I could identify using autoshazam (didn't have to touch my phone to do this work):

Song Dur. Artist Year
Nnnn 4:19 TRAKA & COIDO 2025
Magma 5:29 Noodles142 2024
G Jabbar Is Dead 3:39 Muadeep 2021
Ruminate 4:43 Fixate 2022
Brutal Meditation 2:14 Panoram 2024
Reflections 4:49 Fixate 2024
Scatterbrain 3:39 Fixate 2024
Lil Booties Matter 2:22 DJ Kill 2018
Work 4:37 DJ Rashad 2007
Oh No (Ext. Mix) 5:04 Itoa 2022
Eddies 5:04 carin kelly 2024
ESSENCE I 4:42 SNKLS 2024
Syzygy 5:30 Greetje 2024
Final Reason 3:48 COIDO 2025

And, for fun, here's a histogram of the genre tags for above tracks. It demonstrates not just the range of sounds going on in that room, but also their complementarity -- these are flavors that went well together, as confirmed by my sweat-soaked shirt without a dry patch on it.

//|// Things you might, might not, and definitely won't see at Nowadays

Unlike Basement, Nowadays has no dark rooms where people can cruise each other. I saw nobody dancing fully nude. I'm not even sure the club would allow it if someone were to try it. New York's surrounded by former Puritan colonies and I think that shows up somewhat in the relative lack of sexual freedom on display in New York City vs., say, Berlin. I'm not a fan of America's Puritanical element, and as a onetime stripper for a bachelorette party, and occasional nudist, I think we as a country need to loosen up, a lot.

On the other hand, in many ways, Nowadays feels like a safer space than its neighbor Basement or the Wonder of the Clubbing World, Berghain. Floor monitors watch the space, and the team truly gives their "safer space" policies more than lip service. This is rare in a world of party spaces that do just enough to stay out of trouble,

Folks who go frequently have promised me it gets decently (or indecently) debauched in the wee hours of the morning. I'll have to go back, I guess, to verify the veracity of those claims.

Things I saw, or might've seen:

Aristotle's Poetics poking out of a shoulder bag sitting on a ledge next to the dancefloor. This tableau felt too-perfectly arranged, like the person who had been doing the reading wanted people to know they'd been doing the reading, like a proud college frosh. Then again, New York is the one city I've lived in where I could read serious books every day during my subway commute to and from work and not feel like a nerd.

A person in a hammock sketching on their sketchbook. Apparently, drawing is a somewhat popular activity at Nowadays, and artists can even be found drawing at the back of the indoor dancefloor once the rising sun gives them enough light.

A woman delivering a lecture on Foucault's History of Sexuality. I didn't see this, because it happened prior to my visit, and definitely not on a Sunday, when there's neither room nor sonic space for heady lectures, but I'm including it as an example of how Nowadays has figured out a variety of uses for its space so that they can sustain the business.

Filthy casuals leaving after last call. New York's last call, at 4 AM, causes uncomfortable drought in the throats those who rely on the drug to keep themselves in a party mood. I tend to think of these folks as dancefloor casuals, because alcohol simply doesn't give one the stamina necessary to go all night, and also requires too many trips to the bar and then to the bathroom to really experience the art a DJ spins out. To me, it's a crime against art to spend 10 minutes every half hour refilling a drink and waiting in line for a toilet.

Alcoholics' alarms going off at 9:59 AM. The bar taps are turned back on at 10:00 AM, and those who bridged the 4 AM to 10 AM gap with backup substances often beeline for the bar at this time of morning. A Nowadays regular wrote, "[The DJ] started slow cuz everyone stormed the bar at 10 for booze. Bar line clears out and people migrate to the floor, sound tech turns up the system and the music picks up. 9am-1015 is literally just the DJ waiting for people to start drinking again."

Electrostatic clerestory windows. One of Nowadays neatest tricks -- in a venue packed with delightful flourishes -- is the electrostatic glass in the clerestory windows surrounding the indoor dancefloor. Typically, the windowframes of the small exterior factory windows are legible as a grid through these windows. Occasionally, the person at the lighting controls flips a switch (on phrase, naturally) that makes these windows more opaque, and the grid disappears. It's trippy as hell when it happens, because you believe you're hallucinating, or did hallucinate the grid. Classy theatricals.

Young folks bringing their parents to Nowadays. I saw more than one 20-something giving their Birthday Mimosa-sousled parents the grand tour of Nowadays. The parents, clearly visiting New York from out of state, looked suitably impressed, their expressions giving "we're not in Kansas anymore."

Grown men doing drugs near infants. After Nonstop ends and the indoor dancefloor is closed up, the party moves outdoors to Mister Sundays (3 PM to 9 PM). The all-ages nature of the outdoors party was wonderful on that warm day on the first of June, and multiple generations enjoyed the 16,000-foot outdoor space, lounging in hammocks, lining up for food trucks, dancing, or, as one person witnessed and shared in an online forum, "ripping a fat line in front of a toddler lmao."

A disco ball turning slowly. I timed it, for science. The disco ball that hangs over Nowadays' indoor dancefloor turns one revolution every 90 seconds. Maybe every 91 seconds. That’s a proper speed, unlike the outdoors disco ball.

People looking at their watches when a really great song comes on. Due to the policy that no phones are allowed at any time, for any reason on the dancefloor, some regulars have found a clever workaround, activating Shazam on their watches whenever a track comes on that they really need an ID for.

A man in salmon-colored shorts coat-checking a cooler full of picnic supplies. We checked our airport luggage on Sunday so that we could maximize our time spent in Nowadays. I thought this was the pinnacle pro move, until I observed a local coat-checking his cooler full of supplies for picnic later that evening in "The Rockaways" (Rockaway Beach, a half-hour drive south).

A woman with a green LV clutch standing on the outdoor dancefloor looking supremely bored and uncomfortable while her frumpy boyfriend sporting a spreadsheet tan (that is, none), in his oxford, slightly swayed behind her. Neither of them looked or acted comfortable or like they were enjoying themselves, and I really wondered what had brought them there that afternoon. This couple stood out because most of the rest of the Mister Sundays crowd on the dancefloor were actively enjoying themselves.

A couple snuggling on one of the sturdy backyard hammocks, legs intertwined, faces looking up at a perfect blue sky through light-green foliage of spring, swinging gently to the early chill tracks played by residents (and co-owners of Nowadays), Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter.

A man lighting and carrying incense through the dancefloor. I'm not sure if the overpowering BO of one dancer prompted the lighting of the joss stick, but soon after I noticed the BO, a man appeared from nowhere and banished the smell with a stick that smelled of sandalwood. Later, I spotted the wooden box that held the incense, and realized that this wasn't just some random punter doing a kind deed, but a staff member executing on one of the many thoughtful little touches that make up Nowadays' operations.

An impish little girl outrunning her father. She was maybe four or five, and she weaved through the moving legs on the busy dancefloor with the agility of a fox darting through canebrake. Her dear old dad had no chance of keeping up, and I marvelled at how this girl was able to move through the dancefloor over and over without colliding with or tripping the dancers. The whole backyard was her playground; I spied her hiding behind the couple on the hammock to avoid her dad earlier that same afternoon.

A tarot card reading. The woman doing the reading, a red-haired witch (the good kind) who oozed charisma, held her audience in thrall as she laid cards out on the sun-dappled picnic table. It took every fiber of my willpower to not eavesdrop.

Someone ignoring the posted signs. If you're really lucky, you'll get to witness first-hand some knob getting booted for not respecting the house rules. If you're not that lucky, Nowadays' Google reviews offer a glutton's buffet of schadenfreude, with entries like these:

//|// The business of Nowadays

One of the most fascinating elements of Nowadays to me, is the hustle and vision and grit of the team that transformed this wreck of a lot -- located next to a polluted federal superfund site called "The Most Radioactive Place in New York City," -- into an oasis and what might be the best club in the United States for lovers of dance music.

In 2015, with the backing of a 30-person investment group, the pair opened Nowadays in an industrial section of Ridgewood, next to a federal superfund site once dubbed “The Most Radioactive Place in New York City.”

Fast forward 10 years, and the backyard has grown up quite a bit. The trees are still young and will need another decade or two to reach the point where they form an unbroken canopy over the backyard, but the greenery has filled out considerably:

The outdoor space was actually Nowadays' first dancefloor. Open only during the warmer months from late Spring through early Fall, the outdoors space is put to a variety of uses to make ends meet. It's an event space that hosts lectures, for example, the above-mentioned lecture on Foucault, and this lecture on psychedelics:

In short, Nowadays seems to be trying everything out to stay in business. They've hosted trivia nights, movie nights, ping pong tournaments, board game nights, and have even rented the facilities out to other promoters for parties.

Nowadays is listed as a wedding venue on Zola, as a site for corporate events on The Vendry, and more. They've got a fairly decent merch program ($40 for ball cap? Girl, I did it).

One of the more interesting hustles involves Patreon Membership. For a minimum of $60 per year ($5 per month), folks can sign up to be a Nowadays Patreon supporter. Contribute more to get deeper discounts and access to exclusives, including exclusive events for members only, exclusive merch drops, and exclusive access to hot event ticket sales.

As of June 20, 2025, Nowadays had accumulated 1,627 paying patrons (a minimum of $98k gross revenue, but more likely well north of that, perhaps 200k to 400k). This doesn't cover operating expenses, but it certainly provides ballast that steadies the ship in times of turbulence.

Back in 2017, Nowadays ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of a year-round indoor dancefloor. Some 900 backers contributed just over $100k to help Nowadays build out their indoor space, and, specifically, an SBS Slammer soundsystem built by Shorty that would "be spoken about in the same breath as Zanzibar, the Paradise Garage, Vinyl and Twilo."

The kickstarter campaign was a success, the space was built, the soundsystem installed, and the results are, as I can personally attest, spectacular.

I find it all fascinating.

In a world where UK clubs are reported to be closing at the rate of 2-3 per week, where Berlin clubs are experiencing Clubsterben (or Club Death), and where everyone seems to be gnashing their teeth and rending their garments in grief at the declining night-life scene, clubs like Nowadays are experimenting with alternate ways to pay the rent, all while preserving a dancefloor at the heart of the club experience.

In 2024, Nowadays was near death. The team hadn't reached a lease deal with their landlord, and rumors were circulating that they were going to lose their lease. They reached a deal for another 10 years, but the lease shot up 50%, according to reports.

For now, Nowadays' future seems secure, thanks to all the multiple revenue streams and hustle of the team.

//|// Perfection?

Is it perfect? No. Here are some of the challenges:

The indoor space is tiny -- with room for maybe 150 - 220 dancers, or 269 folks just standing around. Certain artists that once played Nowadays (e.g., Four Tet) have gotten too big for the space. The dancefloor is often too empty or too full, and finding it at "just right" density can be difficult. It's a tough ticketing challenge to sell the right number of tickets without knowing how many folks will show up early, how many will stay late, or how many might arrive somewhere in between. They're still figuring this out.

The crowd can be a little uneven. Despite adamant signage that the dancefloor is for dancing, sometimes the crowd might stand and yap, and the floor monitors seem powerless to deal with the mass disobedience situation, on the rare occasions when it does happen. I didn't witness this issue happening, but have spent only about six hours total at the venue.

The very porous door (the polar opposite of Berghain's tight door) means that tourists and casuals and all manner of folks who aren't quite right for the party make their way into the space (the Google and Yelp reviews provide ample evidence of this phenomenon). The vibes at the start of a Nonstop party are said to be far inferior to the vibes at the tail-end of that same party. The variability can be unsettling.

Nowadays doesn't own its space, and though it has just secured another 10-year lease, tenants are more limited in what they can do, or are willing to do, vs. owners. I think this is a club whose legacy is secured, regardless of what happens at the end of its current lease. But it'd be great if they and their investors could manage to buy their landlord out and secure the space for decades to come, and make the sorts of improvements they would make if they owned the joint.

The entry experience at 5am on Sunday morning was unnecessarily rough. We weren't expecting an hour-long wait in the cold and hadn't dressed for it. Once we got inside, it was clear capacity wasn't the constraint, but instead some sort of operational bottleneck kept folks waiting outside longer than necessary. Some of this is the complexity that the door must face -- there are at least four levels in the entry pecking order: friends and family are let in first, followed by card-holding members, followed by patreon members, followed by the ticketed masses (we were in this group) followed by the unticketed and unwashed masses.

Bagels where? Though this is a very petty complaint, it must be noted that Nowadays would be more perfect if it brought back the crowd-pleasing "bagel hours" featuring bagels from bagel masters Utopia bagels. This perk, typically rolled out on Sunday morning of a Nonstop party, was ended when a food vendor started making breakfast. I think it was a miss that the vendor doesn't simply stock and sell Utopia bagels with enough chive cream cheese to drown the ravenous appetites of all-night dancers.

//|// Mister Sundays (3pm - 9pm) - dance away the Sunday scaries

Once dBridge had finished with us, we had three more hours to enjoy Nowadays before we made our dash to the airport. We needed a taste of the Mister Sundays party because this party is the one that Nowadays started with, and I thought would give me a deeper sense of Nowadays' identity and ideals.

Though some complain the Mister Sundays events are just an excuse to daydrink for most of the crowd, I found it to be a wonderful mix of ages and life stages. There was drinking, yes, but there was eating dancing, chatting, smiling, and an overall vibe of great party in someone's backyard.

The disco ball hung over the springy playground turf between the four perfectly tuned (if a bit quiet) outdoor stacks was tiny, chintzy, and spun too fast. I gave it a kiss anyway (kissed my fingers, planted the kiss on the ball), and danced for nearly three hours under shade canopy. The dancefloor started so empty that I was the only one dancing on it at first, but by the time we left at 6pm, it was nicely packed with folks sweating and bouncing to the excellent tunes of Misters Harkin and Carter. This is the first time I've ever danced on playground foam, and it was even better for my tired feet than a sprung wood floor, though it provided too much friction for foot-dragging moves.

This floor was far more omnidirectional than the indoor floor had been. Perhaps because the DJs aren't big name stars, perhaps because folks were in a chatty mood, but there was very little of that "face the DJ" disease that is so common on other dancefloors (even, it must be admitted, the dBridge dancefloor just an hour prior). Folks danced and smiled with and at their friends, and with and at total strangers. I caught a lot of stray smiles, and found the vibe to be absolute perfection, even down to the somewhat DIY nature of the canopy over the dancefloor.

//|// The DPARTII Scorecard - DBridge @ Nowadays

//|// The DPARTI Scorecard - Mister Sundays with Eamon Harkin & Justin Carter @ Nowadays

Highlights from the May 9 event include Moby performing his big hits with a roster of six other live musicians. Unfortunately, Moby's excellence could not overcome the broken execution that showed up in the form of terrible acoustics and amateurish, unsophisticated, and undercooked lighting and visual effects. Cercle as an organization have lost sight of the dance magic that propelled the Cercle brand to YouTube stardom.

WORD ON THE STREET POPS CERCLE'S BUBBLE

We attended Moby's performance for Cercle Odyssey in Los Angeles on Friday night, May 9th. The event was part of a new series marketed by Cercle, an event production company that rose to fame with gorgeously produced dance music streamed to YouTube during the global pandemic. The company marketed Cercle Odyssey as "the world’s first immersive 360° nomadic installation" featuring artists including Moby, Black Coffee, The Blaze, Whomadewho, Monolink, Mura Masa, Ben Bohmer, Bonobo, and Max Richter. One artist per evening performs for roughly two hours "in the round" -- in the center of a room surrounded by their audience.

Despite the talent roster, these events are, unfortunately, unsuccessful, and aftermarket ticket prices have crashed as disappointed attendees have shared their impressions in scathing online threads. After the Mexico City series of events, negative word of mouth soured appetites for future events, and at the time of this writing, of the remaining 19 events scheduled for Los Angeles and Paris, just two are "sold out." (Cercle deceivingly marks all past events as "sold out" on its website regardless of the fact tickets for the Los Angeles events were available for purchase all the way up to the event dates.)

What's going wrong for Cercle, an organization that prior to Odyssey had built a powerful brand that music lovers trusted by producing over 250 high-end music events, including its own festival? I went in to investigate the situation first-hand last night, and have some thoughts.

KOYAANISQATSI = LIFE OUT OF BALANCE

During the stage reset time between the laughably-short 30-minute DJ set by Eli & Fur, Cercle distracted our attention by playing a six-minute excerpt from the film Koyaanisqatsi, an 86-minute documentary without narration or dialog that features beautifully filmed montages accompanied by a minimal score by Philip Glass. Cercle explained they were showing us this excerpt because the film had been an inspiration for Odyssey.

The film's title, pronounced "koy · aa ·nuh · skaat · see" is a Hopi word for "life out of balance" (meaning, literally, "chaotic life") and the film shows, through its juxtapositions of natural and man-made settings, how the modern world's embrace of technology might be contributing to this life out of balance, this modern chaos.

Cercle states on the Odyssey website that they wanted each event to "unfold like a living painting with videos projected onto the walls and ceiling, all synchronized live with the music." They likely believed this would be a path to success because the heart of their brand was about putting music into beautiful settings such as the Eiffel Tower, hot air balloons over Cappadocia, the Giza Pyramids, and other gorgeous destinations around the world. They likely believe that the beauty of these settings was important to the success of their prior events (and it's hard to argue the hundreds of millions of views their YouTube videos of these events have accrued to date).

But needing a fancy location ultimately limited the growth of the firm. Beautiful settings are hard to book, and operate. I had fun imagining the board meeting in which Cercle's leadership team twisted their mustaches and proposed replacing natural beauty with the technology of projection:

Exec 1: We can’t just book the pyramids or the Eiffel Tower over and over, and most of the world can't get there. Shareholders demand growth!

Exec 2: Ok, so let's put the events in warehouses near major population centers and --

Exec 1: Sacre bleu! Warehouses? Hideous! Cercle is about beauty!

Exec 2: S’il vous plaît, let me finish. In zese warehouses, we shall project video of stunning places. Our target consumer lives in screens and will be watching on YouTube anyway — zey won’t know ze difference.

Exec 1: Genius!

Cercle Odyssey unintentionally demonstrated the truth of the film's core "life out of balance" message. Cercle's biggest mistake comes down to fundamental design decisions -- as a brand that rose to prominence through YouTube, it seems clear that the Odyssey event series was built for their primary audience of online YouTube users. Cercle tried to create a traveling Vegas-style "Sphere" on a modest budget, and their technology distracted the organization from executing properly on the in-person component of the event.

To be fair, I seriously doubt that the Cercle exec team are mustache-twisting villains, and yet it's hard to read positive intent into the decisions that led to the design of Odyssey. It failed on the most critical elements of a proper dance party.

THE CAMERA PROBLEM

One of the big selling points for me for the event, when I purchased tickets without knowing who the headliner would be, was the promise of a camera-free event. And on this promise, Cercle delivered.

Kind of.

At the event check-in, our phones were put into Yondr pouches so that our eyes would "be the sole witnesses to the experience ahead."

And yet, once we entered the space, we noticed cameras everywhere. Not snuck in by attendees, but wielded by many official event photographers and videographers. We had surrendered our phones at the door only to encounter an environment bristling with cameras on the inside. Photographers with heavy DSLRs rigs moved around the space catching crowd reactions to the music. Other photographers held cell phones aloft to capture vertical footage that could be used for marketing the events on social media. There were massive broadcast-style cameras mounted on podiums. There were cameras mounted over the entire floor -- a fact that we were reminded of when the event floor was shown from above on the large video screens.

Cameras everywhere serves the organization's YouTube goals. Cercle, on their website, require people going to their events to agree to the following:

"By going to this event, you irrevocably consent to being filmed and photographed, and allow Cercle to use your image and your voice in any media, for any purpose, anywhere in the world and in perpetuity without limitation and without financial compensation."

This wasn't a camera-free event. It wasn't even a phone-free event. I'm thankful for the fact that I wasn't surrounded by a group of phone zombies holding their phones aloft the entire time, but I didn't feel safe at all to dance as if nobody was watching, because I was perpetually under a lens. Just a couple days after publishing my article on how the panopticon fucks dancefloors, I had unwittingly stepped into a panopticon. Unnerving. Unsettling.

One redditor quipped, "I felt like they invited us just to fill out the crowd shot."

Cercle likely calculated that they would have an easier time getting punters to buy tickets if they promised a post-event recording, so the heavy use of cameras was necessary to deliver on that promise. But the cameras are also part of the Cercle standard operating plan for their events.

What happened to simply attending a party, without needing to photograph or take video of the entire thing?

TOO QUIET, MUDDY SOUND

Wearing my 17dB filters in my 1of1custom earplugs, I found the sound too quiet. Consulting my Apple Health data the morning after, I learned that the room's "exposure without sound reduction" measure averaged 93dB to 94dB, with a range of 75dB to 105dB.

The best-sounding rooms I've been in tend to measure about 103dB on this same measure of sustained exposure. The difference between 93dB and 103dB may not sound like much, but it's a massive gap -- a 103dB room sounds about twice as loud as the 93dB room, to human ears.

The sound pressure levels had likely been tamped down due to the acoustics of the space. The bass was muddy and boomy, with unintentional reverb in the cavernous Los Angeles Convention Center Space. I don't know if acoustically transparent projection screens were being used, but I thought I could also hear faint slapback from the high frequencies bouncing off of the vinyl sheets onto which all the visuals were being projected.

One Redditor wrote, "Music always comes first. The sound was horrible - muffled and low. It sounded like I was in a cafeteria. I could hear everyone speak."

Another agreed, "This person is not over-exaggerating when they say it was muffled garbage in a cafeteria. There was no clarity and delineation of the different musicians. You couldn't make out what the singers were saying. Moby was doing cool hybrid live dance tracks, and you couldn't hear his beat played by hand on the drums on top of the track. It was muddy one note bass with everything buried in the mix."

Cercle partnered with L-Acoustics for the sound, but there's a story here that we'll probably never know about why the sound was so problematic. It may have been venue-specific, or it may have to do with a deeper flaw with the sound design, as attendees in Mexico City were lodging similar complaints about the sound.

Ultimately, the Cercle Odyssey event is designed to deliver a standardized experience across locations. It's all done inside a box that's 50 meters long by 10 meters high. Perhaps the acoustical treatments (or lack thereof) around these boxes are insufficient, perhaps wrapping the whole room in giant plastic sheets to receive projected images muddies the sound.

Regardless of reason, not nailing the sound is a cardinal sin, especially for an event with such a sizable production budget and such expensive ticket prices.

VISUALS DETRACTED; SEVERELY UNDERCOOKED LIGHTING

Sound wasn't the only problem. The screens that surrounded us on all sides, and the screens overhead infused the space with ambient light that -- in combination with the omnipresent cameras -- made us feel like subjects lit up for the cameras. Some 16 or so 50,000-lumen 3DLP projectors from Panasonic provided crisp visual projections, but harshed the vibe with their high-lumen output. A good dance party is mostly dark. This one was too bright at all times.

Shorter folks -- like my girlfriend who's 5'4" -- could only see the top third of the screens anyway, so all the big projections did for her was provide a lot of unwelcome ambient light that made it hard for either of us to feel comfortable. At one point, she remarked, "I feel like I'm surrounded by Microsoft screen savers," but then later upgraded it to "Apple TV screensavers." There was a sort of soulless aestheticism to these videos that betrays a lack of creative vision. One video of space rocks floating through space looked like dated 2010 video game graphics -- the shading, textures, and animations were all sub-par and felt cheesy (I spent a couple decades working in the games industry -- I have a professional’s eye that doesn’t miss attempts to sneak in low-budget work).

Things get worse.

The lighting sequences were actively bad. The primary moving heads used were Claypaky Sharpys, a light that costs about $7,000 USD per fixture. There were at least 150 of these in use throughout the venue, with about ~110 of them in the room with us. I can tell when someone has lovingly programmed lighting sequences and have spent hundreds of hours obsessing over the brilliant effects that can be experienced in dancefloors such as Yuma, Despacio, Berghain, Wall of Sound, etc. These moving heads were hardly programmed to move, stuck to a few colors, and were minimally programmed. Big miss.

Moby played three or four of his more "ravey" records, and the lighting was positively embarrassing during these moments, with all the lights popping off here and there, chaotically, without much grace. The green lasers fired off near the end of the event felt really cheesy -- like a budget rave. These "rave" sequences were some normie lighting guy's idea of rave lighting; absolutely disgraceful. Whoever was on the lights needs to be given more time, and perhaps more education, so that they can do better work.

MOBY SAVES THE DAY

Luckily, Moby's an experienced performer and his performance, after the risibly short "DJ set" by Eli & Fur gave the event some redeeming value.

Here's some of what he played for us.

In the first half of the event, Moby's tracks were more artsy and epic -- like the soundtrack to a beautiful nature documentary. He played downtempo, trance, and house full of strings, melodic angel choruses, and uplifting vibes. Songs included:

• In This World

• Bed

• Dark Days (Tonic Water Remix) by Moby & Lady Blackbird

• Go (with live bongos by Moby)

• God Moving Over the Face of the Waters

• Porcelain

About halfway through, Moby took the mic to talk about his first-ever performance in Los Angeles in 1991. He and Jason Bentley helped build a DIY DJ stage out of plywood for the event, and Moby admitted to being a "little rave kid" at heart. He played several ravey tracks, starting with Bring Back My Happiness, then the following tracks (in rough order of appearance):

• Morningside

• Natural Blues

• The Broken Places

• Feeling So Real (Siona Remix) by Moby, Miss Monique

• Where Is Your Pride (Essel Remix) by Moby & Benjamin Zephaniah

• Honey

• We Are All Made of Stars

• [encore] Bodyrock

Moby and team did struggle a bit with the "in the round" nature of the stage. He tried to move around the stage and give equal time to people on all four sides of the stage, but his movements seemed a touch awkward as he navigated turns at the corners. Performing "in the round" takes some practice, and he noted that this was his first time ever doing so.

For the budget, Cercle probably could have put Moby and the other six artists on a rotating platform so that they could focus more on performing and less on not tripping while doing laps on a rectangular stage.

BUT DOES IT DANCE?

Cercle Odyssey's design undermines dancefloor vibrancy.

By putting the performer on a raised stage in the center of the room and lighting them like a monument, the choicest dancing real estate is given over to the performer. This design made it clear that everyone should face the center. What's more, the rectangular stage had four times the length of "rail" of a typical stage because there were four sides of railing (aka crowd barriers) for folks to attach to. Those who got to one of the coveted rail positions held on for dear life, as did most of the second and third rows behind them, just in case a spot opened up. As a result, about half the room was hard-locked into facing the stage at all times, and these folks generally danced a lot less because of the constraints of being in proximity to the railing and needing to guard their spots so that no intruders could slip in and grab onto the rail.

The event certainly wasn't oversold (it hadn't sold out) and there was plenty of room to dance. But the dominant presence of the stage combined with the overwhelmingly bright screens around the room meant that the performers and the visuals were commanding almost all of the crowd's attention. On healthy dancefloors, the action is on the dancefloor, not up on a stage or on screens around the room.

Folks were mostly polite to each other. Attending were Los Angelenos in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, with an average age of maybe 35; fairly typical of Moby's fandom. They didn't show a ton of entitled behavior, outside of a few very yappy finance bros and two obnoxiously drunk women who were so out of it they didn't even make it the full duration of Moby's set.

Unfortunately, Moby's set list also made it impossible to catch and hold onto a dance groove. The tempo of the music bounced around from slow ambient (where the entire room could be heard yapping over the music) to house to techno, and the pause and applause between songs stopped all dancing entirely. It was a concert, and concerts rarely host great dancefloors.

The VIP area's entrance and exit sent snooty VIPs (who danced even less) through the GA area, and they were often so insistent on their need to get to or from the VIP section that they barged through dancing groups mid song while angrily guarding their draft cocktails ($20) or champagne flutes ($24).

Four front-of-house staff sat on their laptops at the foot of one side of the rectangular stage, dampening dance energy with their stillness and their forest of technical gear.

The Yondr pouches our phones had been locked into were also awkward hindrances to dance. They slapped against bodies that dared to move, and the chintzy straps that held them dug into our skin uncomfortably once we worked up a sweat. Yondr isn't necessary; it's easy enough for phone lenses to receive little stickers over them and for folks who take these stickers off to be ejected from the event.

Even the merchandise experience wasn't designed for dancing. Those who purchased a tshirt, sweatshirt, or other merchandise had to carry their shopping bags into the event with them. The folks saddled with shopping bags gamely tried to dance, but it was obvious that the bags were interfering with their ability to express themselves through dance. They looked like shoppers shifting from foot to foot while waiting for a bathroom stall at the mall.

WHY EVEN BOTHER WITH CONCERTS?

It's become abundantly clear to me at this point in the Magical Dancefloors journey that concerts rarely (if ever) offer vibrant dancefloor experiences. Concerts are fine, concerts are fun, but concerts ain't the place to go if you want to really dance.

Cercle Odyssey made promises in the marketing of this event that suggested that they cared about creating and curating a great dance music experience. Perhaps I'm dumb to have fallen for the marketing and the hype, especially at the cost of $200 per ticket. That's on me. But I'm grateful for the experience because it's helped me draw a sharper line between magical and muggle dancefloors. I will continue to watch Cercle's excellently produced YouTube videos, but I will never again attend one of their events in person. Cercle simply do not seem to care about (or be capable of caring about) the “dance” part of dance music.

I do have one more concert experience to review before I swear off of them altogether for the purpose of Magical Dancefloors: I attended Phish at the Hollywood Bowl recently and am eager to share some thoughts from that experience. Stay tuned!

THE SCORECARD

The plague of social media and the mobile phones it rides in on, like Bubonic fleas, has deeply fucked modern dancefloors.

I know this to be true, and anybody that's spent time dancing and/or DJ'ing in a wide variety of clubs, festivals, pub backrooms, underground raves, and private parties knows it to be true.

Increasingly, the best parties are those where phones are absent.

The cameras 99% of adults carry in their pockets every day, and the powerful surveillance software those cameras connect to, make it easy for anyone to rip any moment -- even our most intimate, silly, goofy, terrible, embarrassing, or happy moments -- and put it online for all to see, stripped of its original context. (Why people rip and monetize private moments is complex -- but it generally boils down to the design of the many systems that reward people for turning their lives and others' lives into content, especially the cottage industry of so-called influencers who make a living by attending and filming real-world events.)

The problem with all of this is that ripping private moments and putting them online causes context collapse. Context collapse is dangerous because it takes something that happened with one group of people and puts it out there for a global audience who don't have the same context.

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman writes about the way we all segregate our audiences, saving one version of ourselves for one audience, and playing another version of ourselves for another audience. As an easy example we can all relate to, my kids should never know what I get up to in a bedroom. My bedroom performances are private, and leaked sex tapes are damaging to the people in those tapes (ahem: except when the tapes launch billion-dollar fortunes).

We're all familiar with the phenomenon of revenge porn — the nude that a malevolent boyfriend shares 'round the locker room and that escapes into the wild. We're familiar with the way people's wardrobe malfunctions, emotional breakdowns, trips and falls, and bad hair days get posted to and rack up millions of views on so-called social media.

The earliest victim of global, internet-enabled context collapse, Ghyslain Raza, became known as the Star Wars Kid when classmates discovered and leaked a private video he made of himself performing Star Wars-style lightsaber maneuvers. Raza became the first global video internet meme, racking up over a billion views before the first decade of the 2000s had come to a close.

The internet had its fun at Raza’s expense. Raza "had to endure ... harassment and derision from his high-school mates and the public at large" and required "psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time." His family ultimately sued the families of the bullies who distributed the clip, and a settlement was reached.

Star Wars Kid: The Rise of the Digital Shadows | “I decided to have a little fun” | (Clip)

You see where I'm going with this, right?

CONTEXT COLLAPSE MEETS THE PANOPTICON

So context collapse is a threat we all live under. We are all Ghislain Raza, doing things in one room that might embarrass us (or worse) if shown to the people we hang out with in other rooms. There's a reason bedrooms have doors that close, and a reason why great parties tend to have a simple privacy rule that's easy to summarize:

what happens at <party> stays at <party>

This privacy commandment even covers the best meetings where attendees want to have more meaningful discussions. The Chatham House Rule, for example, is used by meeting organizers to encourage open and frank discussion around sensitive topics by forbidding revealing identifying information of meeting participants.

Why does it matter for dancefloors?

It matters because dancefloors and dance spaces where phones are present are now spaces where any dance moment could be ripped from this space and put online for views and for money, yes, but also for ridicule, for embarrassment, for ostracization, even for punishment.

For example, a closeted gay man might freely express himself in a place like Berghain, but lose his job at his conservative firm if his colleagues and bosses knew how he spent his weekend. The brave citizens who stood up to bigoted American policing in the events known as the Stonewall Riots fought for gay safety on dancefloors, and the context collapse that phones bring threatens that safety in a broader world where bigots still hold positions of power. Some countries still impose capital punishment for homosexuality, and domestic terrorists shoot up gay nightclubs. Safety is a real concern in these spaces.

And it’s not just gay folx that need protecting. A normie parent in the middle of a messy custody battle might lose the right to see their child if that photo of their powdered nose at the party were to be entered into evidence in the court battle.

Part-time sex workers who have been connected to their OnlyFans accounts have been fired from their jobs by Puritanically panic-stricken administrators; and some dancefloors are easily as wild as OnlyFans. People shouldn’t be fired for having a good time on the weekends, assuming they aren’t having performance problems during the work week as a result of their weekend revelry.

In short, I believe we all need places to express and perform and playfully explore our identities without fear of context collapse. But the now-ubiquitous phone camera that sits in every pocket makes this nearly impossible.

Would you believe that professional dancers are getting messed up by mobile phone cameras?

In this excellent NYT piece [free gift article from me for you] about the impact of phones and social media on professional dancers, Stacey Tookey, a dance instructor, discusses the importance of dance studios needing to be a place where students feel safe to fail, "but she now sees young dancers who are afraid of vulnerability or imperfection, anxious that a classmate might catch an unflattering moment on video."

Tookey told the Times, “They end up more concerned with what the clip will look like on social media than actually being present in the room,” Tookey said. “They’re watching themselves from the outside, rather than what dancers should be doing, which is being themselves from the inside.”

This phenomenon of monitoring your performance from the outside -- from the perspective of the global online audience that your dance performance might be seen by -- kills the dancer's connection to their emotions and stifles their creativity. It's like dancing on a stage. Most of us would dance quite a bit differently (or not at all) if we were forced to be in front of an audience to do it.

This is why the policy of banning photography and filming from dancefloors is such a critical element of the Magical Dancefloors scorecard:

In online debates that I really shouldn't be getting into (oh, the hours lost!), young people who have never known a camera-free dancefloor defend the use of phone cameras, making one or more of these arguments:

• "I don't notice even notice the phone cameras, and neither should you"

• "People only film the DJ on the stage, so you don't need to worry about the use of phone cameras"

• "So what if someone's filming nearby, I ignore them and just dance"

• "There aren't that many phones being used in this way, so no big deal"

• "I only use my phone to grab a 30-second clip every song or so, and dance the rest of the time"

• "OK, boomer, just accept that phones are here to stay."

• "I hold my phone low so it doesn't block anyone's view, so it should be ok."

• "I paid for a ticket, so I can do what I want when I'm on the dancefloor."

It's beyond the scope of this post to tackle all of those arguments, so I'll focus on just the statements that suggest that we should be able to ignore the cameras and have fun, that someone else's use of a camera shouldn't affect how we feel or conduct ourselves.

The folks making this argument are unaware of the concept of panopticism. Michel Foucoult explained the idea in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison as a system of omnipresent surveillance that results in the inmates of prisons modifying their own behaviors to avoid punishment. Though it took a modern philosopher to lay it out so clearly, the system started in the late seventeenth century as a method for handling outbreaks of the Bubonic plague.

The anti-plague measures isolated people in their homes and used surveillance to ensure they stayed there: "Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment."

Honestly, that sounds like a lot of modern dancefloors where the plague of phones is present. To dance is to risk being ridiculed for being "cringe" or for caring. There’s a whole genre of Tiktok and YouTube videos where people who dare to dance expressively are ridiculed for doing so.

Foucault turns next to the discussion of the Bentham-style prison panopticon (pictured below) in which a central guard tower looks into prison cells, putting the fear of being observed (and punished for any infraction) into the heart of every prisoner, whether they're actually being watched or not.

Foucault's writing about the Bentham panopticon is fantastic and chilling in the way it predicts what has happened to modern dancefloors:

"The arrangement of [each prisoner's] room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities."

And, he might have gone on to write, if the inmates are people on a dancefloor, there's no danger of dance energy contagion. There's no copying of moves, no trading of smiles, no forming of groups, no interpersonal communication. Instead, everyone dutifully faces the DJ on a stage, and the crowd that had been collectively effervescing is turned into a collection of separate individuals, of content consumers facing and worshipping a stage.

Dancefloors had been places where it was OK to fly our freak flags, where dancing our hearts was the norm, where we didn't just communicate through the nonverbal language of dance, but also collaborated and built together something that rivaled whatever was going on in the DJ booth (the wellspring from which dancefloor energy emanated).

Any dancefloor that doesn't ban cameras is a dancefloor that puts dancers into a headlock that makes it uncomfortable to do anything other than obediently pogo-hop or side-sway while facing a stage. Power on these dancefloors is taken away from the dancers and given back to the organizers of the event and the owners of the brands on the stage. And the event itself, due to this policy, is no longer a dance party, but a "show" (to be watched). A mere concert.

The best of the many approaches to this problem is to simply sticker the cameras of phones and educate attendees on the importance of keeping the dancefloor safe from phones as is done at Berghain, Pikes Ibiza, SIX AM Los Angeles, and many other fine party establishments around the world.

Some establishments don't even need to sticker lenses because they're small enough to identify rule breakers and eject them. Stereo Montreal is my favorite example of such a space. And some of the underground events I've attended don't need to use stickers or sternly lecture partiers because their door policy is so careful about who gets in in the first place that the only folks who are allowed to enter are those that understand the importance of maintaining the sacred qualities of the dancefloor.

In this sixth installment of the "Love Letter to Berghain" series, I take a look at Berghain itself -- the institution, the building, and the way in which it all comes together to be greater than the sum of its parts. This one's a bit headier, and I've timed it to coincide with the birthday of Jane Jacobs (4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006), the influential thinker whose life work influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics.

The next installment in this series will be far more salacious and gritty -- consider this one a palate cleanser before the happy ending to the series. This writing comes from my belief that dancefloors are far deeper than we tend to give them credit for -- they're not only cultural institutions deserving of tax-advantaged status, but also essential spaces for making sense of life.

IīīīīI MEET ME AT THE EISBAR, EISBAR, EISBAR

A soundtrack for this section:

During Klubnacht, I made several visits to Berghain's famed Eisbar, the "shockingly good" ice cream parlor that sits in a room tucked above the main dancefloor. I had to visit this famed establishment because entire articles and appreciation threads have been penned in its honor.

My first attempt at entry happened during the Sound Metaphors party early Saturday morning. Eisbar was closed then, but a subsequent visit on Klubnacht, at about 3am Monday morning, met with success.

Eisbar sits above Berghain's flagship bar, off the main floor, up a narrow staircase. Upon entry, it felt immediately familiar, like a trendy coffee and ice cream shop one might encounter in a city center. Seductively lit with incandescent bulbs and accent candles that give the concrete and steel surfaces gorgeous texture, it feels like the sort of place you might take a date for an after-dinner affogato.

IīīīīI MAKKARONI SALAT

I peer into the ice cream case, but nothing there grabs me. Heresy, I know, but as a teen I worked in an American ice cream shop for six years, and have eaten my lifetime allotment of the stuff. I stroll over to the cold case at the far end of the small bar, past the barista pulling a double espresso shot for another patron. Earlier on Klubnacht, the case was stocked full of healthy delicacies such as chia pudding, bulgar wheat salad, and German-style potato salad. Now, at 4am Monday morning, all that remained was a few containers of "makkaroni salat" for about 7€.

I purchase one and sit with my back to the corner on one of the cosy black vinyl-clad couches, kick up my feet, and dig into the container with the flimsy eco-friendly bamboo fork. After seven hours of dancing and consuming nothing but secondhand smoke, my own sweat dripping through my mustache, a couple tabs of LSD, countless bottles of tap water, and electrolyte drops, the flavors of real human food overwhelm me.

That first bite of al-dente elbow macaroni swaddled in creamy mayonnaise cut with tart mustard makes my eyes roll back in my head. An involuntary moan escapes my lips. Too loud. I see movement out of the corner of my eye as the barman turns towards me with a look of concern. I give him the thumbs up and a stupid grin to show that I'm not having a seizure, I'm just loving what's in my mouth.

A feeling of ease and relaxation comes over me as I savor my macaroni salad while listening to the muffled beats Len Faki plays to the Berghain main floor. The food is almost too rich after so many hours without food, so I set it aside, and get to peeling the banana that I'd fetched out of my bag in the garderobe. This is a global banana and tastes exactly the same as the bananas back home. That's not a metaphor; sometimes a banana is just a banana, but to be honest, the white shaft of the peeled fruit does give me flashbacks to my darkroom visits.

I'm peeling an orange from my garderobe stash when a woman and her companion sit nearby. They've got ice cream, but I offer them half an orange to be friendly. They take it and the three of us sit there meditatively peeling orange segments and popping them into our mouths while their cups of ice cream sit melting. Nothing beats fresh fruit.

IīīīīI NATURE'S LIGHTSHOW

I get to talking with the woman, whom I'll call Noor here. She's from Jordan, now living in Berlin.

We get to talking about other dancefloors we've loved. She tells me about an event at the Sydney Opera house that impressed her with its magic, and I cry when describing the power of a full moon rising over a dancefloor of sand amongst the Joshua trees of a Southern California desert. She doesn't seem put off by my tears, so I just continue to talk right through them. I praise the way natural phenomena -- a full moon, a sunrise, a sunset -- seem to effortlessly open the emotional floodgates. These moments where our little spot on earth rotates into or out of the light of our life-giving star plucks the string of life that connects all of us to life, the universe, and everything.

This is why I believe the Panorama Bar shutters are Berghain's single biggest lighting achievement. When they're opened at just the right moment in the morning, after we've danced all night, the sun makes a mockery of all of the feeble, man-made lighting and shows us that the waxing and waning of sunlight that mark the passage of time is the bedrock experience of human existence.

IīīīīI JANE JACOBS ON BERGHAIN

In telling me about some of the dancefloors she's loved, Noor emphasizes that dancefloors have to be understood in their context -- be it desert or urban jungle. No discussion of urban context would be complete without Jane Jacobs, and we discover we're both huge fans of Jane Jacobs' work. We talk about the ways in which Jacobs' would have understood a place like Berghain.

Jacobs famously coined the concept of the "sidewalk ballet" in which the people of a city go about their lives in a way that at first seems chaotic, but that reveals an underlying, self-reinforcing structure. She wrote of the order of the city sidewalk, "composed of movement and change" that can be compared to dance.

She was careful to note that the dance of a vibrant sidewalk isn't like "a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse," but is instead like "an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole."

It’s hard not to see Berghain in that sentence. The bustle and flux of bodies through its sidewalks, the choreography of collision and consent... to use Berghain's sidewalks is to continue the dance. Two strangers might slip by each other, one to the stalls for another hit of coke, the other to the dark room for another orgasm, their minds intent on their goals, their dancefloor-educated bodies effortlessly negotiating the bottlenecked passageways with a politeness and friendliness that wouldn't be out of place in a supermarket aisle.

Jacobs outlined four key conditions for vibrant urban life. Berghain, perhaps unsurprisingly, checks every box:

Mixed uses: Jacobs championed city blocks with a mix of spaces to live, work, eat, gather, and play. Berghain is a mixed-use marvel. Beyond its dancefloors, it contains bars, dressing rooms, lounges, darkrooms, art galleries, and of course, the Eisbar. Legal and illicit economies intersect on its street corners and in its dark corners. People consume nourishment and each other, in acts both sacred and profane.

Small blocks: Jacobs advocated for smaller city blocks with frequent street intersections to support walkability, social exchange, and "natural surveillance" between pedestrians and other sidewalk inhabitants, from shop-keepers to children at play. Small blocks result in more interconnection, and ultimately, more trust: "The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.”

Berghain's rabbit warren of intersections, corners, cubbies, hallways, bathrooms, bars is designed to have few dead ends to keep traffic flowing and to make it easy for people to cruise each other. Criss-crossing Berghain's spaces over the course of my weekend, I ran into people I'd encountered hours earlier on a dancefloor or in a bathroom line, each reunion making me feel a touch safer and more at home. I could see how, over the course of several weekends in this place, I would feel at home here.

Density: Jacobs believed that just-right density leads to more vibrant on-street interactions, with a key benefit being the safety that comes from many eyes watching the street at all times. She wrote, "Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”

From a density perspective, Berghain's door team performs the essential role of zone enforcers and city planners by keeping density levels on its sidewalks just right by carefully filtering and dripping partiers in until the space is filled with lively interactions, but not so full that rooms feel cramped. They build density slowly, allowing it to peak then slowly dwindle through the weekend, cutting off re-entry when the final DJ begins their set to heighten the intimacy of the final eight-hour stretch -- this is when Berghain's energy is purest.

When densities are just right, Jacobs notes, "incidental play" emerges. People spend their time on sidewalks "loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and [engaging in] horseplay." I detail some examples of "incidental play" that happened on the Panorama Bar dancefloor in part 3 of the series, here.

Mix of economic activities: Jacobs believed that vibrant cities have strong local economies where goods are produced and consumed within close proximity. Though I never witnessed money changing hands, the signs of vibrant local commerce were evident in the dilated pupils all around me.

Noor and I didn't have a copy of Jacobs' book open in Eisbar. But as we talked, I found my understanding of Berghain expanding to include not just everything happening within its walls, but also the cultural context in which Berghain came to exist.

Noor and I didn’t lay this out so systematically. We didn’t have Jacobs' Death and Life open on the bar. But our chat helped me understand that this fortress of concrete might feel like chaotic hedonism, but was actually structurally rigorous, while being soft enough to allow for real life to blossom there, emergent and elastic. A micro-city. A dancefloor democracy.

IīīīīI THE DEATH AND LIFE OF A GREAT BERLIN DANCEFLOOR

To understand Berghain, one must understand what came before Berghain.

In 1988, Berlin's first permanent venue, UFO, opened in what used to be the potato cellar of an apartment building. A literal hole in the ground. It had no ventilation system and was lit by candles.

When the wall that divided Berlin fell a year later, in November 1989, and the East German administrative state fell apart, it happened to occur just after Europe's awakening to the power of raving via the "Second Summer of Love" (1988 - 1989). Additionally, the genre of techno, first developed in Detroit, had blossomed and had begun to take hold on dancefloors around the world.

Raving. Techno. Reunification. Unrelated, but simultaneous -- a perfect accident. The Wall fell in a socio-political rupture that both reunified and broke the city, and techno grew in the cracks like weeds in a city sidewalk. In Der Klang Der Familie: Berlin, Techno and the Fall of the Wall, Felix Denk and Sven Von Thülen describe the happy coincidence that birthed the Berlin techno scene that we still enjoy today:

"This new, raw, stark machine music appeared -- and then the Wall came down.... With no authorities involved, cells of ravers from across the city built a new scene together on the temporary dancefloors of forgotten banks, supermarkets and power stations -- the type of spaces that anarchist Hakim Bey described as 'temporary autonomous zones'.... Suddenly, there were all these spaces to discover: a panzer chamber ... a World War II bunker, a decommissioned soap factory... a transformer station .... and suddenly, people were dancing at all these sites rejected by recent history, to a music virtually reinvented from week to week."

Berlin's first club dedicated to techno, Tresor, opened March 1991 in the abandoned, subterranean vault of the former East Berlin department store Wertheim.

Before the 90s were out, many clubs had opened and closed, with Ostgut, Berghain's predecessor club, opening in 1998 to play techno for gay men. When Ostgut lost its lease in 2003 due to pressures of redevelopment, it was relocated to and reincarnated in the building it now inhabits, and given the name Berghain.

IīīīīI BERGHAIN'S SAVVY

This quick and shallow history lesson places Berghain in the context of global music (techno, raves), geopolitics, and gay culture, but it doesn't explain Berghain's ability to survive, thrive, and rise to the zenith of global club culture.

A lot of the club's success must be credited to the smart moves made by Berghain's leadership to position the club as a cultural institution (and not a mere entertainment venue) in a legal battle that began in 2008.

Freakonmics covered this battle, "Government tax agents walk into Berghain, presumably without needing permission from Sven. They’re there documenting everything they see. Asking a question: From a tax perspective: what is happening in these rooms?"

The officials were trying to reclassify Berghain as mere entertainment (e.g., casinos, porn theaters) so that its income could be taxed at 19 percent, rather than the 7% rate that "high culture" institutions such as opera houses and museums enjoy.

Berghain ultimately triumphed in court, arguing successfully that what happened in Berghain was high culture. A key argument supporting their legal case was the fact that attendees came to enjoy the work of specific artists (this is one reason why the security frequently ask those who would gain entry which acts they've come to see -- this question provides ongoing reinforcement of the "high culture" argument).

The tax break, and the smart purchase of the building in 2011 from the energy company they'd been paying rent to, gave Berghain the sort of financial security that would be essential to its ability to survive not only the 2020-2022 global pandemic, but also the clubsterben (English: "club death") malaise that had, by 2024, struck down many fine Berlin clubs.

But I'd argue that the majority of Berghain's success can be credited to the genius design of the entire experience -- the Jane Jacobs-like intentionality of architecture decisions that culminate in a vibrant cityscape of diverse needs, activities, and behaviors that take place at the intersections, on the sidewalks between its dancefloors, and in the cubbies and darkrooms through which 2,000 to 5,000 strangers flow every weekend.

Jane Jacobs described a vibrant city sidewalk as a place where "An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.” She could just as easily have been talking about the cubbies at the backside of the Panorama Bar space, the lounge above Pano's bathrooms, the tucked-away bars, and the Eisbar.

Vibrant cities contain enough flexibility for the real patterns of life to take place. Suburbs, in their attempt to clean up the disorder, trash, and ugliness of cities, regulate humanity to the sidelines. “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”

Making a space where the real order could be served is where Berghain's architects (not necessarily the firm that designed the space, studio karhard, but the team that directed the architects' work) showed restraint. Like enlightened city planners, they laid out the space, they set up a few key regulations, and then stepped aside to let the inmates run the asylum. Emergent behaviors and vibrant expression followed, messily and beautifully exploding all over everyone within the confines of this one city block of a building.

What exactly is the "real order" of Berghain? In part, it's a function of the people who show up every weekend. Not just the regulars, but the new blood who create essential frisson by introducing new ways of being, thinking, and behaving. As with most cities, Berghain has long struggled with the tension between residents and immigrants.

Tobias Rapp's description of the club beautifully captures this dynamic:

"On a dance floor full of hardened Berlin techno veterans, everyone knows what the score is, but sometimes they can lack the necessary enthusiasm when the DJ slams the bass back in after an eight-beat pause. It's just that they've heard this track a few times already. If you replaced this whole crowd with young, gay Italians who were at Berghain for the first time and really getting their rave on, it probably wouldn't matter what track was playing -- they'd go crazy every time. But the combination is wonderful. Nothing can beat a dancefloor which has been formed over the years, which knows what to expect from what DJ, and is nevertheless capable of breaking out of these patterns from time to time."

Agreeing with Rapp's analysis, Luis-Manuel Garcia, an ethnomusicologist who studies techno at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development compared clubs to island ecosystems: “For a scene to be lively and coherent, it requires turnover but also a certain amount of stability... If a scene becomes too insular, it tends to stagnate, but if it is suddenly overwhelmed by newcomers, the elements that created it begin to dissolve."

The door also controls the critical mix of new and old partiers, keeping the veterans invigorated and challenged with just enough -- but not too many -- newcomers while simultaneously keeping them in check with a foundation of mentors who know the rules.

This is a problem the city of Berlin struggles with overall. Tourist dollars contributed about €10B to Berlin's economy in 2019, but not without the side effect of driving the cost of living higher for Berliners, creating tensions that bubble up into protest, including the evocative graffiti pictured below, which can be translated to "fist tourists." Perhaps the graffiti artists know the locals do exactly this to tourists at Berghain's Lab.oratory, where Crisco is helpfully sold at the bar, perhaps not:

Berghain's door, once again, holds the key to managing this tension.

IīīīīI THE REAL ORDER

But that still doesn't answer the question posed above. What's this "real order" of Berghain? Why do we go? What are we getting out of it? What animates every human partying there or supporting the party? What is the "high culture" of Berghain?

My answer to the "real order" question is: art. People flock to dance music because it's an artform that requires bodily participation, and that embodiment helps us make sense of life and our place in it. To dance is to art.

Ernest Becker, cultural anthropologist, writing about our attempt to make meaning out of life, wrote about the "new [at the time] cult of sensuality that seems to be repeating the sexual naturalism of the ancient Roman world."

Becker says this cult is one that lives "for the day alone, with a defiance of tomorrow; an immersion in the body and its immediate experiences and sensations, in the intensity of touch, swelling flesh, taste and smell. Its aim is to deny one’s lack of control over events, his powerlessness, his vagueness as a person in a mechanical world spinning into decay and death."

So far, Becker seems to have our number as surely as if he'd been right there in Klubnacht with us. Lest we feel judged, however, he continues: "I am not saying that this is bad, this rediscovery and reassertion of one’s basic vitality as an animal. The modern world, after all, has wanted to deny the person even his own body, even his emanation from his animal center; it has wanted to make him completely a depersonalized abstraction. But man kept his apelike body and found he could use it as a base for fleshy and hairy self-assertion—and damn the bureaucrats."

Again, the door is the essential piece that makes Berghain's cult of sensuality possible: it creates safety for reassertion of our basic animal vitality not only through swelling flesh, tastes, and smells, but also through overwhelming auditory sensations that drive from our heads all of modernity's kruft. Berghain is where we both throw off the chains of our subservience to the bureaucratic horrors of capitalism and reacquaint ourselves with the truth of animal bodies that were meant to dance, sweat, and fuck, not fold into ergonomic chairs designed to lengthen the duration with which we can squint at rows in a spreadsheet.

IīīīīI JUST A STALE DISNEYLAND FOR ADULTS?

(of the Rave New World Substack) criticized the club after a "rather bleak time partying at Berghain." She faults Berghain for its "putrid, animal trough-like bathrooms" and "the fact that the club doesn’t even offer free water!!!" and, ultimately, for a pervasive "self-consciousness performativity" thanks to the "flattening weight of the internet."

I saw glimpses of people "performing Berghain" at Berghain, especially the newcomers who hadn't yet been through the cleansing crucible of an epic Klubnacht weekend. But by 6am on Monday morning, after Klubnacht had matured over the course of 30 hours into a full and sweet ripeness, after the door had been closed for six hours to re-entry, people were too exhausted to perform their identities with the same gusto, instead showing up with a raw vulnerability that both stank of birth and glistened like a wound.

I don't understand Lhooq's complaint about the lack of free water. I easily found a glass bottle, cleaned it off, and quickly filled it with ice cold potable water some 20 or more times over the course of my weekend there. I think people sometimes forget that tap water is potable. I found Berghain's infrastructure admirably up to the task of keeping thousands of people alive and healthy. Whereas Lhooq found Berghain a "soulless simulation of cool" and a "techno Disneyland,” I found it to be a place of relaxed lawlessness reincarnated from the ashes of a temporary autonomous zone (Ostgut) that was itself built on the ruins of a temporary autonomous zone (post-wall GDR).

Still, perhaps there's something to this Disneyland angle, so let's hear it in different words from another writer, this time (who writes the First Floor Substack), who essentially agrees with Lhooq when he wrote, in his book First Floor Volume 1, "People, fueled by the legend of places like Berghain, have clear expectations of what a night at the club is supposed to be like, and will eagerly dress up to play their part. (It’s not a coincidence that so many of today’s party people are still dressing up like characters from a fetish porn spoof of The Matrix."

Fashion photoshoots, such as this one from Paper Magazine, only perpetuate the superficial myths of what it means to look like you belong at Berghain:

As evidence of Berghain's staleness, Reynaldo cites the "clichéd images that DJs tend to post on social media," specifically "the obligatory post-gig photo in front of Berghain" in which the DJ who just played a set "posts up in front of the hulking former power plant and takes a photo, which is then usually shared with a gushing caption that may or may not resemble the quasi-motivational tone of a high school valedictorian's graduation speech."

Reynaldo continues: "In some ways, the sound of techno has become almost secondary. It’s the vibe and aesthetic most audiences are after, and while promises of unbridled hedonism and wild, round-the-clock partying do tend to have a wide-ranging, evergreen appeal—which has undoubtedly helped fuel the genre’s commercialization and the influx of “normies” into nightlife—it’s nonetheless telling that even as the music has changed, so many other aspects of the culture have not."

Again, I think the analysis relies too much on an outside-in analysis of Berghain that's not been tempered by a dive into Berghain's real and alive vibrancy. Perhaps Lhooq and Reynaldo made such dives, but there's no evidence that I can find in the writing they've published. It just doesn't feel fair to hate on a thing because it's been meme-ified. Memefication comes for everything that achieves a certain level of global awareness.

Patrick Hinton defended Berghain against meme-ification charges, writing, "Its meme status is of no detriment to its reputation, it just so happens that in 2016 cultural significance unfolds online in disposable-yet-celebratory internet humour." It's just the internet doing what the internet does.

That said, it's certainly a good deal less underground than it once was, which leads some cool hunters to look elsewhere. But I think Berghain's still rich with secrets and opportunities for discovery, even for jaded internet natives who think they know the place, having consumed memes about it for more than a decade.

In the end, the question we should be asking isn't whether Berghain still matters or has become Disneyfied. Rather, we should ask "why does Berghain continue to matter, when other cultural institutions have faded or succumbed to death?"

Because it was never just a club.

IīīīīI MEMORY PALIMPSEST

To praise Berghain's features in isolation (e.g., darkrooms, lounges, balconies, lighting fixtures, high ceilings, cold water taps) feels myopic. We can't just tally up all of the support spaces that make it easy for people who need a break from dancing to do drugs (or a break from drugs to do dancing). We also need to understand how the space supports people who need to fuck, to cuddle, to splash cold water on their faces, to get refreshments, to sit with their head down at the bar, swirling their drink while trying to read in the melting ice cubes an answer to what they're doing with their lives.

The thoughtful details reveal the soul of the place, and the soul of the place is imprinted on partiers through the layers of memory that's scratched into the wax of our brains as we bounce from room to room, absorbing memory and incorporating it through repetitive movement on and off Berghain's dancefloors.

I remember the ecclesiastical bloom of color in the smoke-hazed air as morning sun streamed through the east-facing stained glass between Panorama Bar's drug dens and the bar-adjacent smoking area. Mein gott, spicy sacrilege!

I remember a couple crouched in a cubby off the Panorama dancefloor, one head held in place by interlaced fingers in an act so tender and explicit it seemed beyond transgression. Nearby, separated only by a thin wall of plywood and no door, another pair lay tangled in each other, smoking post-coital cigarettes, their affections natural and unremarkable inside the umbrella of shared trust.

I remember the toilets. The Pano bathrooms felt like zoo stalls for human mammals in various states of undress, grooming, and veterinary supplementation. Elsewhere, floor-to-ceiling stalls offered true privacy. These spaces affirmed and supported our mundane and sacred, erotic and excretory ape rituals.

I remember the water taps: industrial, indestructible, and ice-cold. The kinds of taps found on the sides of houses, built to kick open when your hands are caked with gardening soil. In Ibiza, I’d paid €18 for .33L of plastic-tasting water. At Berghain, hydration was non-negotiable and infrastructural, not another opportunity to make people regret not buying into a VIP table.

I remember the club’s peculiar ability to both decay and renew itself. On Saturday morning, the sink basins were clogged with hair, cigarette butts, and half-dissolved beer bottle labels. By Saturday night, they gleamed again. This den of iniquity could be wiped clean and dressed for church by a cleaning crew who mucked out and hosed away the past in a matter of hours.

I remember the Asian boy who emerged from nowhere, interrupting my conversation with Noor. A 20-something twink: tiny, lithe, and unmistakably in his element. He climbed a couch, stepped onto a tiny lip of concrete, and reached up for his phone that had been stashed in a hidden charging nook ten feet off the ground. He grinned at our astonishment. “I know all the secret spots,” he said, beaming with the pride of a church mouse who steals Eucharist nibbles. "I basically live here," he said, then disappeared into the shadows.

I remember the dog tags at the coat check. Mildly militaristic metal-and-nylon necklaces built for rough play. I remember the taste of salt on the cord right after it had been handed to me, evidence that this place had existed before now, and wasn't just a dream, and a comforting breadcrumb trail back to civilization, should I find myself lost.

I remember watching people cache their drinks in improbable places: ledges 8 feet high, pockets behind columns, atop steel dividers. The tall had secret privileges. The clever, even more.

I remember the candle holders in the Eisbar, as big as volleyballs through years of accumulated ash, wax, and history. Silent witnesses to confessions, propositions, breakdowns, and bliss. Perhaps my macaroni salad moan had been recorded in wax. I wanted to ask the bartender when they’d last been cleaned. I suspected the answer was never.

I remember the absence of mirrors and how I enjoyed reading my face by looking at others. I attend my college and grad school reunions every five years because they're a powerful memento mori, showing me the passage of time, something that's hard to detect in the mirror every morning. When I see a face for the first time in five years, I see in their face proof of my own big leap towards death. Similarly, at Berghain, I didn't need to see my face reflected back at me, because I could observe my ferality on the faces of my peers. At some point, we all looked like grimy kids who had been playing tag until called in for dinner: faces flushed, hair sweatily pushed out of our eyes, collars stretched, buttons unbuttoned, zippers half closed. But what I saw more than anything else in their faces was joy: like children, we glowed.

I remember the sticker-covered stairwell connecting the FLINTA toilets to the ground-floor exit. I cooled off in this stairwell a few times and enjoyed browsing the layers of pornographic stickers and graffiti tags. I hadn’t brought stickers or a marker on my first night, a mistake I corrected by sneaking in a fat marker on my next visit. Encountering this stairwell felt profound because it sat outside the reset bubble. The graffiti and stickers were allowed to accumulate. We were allowed to leave behind some small part of ourselves, some proof that we had been here, that we had existed, and this felt anchoring.

Berghain isn't a list of parts, it's an intentionally designed experience that trusts its citizens to wander, discover, and play. Berghain doesn’t present itself all at once, it must be earned, layer by layer.

CBS News Los Angeles just featured Dance Music Initiative, the nonprofit that taught me to DJ. Here’s the video news report.

If you’re in the Los Angeles Metro area, I can’t recommend this team of teachers highly enough. They started me on vinyl mixing and beat-matching by ear, gave me hands-on lessons with a variety of newer and older DJ mixers, turntables, and CDJs (I learned on Allen & Heath and Pioneer DJ gear). The lessons are free, the teachers are all volunteers, and the guy in charge of it all runs an excellent operation.

The lessons allowed me to hear dance music more deeply when on dancefloors. Learning to DJ helped me learn the structure of music, from intro to outtro, including verse, chorus, bridges, breakdowns, and so on. Knowing this stuff allows me to identify when a new song is being brought in, and helps me unweave the tapestry that the DJ is weaving through their performance, which helps me understand when they’re performing a simple mix or performing with three or even four sliders up, as some of the masters often do.

I credit DJ lessons with helping me develop insight and clarity DVS1’s mixing style at his Wall of Sound event (which I wrote about here), producing what I think is the most accurate and in-depth write-ups of Wall of Sound ever published.

Why would I want to unmix the mix, or unweave the tapestry? It’s similar to what a food critic does when they identify specific flavors in a dish. Knowing what cumin tastes like, knowing when a Maillard reaction was in play after a sous vide, knowing that a sachet of herbs was involved in the making of a cassoulet, knowing the cooktime on diced vs. brunoise cut-vegetables … this all helps me understand the chef’s intent when they put together the mix of ingredients. It helps me understand where they’re adhering to formula vs. breaking from tradition. It helps me understand where they’re innovating and where they’re playing true to the classic flavor profiles. It’s about understanding the art, and understanding the art’s impact on me.

And there are so many layers to the understanding that’s available to us, if we’re willing to really dive into the richness and depth of how the music came together before it was played out on a dancefloor.

The DJ is at the end of a long chain of creatives: the artist who recorded the track, the recording engineer, the mastering engineer, the producer, the instrumentalists — all of these people touch a dish before a DJ plates it up for us. And in the effort of arranging a specific song for our consumption, they put their own spin on it. They’ll remove frequencies to make the flavors of the new dish meld more seamlessly into the prior course. Knowing what a high pass filter sounds like and how it’s used to heighten drama before a drop allows me, as a dancer, to wrap up one physical motion and prepare for another.

And of course dancing is about predicting — knowing that a given moment is going to last only 32 or 64 beats allows my brain to tell my body when to get into position for a completely different set of movements. Almost nothing matches the satisfaction I get from accurately predicting a phrase change and marrying to it a motion that complements the change-up — for example, moving into bigger hip and leg motions for a transition to a heavy beat, or moving from rhythm-centric dance into motion that’s tied to melody or to vocals.

DJ lessons deeply improved my ability to *hear* music, and when I hear music better, I dance to it better. Not just mechanically better, but in a more emotionally resonant way, in a more satisfying way, in a more connected and human way.

And when the DJ does a bad job, or the soundsystem has failed us (as with Quasar, recently) I understand why and how the dancefloor just broke.

In the earliest days of dance, we sat around a campfire and could observe Krrk’s hand claps and Grok’s stick hitting the hollow log. We had a direct connection to the artists and performers. As time unfolded our distance from the source of sound grew and this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Music became more sophisticated.

Layers of culture built up over the eons, and music co-evolved with human technologies, from architecture (reverb!) to money (the 78-RPM-length single for commercial radio!) and being able to unpack a song from many different lenses gives us a heart, body, and head high as we dance to it. We understand the references to the references, we build an intuitive understanding of the mood of a minor chord vs. a major chord, and we dance it out.

Anybody who’s been around long enough knows how music sounded when Moog Minimoogs and Linn drums and Roland 808s were the new sound. We remember the Roland TB-303 started squelching out the iconic sound of Acid House and understood in our heads that something new had begun, and translated that newness into different styles of movement on the dancefloor.

All of my (self taught) music education has made me a better dancer and a more perceptive observer of dancefloors. And learning to DJ is one of the four key pillars of my education, the other three being reading about music, writing about music and dance, and actually getting out there and dancing regularly — especially in the presence of great selectors playing on great soundsystems to great crowds. I’m now working on fifth and sixth pillars: playing music (as a DJ) and creating music (as a producer) to deepen my understanding of how dancefloor magic is built, note by note.

This article, like my Panorama Bar review, focuses entirely on one of Berghain's dancefloors, this time the main floor. Of the 30 hours I spent inside Berghain over the span of my one glorious weekend in mid-March, about a quarter to a third of my time was spent on this dancefloor -- the cavernous space pictured here:

I dipped into and out of this space frequently, experiencing at least part of the sets of Konduku, Vlada, 69db, DJ Stringray 313, Interstellar Funk, Francois X and Len Faki, but most of my dancing was done while Len Faki captained the decks.

IīīīīI WHY I'M DOING THIS

I'll be using my standard scorecard to rate the success of Berghain's main dancefloor. Here's the scale I use to structure my thinking:

By using a consistent rating scale, I hope to bring some rigor to the discussion of the parties that feature magical dancefloors at their center. It's common to hear folks rave about "the best night of my life" (and I don’t doubt them) but I find these hyperbolic party reviews lacking in specifics, so I'm using the scorecard approach to articulate concrete reasons why a given dance party might end up being the best night of your life.

To this end, I write about truly magical places like Berghain, Stereo Montreal, Pikes Ibiza, Despacio, and so on. My research will take me to NYC and Black Rock City later this year. To be fair in my coverage, I also feel an obligation to write about more mainstream, less magical experiences because this is where the majority of the world encounters dance music. These venues -- the major music festivals, the Ibiza superclubs, and the corner pub -- are important benchmarks for me to discuss because putting them on the same scale and discussing them in comparison to the truly magical places helps make the differences between magical dancefloors and muggle dancefloors more clear.

Why is it important to me to draw these distinctions? Ultimately, my mission with all of this is to steer the dancing public to spend their time and money on the places that most deserve support: to sweaty, fun, life changing, and transformative dancefloors. At the same time, I hope to provide a guide for the industry folks (the promoters, artists, sponsors, and venue managers) that will help them improve the quality of the dance parties they throw.

Dancefloor magic isn't the exclusive domain of institutions like Berghain. This isn't a zero-sum game, where one place gains magic only if another place loses magic. I believe that every dancefloor has the potential for magic, if we study the successes, think deeply about them, and build their lessons into the dancefloors closer to home.

IīīīīI THE BERGHAIN SOUNDSYSTEM

Let's start our examination of the Berghain floor with an evaluation of the soundsystem. I start here because it’s often one of the first things people praise when they talk about Berghain.

The system that I experienced was installed late summer 2022, with some updates to the configuration since that date. The components are:

• 16 count: Funktion-One Evo 6EL -- "Evo 6EL supplements Evo 6E cabinets to provide additional mid bass headroom – especially useful for flown Evo 6E installations."

• 10 count: Evo 6EH -- "Evo 6EH is the mid-high section of an Evo 6. Most frequently used as the high power mid-high section of a modular system."

• 6 count: Funktion-One F124: "F124 features two voice coils to control the 24-inch cone. The F124 delivers excellent transient response and extended depth to below 30Hz."

• 12 count: Funktion-One F218 MkII: "The F218 MkII is the latest iteration of Funktion-One’s long dual 18” bass enclosure. [Delivers] tight, punchy, well defined clean bass from a relatively small package."

All of these speakers are arranged as four stacks pointing to the center of the dancefloor, each of which consists of, from the floor up:

• 3x F218 (totalling six 18" subs)

• 2x Evo 6EL

• 2x Evo 6EH

• 2x Evo 6EL

Within each of the four stacks, the Evos are stacked on top of the subs in two mirror stacks that point slightly away from each other in a pigeon-toe configuration to increase sound coverage over the floor.

Then there are two DS210 + DS15 pairs, one hung near the front of the room, one hung near the back of the room. These are carryovers from a prior configuration of the system. When the lights hit them just right, they look like masked demon faces floating above the dancefloor.

According to a gentleman who runs the biggest Funktion-One rental business in one European country, the Berghain system would have cost approximately €152K in 2021, though there were likely discounts offered because Berghain’s fame would be beneficial for Funktion-One.

The big issue with systems that have speaker stacks all facing inwards (and this includes my favorite systems at Despacio and Stereo Montreal) is that sound waves overlap in ways that can cause dead spots and unpleasant audio artifacts.

Redditor willrjmarshall wrote a wonderful analysis of the Berghain system here. To support his analysis, he shared the diagram above. In his words, "To illustrate, here’s a picture of the level at 60hz (medium-low bass) of a 4-point system. You can see crazy variations, with a big ring in the middle where the bass volume is dramatically quieter. The pattern is different at every frequency, but always similarly crazy!"

The analysis rings true for my experience of the Berghain system. There's a lot of variation throughout the Berghain floor. Depending on where you stand, the music can sound quite different. I personally love a system with bass notes so loud and clear that it feels like a donkey kick to my guts. I want it to feel like there are a couple of angry squirrels fighting in there, kicking their hind legs to the beat while gnawing angrily on anything that gets in the way of sacral chakra flow. Berghain's bass felt, for the most part, somewhat underpowered compared to what I've experienced at Stereo Montreal and at Despacio. It just lacked low-end sound pressure, or oomph.

But what Berghain lacks in bass, it makes up for in clarity of mids and highs. The system doesn't cause fatigue. It's not hard on the body or head anywhere on the floor, and there were several moments where I removed my ear protection to listen to a song with my naked ears, but only for a minute or two because at these levels, only stupid people rawdog a soundsystem.

In short, Berghain's soundsystem sounds great, but doesn’t sound as excellent as the systems found at other clubs. To be fair, many clubs don't have to deal with the same quantity of hard concrete and glass surfaces. Berghain was built for power generation, not for dancefloor acoustics, so some compromise should be expected. It's said that how a room sounds is largely due to the architecture and materials used -- and the world is littered with clubs that have Funktion-One systems that just don't sound great because the rooms they're placed in will never sound good. That the main room at Berghain can be made to sound this good, even with all of the obstructions and reflective surfaces, testifies to the love and care the management team have invested into this room.

IīīīīI BERGHAIN’S LIGHTING

To be blunt, the Berghain main room lighting rig feels out of date. It's not that I'm looking for a festival-style show. I find lasers and video screens cheesy, and think they're part of what's wrong with modern dance music because they fascinate dancers, grabbing them by the chin and turning their faces all in the direction of a "show" on a stage. These light shows destroy dancefloor cohesion, atomizing communities into audiences of individuals who might as well be watching a movie screen, for all they interact with each other. I intensely dislike lighting that forces an entire dancefloor to face one direction, because, at that point, we’re in concert territory.

For this reason, I appreciate the minimalist nature of the Berghain lighting rig. Approximately 12 moving heads pierce the darkness in fairly typical patterns. Sometimes the lights sweep fast with mechanical precision that matches the beat, sometimes they sweep slow with an organic acceleration and deceleration that feels connected to the melodic elements. The lighting is vibey and well-matched to the music.

The lighting guy has his pre-built DMX sequences, and he brings them in on phrase and as he feels the music changing. He dances with lights and makes very few mistakes (a mistake being, for example, a change-up in the lighting mid-phrase or the wrong pattern for a given musical moment).

And yet the lighting frequently underwhelms. One of the clearest problems is the fact that the room simply can't be kept full of atmospheric fog. When the lighting guy hits a button and summons a wave of fog, it fills the room within 10 or 20 seconds, but the fog disperses as quickly as it arrives. The massive cubic volume of the space and a solid HVAC system make atmospheric effects hard to sustain. As a result, there's little sense of mystery. There were never moments where I felt as if I didn't have a clear view of everyone around me. And when I ascend the balcony above the floor, I'm frequently able to survey the whole floor -- there's a general lack of privacy on the dancefloor. It’s never blanketed with theatrical fog.

Without thick fog or total darkness, I never feel lost, disoriented, or turned around. I always know which way the room's true north lies, I never lose sight of the exits, and I never accidentally collide with people in the way that I might on a floor where the atmospherics are thicker, the darkness more complete, and the lights less gentle. You might think those are good things, but I want to feel lost, turned around, torn apart, and overwhelmed. I generally feel far more in control of myself and my surroundings on the Berghain floor than I felt on the Panorama floor, where anarchy and chaos seem more present.

The contrast to Freddy's room, at Pikes Ibiza, couldn't be more stark. At Freddy's, fog sticks around for minutes at a time and is so thick that people cope by sliding along the walls to make their way through the room. When the fog is thick, letting go of the wall results in getting completely lost. There's no anchor point, no north star, no tether to reality. Similarly, Despacio's darkness is so complete, and the DJ booth so hidden, that dancers quickly orient towards the darkly sparkling disco ball at the center of the room as their anchor, resulting in instant community as the room forgets trying to look at the DJ and coalesces into a circle-shaped community.

Berghain's lowest lighting never sinks low enough for long enough for anyone to lose sight of the room's north. The room never disappears, the landmarks remain visibile throughout the night. Dancers here face the DJ most of the time -- standing shoulder to shoulder while staring ahead at the back of the person in front of them and dancing alone, for the most part. It's not just the lights -- part of the reason for this orientation is that the techno music played here feels fundamentally more introverted than the house music played on the floor above. Techno's minor chords intensify a dark and somewhat dangerous vibe — think streets of London with Jack the Ripper on the prowl — whereas house music's major chords and more vocal-driven tracks tend to make inspire positive feelings about interacting with my fellow humans.

In short, the Berghain dancefloor is at its weakest in the area of theatricals. It's not terrible, but it's not in my personal top five dancefloors, from a lighting perspective. Thankfully the stunning backdrop of the architecture goes a long way towards filling the gap left by the lackluster lighting.

It's fine to understand the specs of a lighting system or soundsystem, but how does it make us feel when a specific DJ is sending their hand-selected tracks into the system for amplification and broadcast?

Now's the time for me to get out of my head and into my body. Here are some memories of my time on the Berghain floor.

IīīīīI ON THE FLOOR

I'm standing on the balcony above the main floor, dancing while looking out over the pulsing crowd. I lean over to the sound guy to try to strike up a conversation about the system. The language barrier makes it hard for us to understand each other, but when I ask him about whether he has to do anything to the soundsystem to tune it for each DJ, he simply says to me, "it's Len Faki." I think I understand his meaning: nothing needs to be touched, because Len Faki knows this room well, having played it more than 92 times to date.

Earlier on Klubnacht, I'm standing under the above-mentioned balcony, just outside the entrance to the darkroom area. I feel drawn to this area for some reason -- perhaps because it feels hidden and less beholden to the north-facing vibe in the rest of the room. While dancing here at the gateway to the darkroom, a couple of completely naked men move into my field of view. One grabs hold of the steel I-beam pillar that holds up the stairs to Panorama bar and sticks his ass out for the other to fuck. They're both beautiful men, fit, naked, and energetic, and their love making moves through the stages from fucking to ass-eating to blowjobs and finally to a full underarm tongue bath. I've never had anyone’s tongue bathe my armpits and feel a pang of envy. I add a new to-do item to my fantasy bucket list.

I'm not great at "reading" a scene like this, but it reminds me of the online exhortations of some Berghain veterans that men should be fucking out in the open at every opportunity to help take back the club from the creeping and corrosive heteronormativity that more lax door policies have enabled. These men want to be seen and have deliberately chosen this location in the open for their tryst instead of the dark room a few steps away.

Even if the men weren't politically asserting their rights to fuck in the open -- even if it were a case of the dark room being so full that the sex spilled out onto the dancefloor -- I love that Berghain is so sex positive that folks don't feel the need to wait for the fog to roll in or for the lights to go dim. Fucking is always an option.

At the peak of my LSD trip, I find myself craving a hug and simultaneously feeling grateful for my girlfriend, whose generous offer of childcare allows me to be present on this weekend. She’s given me the gift of Berghain, and I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. She's back in California, but I’m suddenly urgent with a need to thank her. So, aided by chemically-enhanced magical thinking, I open my third eye and search for a solution. Immediately, I identify a steel i-beam that had been in my field of vision for at least an hour.

I step up to the beam and rest my hand on it. This is the same beam that I saw one man brace himself against with both hands while bent at the waist for his lover's urgent ministrations. I allow myself to explore the subtle texture of rust lacquered over with sweat, grime, oil, and cigarette smoke. It's filthy, but it's an honest bit of functional architecture, warm and solid.

I feel the vibration of the music in this beam. I feel the vibration of people in the beam when the footstep energy of those headed to Panorama Bar flows through the metal balcony into the beam I’m holding. I feel the way the beam is anchored into the concrete at my feet, and I sense the dirt far below these layers of steel and concrete, earth from which I came and to which I’ll return.

I give the beam a shove. It doesn't move at all. I hammer on it with the bottom of my fist. It doesn't notice me. Sound and footsteps can vibrate it, but nothing I can do to it has any effect. Well, if it won’t yield to me, I can yield to it. I step up to it, my toes touching it at its base, and I give it a full body hug.

It should be noted here that I have hugged many, many trees. If you've never hugged a tree, please make it a point next time you’re outside to give it a go. There's something beautiful about hugging another living thing and feeling the life and truth of that thing -- the bark, the hardness, the subtle movement (if there's wind), the susurration of the leaves. I'm told I give good hugs, and am no stranger to hugging things that aren't typically meant to be hugged.

This is how I hug this pillar of Berghain: I wrap my arms around it, I think thoughts of gratitude to it for being here for me, for being strong, for being a surrogate for my girlfriend whom I can't hug at this moment. I press my lips to the pillar, then press my nose and forehead to the pillar. I hug it harder, wrapping my legs around it like a fireman descending a pole, like a lover saying goodbye at the airport, like a sea-sick passenger on a ship deck trying to stay upright. This beam is my strength, my support, my lover, my anchor, my calmness.

I stay locked to this pillar for I don't know how long. My hug loosens and turns into a dance. I'm an exotic dancer, grinding against the pillar. I push against it, thrust against it, hip check it, and bounce my body against it to the relentless beat, and I feel truly as if I'm dancing with my partner. I of course recognize that I'm on some good LSD, but this understanding doesn't diminish the joy that this metal proxy for my lover back home gives me.

(Later, in the elevator back at my hotel, after I inhaled with terrible manners three large plates of breakfast at the buffet line, I catch my first look of myself in a mirror since the day before. I'm confused for a minute to see a stain on my shirt, but then I remember the rusty pillar and the comfort it gave me.)

I'm still hugging and dancing with the pillar -- eyes closed, just pushing against the beam and enjoying hugging it, when someone's fingers -- all 10 of them -- suddenly tickle the nape of my neck. It's the sort of move you do when you're trying to scare a friend whom you've crept up on in the dark. I had been deep in reverie with the beam, floating in my own world, and someone had entered my dream through an interdimensional portal in order to snatch me back into the here and now.

I wheel around to find the culprit and see a Japanese woman wearing a neon tracksuit in parachute nylon. She's wearing a pixie cut and she's tiny, maybe 100 pounds, and bouncing with a b-boy lightness and swagger right behind me. She gives me a smile and bounces away, like a butterfly looking for another flower to alight on. My reverie breaks, and I'm back in the real world, or at least in the Berghain world.

I encounter this woman many hours later in Pano and make a point of thanking her for coming along when she did. "Thank you! You pulled me back into the real world," I say. Her face breaks into a big smile and she says, "you looked very happy." That's it. We dance for a while near each other, then drift apart. I marvel at how she's able to bounce without breaking a sweat at all.

Downstairs, I'm still dancing near the beam, shortly after the Japanese woman snatched me out of my dream, when I encounter a man I'll call "Jann" here. He's over seven feet tall and thin like a marathon runner. I'm overflowing with good feelings so I just say hi, and introduce him to my pillar. I explain that I've named the pillar after my girlfriend.

"And where is your girlfriend tonight?" Jann asks, a bit of sly grin adding punctuation to the question. He's flirting.

"Back in California, taking care of my children," I reply.

"And she trusts you alone here?" he asks, gesturing to the darkroom behind us.

"Yes... I promised her I'd behave."

"And have you behaved?" he asks.

"Yes, of course!"

"Good boyfriend," he says, patting me on the shoulder, somewhat patronisingly. I feel like I've failed some kind of test. Before we part ways, I test whether he remembers the name I've given the pillar, and he does. At least he’d been listening attentively.

Not long after the conversation with Jann, a beautiful third-gender person dancing nearby catches my attention. They're shirtless, with long, intricate braids of black-brown hair and dark skin. They could be Filipino or American Indian or Hawaiian with their hybrid looks. Their high cheekbones and grey-green eyes mesmerize me. I instantly feel that they might be the sort of person who is forever 30 -- one of Berghain's resident vampires, never aging, always appearing out of the clouds of fog at just the right moment to rescue or devour the lost.

I don't know how it happens, but one moment I'm dancing on my own, then I'm dancing with them, and then they're beckoning me to follow them into the middle of the Berghain dancefloor. I don't ask why, or where we're going. It feels natural to follow them, so I do. I take a last look at the beam and enter the center of the Berghain floor.

We chat a little while dancing to Len Faki and I learn their name is Zand (not their actual name, but I mishear their name and will keep the mistake here, for their privacy). They live in Berlin and attend Berghain regularly. They tell me I looked like I needed to be here, in this spot in the middle of the dancefloor.

I dance there for an hour, or two hours, or three. I don't know how long. I lose myself in the music and when I look up, Zand is gone. I never see them again. It doesn't matter -- the whole point of our meeting was to move me to the center of the room where I fall into synch with the people around me, dancing the way they dance -- a sort of Germanic techno swing that isn't my usual style, but that feels right for the tunes that Faki is playing. I copy their moves to see whether this style of dance feels right for the music. It does feel right: effortless but effusive, arms and legs and core all moving like a machine to the beat. I feel like I never want to move from this spot. I’m invincible.

Dancing here on the main floor, I feel less connected to everyone else than I felt on the Pano dancefloor. It might be that I haven't danced here long enough to put down roots and build a little community with my fan action, but I feel that it's also the strong orientation toward the DJ booth that almost everyone in the room obeys. There's an order or an orthodoxy at work. This feels like a more religious space in every sense of the word: the cathedral-height ceiling, the introspective demeanor of most folks here, the cool stillness of this dancefloor compared to the steamy chaos of the Pano dancefloor, the distance of the DJ in their pulpit, the walls between the dancefloor and the bars on either side of it. Berghain is yin to Pano's yang in many ways.

Later, I spend several hours dancing on a podium in the back of the room. The wooden boxes built from plywood flex under my feet and the give feels glorious after the experience of dancing on concrete. The podium boxes give me the freedom to flail my arms about in big movements and to use my fan as a flow toy. I'm up there for hours and enjoy the way the podium gives me my own space where I don't have to worry about whether I'm going to whack someone with my arms or my fan. It's the perfect little antisocial bubble to get lost in, sealed off from social interaction by simple elevation.

I see a red light moving through the crowd below. As the light gets nearer my podium, I make out a bald, shirtless Asian man wearing a head-mounted red flashlight. He darts about the floor picking up empty bottles and he’s working hard, his skin slick with sweat as he bends down over and over to snatch bottles from corners and ledges where they've been tucked away. He drops the bottles into a plastic crate, stacks the full crate on his hand-truck, and continues his search. I hope this man or one of his colleagues found the cash that fell out of my pocket on my first night here. He and his colleagues remind me of the mechanically-minded Morlocks of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine who scurry about to keep the machines running and demand in return only a small sacrifice of flesh now and then from the fatted calf Eloi.

On the Berghain main floor, I encounter far more latex-clad dancers. It's cooler here and folks are less likely to swing a lit cigarette into their expensive rubber wear. Perhaps they're avoiding the heat of the Panorama floor. These folks look like superheros in their tight, bright costumes, but they're some of the least expressive dancers. The latex does more of the self-expression work; the human inside seems to be just trying to stay cool enough not to drown in their own sweat.

IīīīīI A HORNY PARADOX

On almost every dancefloor on the planet, dancing together makes people hot for each other. Sometimes platonically, sometimes sexually. The egregious displays of health and vitality make it easy to imagine someone's stamina in other realms, the gyration of a dancer's hips to the rhythm communicate how well they might apply friction at the point where two bodies meet. Some moves (e.g., the twerk) involve a dancer making their ass clap in a way that visually recalls the ripple that flows when one body collides with another from behind. I could go on for pages about this, but we don't need pages, we just need George Bernard Shaw:

“Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”

Strange, therefore, that Berghain’s main floor paradoxically felt like one of the least horny dancefloors I've ever been on. How could a dancefloor that features so much nudity, so much fetish wear, so many faces flushed with the afterglow of recent orgasm, so much proximity to sex that -- if not for the ever-present cigarette smoke that masks Berghain's animal smells -- our nostrils would involuntarily flare with the aromas of sweat, musk, and cum?

I believe the answer is simple. If two (or three or more) people want to have sex with each other, there are rooms just a few steps off the dancefloor where they can consummate their desire. There's no need for an escalating flirtation of touches and surreptitious grinding on the dancefloor. Berghain’s dancers needn't wait for darkness before they slip their hands down someone else’s pants. All they need to do is tug a hand, or gesture with their head, and a few steps later the vertical dancers can translate their rhythmic movement to more horizontal planes.

As a result, people on the Berghain floor are often sexually spent. Tensions don't build over the course of a night before dancers can take each other home. Tensions instead build over the course of an hour. Or a song. The people here dance with post-nut clarity.

Due to this dynamic, Berghain's dancefloor feels more purely dedicated to dance than dancefloors that aren't attached to adult play spaces. On other dancefloors, people get handsy. At Berghain, people simply step off to get off quickly and anonymously in the darkroom. Of course the nearness of sex makes it one of the sexiest places on earth to dance, but once you're in the building, the delineation of space makes for greater clarity on the dancefloor. There’s a narrowing of purpose from the heterogeneity found on most dancefloors to the shared, single purpose of the Berghain floor. This homogeneity of purpose adds to the sacred feeling of the space.

IīīīīI SOME LEN FAKI IDS (IF SHAZAM IS TO BE BELIEVED)

• Black Circles by Mike Dearborn

• Playground by Game Boy

• Sanctuary by Dejure

• Pump Up Da Bass by Da Tekno Warriors

• Rock by Kari Shearman

• Cafe Del Mar (Three 'n One Remix) by Energy 52

• La Musika Tremanda (Yves Deruyter Remix) by Ramirez

• After Life (FSOE762) by Ehren Stowers

• Crazy Tech by Techint Electornico

• Crazy Summer by Tura

• Border Line by The Strings ITA

• Disonancia 2 by Berend Salverda

• On the Run by Gerd Elysis Raudenbusch

• Altitude Compensation by Aly & Fila

• Ph1 by Circulation

• Why (The Cloudy Day Remix) by Denis Sender

• Magic O by Terrace

• Eyes Behind the Door by Steve Murphy

• Serendipity (Max Mix) by Mario Piu

• Out of the Blue y System F

• Justice by Gareth Wynn

• Work that Body (Intrique Hardclub Mix) by Temper

• Walk with Me by DJ Eclipse

• Blue Coast (Red Eye Mix) by Several Spirits

• Constellation by Dok & Martin & Matteo Vitanza

• Giesl Ejector by Kozi Komatsu

• Magnitude by Johan Gielen

• Lo-Fi (Lo-Fi Original Mix) by Phunk Investigation

• Break Away by DVS1

• Adagio for Strings by Tiesto

• Tiempo (Mondragon Remix) by Lucius Young

• Traffic by Tiesto

• Rhythm 11 by Deadwalkman

• Life's Little Pleasures (Continual Trix Mix) by Trix

• Everything Is Energy by Metta & Glyde

• Dances on Wood by Thomas Schumacher

• I See Her Eyes (Rework 2018) by Aleksey Litunov

• Bla Bla Bla by Gigi D'Agostino

• Let the Beat Go On (Long) by Dr. Alban

• Goa Head by Carlim Sakoo

• Track 02 by Nortek

• Return of the Predecessor by Fractal Strangers

• Waterfall by Atlantic Ocean

• Blow up the Speakers (Vocal Radio Edit) by The M.O.O.N. & DJ Ghost

• Engage by Benfay

• Go Back by Albanez

• Operation Blade by Public Domain

• Ham (Hardspace Mix) by Aoki Takamasa

• The Man With the Red Face by Laurent Garnier

IīīīīI THE DPARTI SCORECARD - BERGHAIN MAIN FLOOR

In the end, I found myself preferring the pro-social chaos of Panorama Bar over the sacred religiosity of the Berghain floor, but Berghain's sound is clearly superior to Pano's sound, and the adjacent darkroom make this a dancefloor like no other on earth.

IīīīīI Click here for part 6.

SUMMARY

On Saturday, April 12, 2manydjs, Barry Can't Swim, and Salute performed a so-called "b2b2b" on Coachella's Quasar stage for three and a half hours. Though the dancefloor started full of people excited to be there, excellent work by all four DJs could not overcome Quasar's misconfigured soundsystem. The event wrapped anticlimactically, with perhaps 10% of peak attendees remaining until the bitter end. The Quasar venue, in its second year at Coachella, remains deeply flawed -- broken even.

In the DPARTI acrostic that I use to rate and review dancefloors, I list seven factors that need to work together to create a magical dancefloor. The factors:

(D) DJs & Artistry: A great dancefloor requires DJs with great taste who select well, mix skillfully, sequence a journey, and who work with dancers to build the floor.

(P) People: A diverse crowd who respect, love, and energize each other make a dancefloor feel good.

(A) Acoustics: We want body-shaking surround sound with clearly separated highs, mids, and lows and large zones where the system sounds great.

(R) Rules & Governance: We're looking for evidence that the party is sustainable and well run and that the people putting it on have their heads on straight.

(T) Theatricals: Lighting sequences and effects add drama and amplify emotion, but they can also demand too much attention, turning dancers into passive zombies who shuffle open-mouthed at "visuals."

(I) Intentionality & Infrastructure: Does the design ultimately support the dancefloor? How does it all come together?

The Quasar stage, in short, fails miserably at (A), (R), and (I). No matter how good the DJs (D) Goldenvoice books for this stage, no matter how wow the visuals (T), nothing will make up for an acoustical nightmare made worse by commercial overreach.

RUFUS DU SOL AT QUASAR 2024: ACOUSTICALLY SUS

I'll skip straight to the heart of the issue by discussing Quasar's number one problem: its soundsystem. Last year, I attended Quasar for four hours for the Rufus Du Sol extended set and within a few moments, found myself deeply disappointed with the soundsystem, which, during specific songs, exhibited immersion-breaking sound glitches.

This is best illustrated through example. Rufus Du Sol performed their breakout hit, Innerbloom:

At 1:03, the first high percussion notes show up — a “tock” sound like a drumstick hitting a wood block. At 1:19, the sound returns, now part of the underlying drum track, on the 2s and 4s of each bar. It’s a clear note, singular and clear, but on the Quasar soundsystem we heard two or three of these notes — each delayed by a fraction of a second — every time the beat fired, due to misaligned and/or misconfigured speaker arrays.

This made dancing to this song especially difficult, because the 2s and 4s are -- in dance music -- the backbeat where a dancer's body usually lands with emphasis, creating an upbeat sense of propulsion. Hit play on the track above, and if you’re an experienced dancer, your body naturally accents its movements on the 2s and 4s.

So when this important beat has an echo happening a fraction of a second after the initial beat fires, you feel this uncanny sense of dancing out of time. That was my experience — I felt sluggish and out of step with the music on a song that I’ve danced to many times before. The soundsystem had made a beautiful song ugly.

This effect was especially noticeable when the percussive tock happened during moments when the rest of the song was quiet. For example, in the break (2:37 to 3:40), the tock is the most prominent percussive note. Each of these percussives had an unwelcome shadow following it. It reminded me of standing 50 feet from a brick wall and clapping -- one can hear the sound of your clap as it leaves your hands and enters your ears, then you can hear the echo of your clap that has traveled from your hands to the wall and back to your ears.

The problem reached a climax at 7:21, when the tock picks up a cowbell companion, and the song enters a gallop for the third and final drop of the song. This climactic moment, which should’ve made us feel like we could dance all night, fell short. This specific moment sounded cacaphonous — like someone had dropped a dozen chopsticks on a kitchen floor.

I stubbornly stayed in Quasar for the entire four-hour Rufus set because I wanted to be able to understand what I was hearing at a visceral level. I moved around the dancefloor and found a few spots where the sound problem was tolerable enough to put it out of mind, but I resolved to visit again in 2025 to see if it had been fixed.

QUASAR'S SOUND -- RED BULLSHIT EDITION

Unfortunately, Quasar's sound system still exhibited the same problems last weekend. Rather than getting better, the problems had gotten worse, thanks in part to Coachella's construction of a mega-temple (pictured above) for one of its biggest corporate sponsors, Red Bull.

This 20,000-square foot, pyramid-shaped building was built to house celebrities and influencers and to serve Omakase meals ($375 per head, before tips) from a pop-up by high-end sushi restaurant Nobu. The multi-level building features a ground level for proletariat attendees, plus two VIP levels for artists, influencers, corporate sponsors, and industry insiders.

This temple to excess wouldn't have been a huge problem if it hadn’t been plopped down directly opposite the Quasar stage, where its expansive glass frontage not only served to swaddle celebrities in air conditioning (protecting them from wilting in the 100-degree temps), but also served as a reflective surface for sound from the Quasar stage to bounce off of before returning to attendees ears, with delay added.

IF COACHELLA ACTUALLY CARED ABOUT SOUND

Coachella's reputation as a great festival was built by booking great music talent year after year, and by paying close attention to the production quality of the stages where artists performed. This is an important point — Coachella was a groundbreaking festival that influenced global musical tastes and artist fortunes for more than two decades.

But Coachella seems to be losing its way. Quasar appears to be the first stage Goldenvoice has built for the express purpose of pleasing a corporate sponsor rather than the ears of attendees or the bodies of dancers.

Quasar is the first branded stage at Coachella. There are other brand activations on the fields — from the Heineken tent to the Travis Scott merchandise experience, but the Red Bull building that violently encroaches on the Quasar dancefloor feels egregious for a festival that had been careful, until now, not to do such things.

Specifically:

(1) The Red Bull logo's prominence -- both in terms of size and placement -- puts it closer than any other corporate logo to any other Coachella stage. I'm reminded of the Bottlerock festival, which has just skipped any pretense whatsoever and labeled its stages after its corporate sponsors: Verizon, Prudential, etc.

(2) The building's impact on the quality of the sound makes its presence impossible to ignore. Few spots on the beautiful, grassy lawn between the Quasar stage and the Red Bull building are free from echo as the sound bounces back and forth between the two buildings. I'm stunned that Goldenvoice would think it acceptable to foist upon attendees such a deeply flawed sound experience. The folks who used to run Coachella would never.

(3) The physical footprint of the massive Red Bull building causes a chokepoint between the Quasar stage and the Red Bull building, making for an unpleasant and potentially even unsafe attendee experience. Squeezing through this bottleneck with thousands of other attendees made us feel like cattle, and sent us the unfortunate message that Goldenvoice had prioritized maximizing the footprint of the Red Bull McMansion over attendee safety.

(4) Due to the bottleneck, mobility-impaired folks who needed the ADA viewing area on the other side of the bottleneck were unable to reach it. The chokepoint caused by the Red Bull building caused these attendees to have to skip the entire stage. Wrote one Redditor, “[Quasar] was a horrible situation if you needed the ADA platforms anytime it was at its peak.”

HOW QUASAR'S SOUND SCREWED 2MANYDJS, BARRY CAN'T SWIM, & SALUTE

Time to put your ears to the test.

In the following embedded file, you can hear 30 seconds of the set, as broadcast on the official Coachella livestream:

And here's audio I captured with my phone, of the same exact moment, while standing on the grass in front of the Quasar stage:

Obviously, an iPhone isn't a great capture device, but the audio only needs to be clear enough to pick up on the problems at Quasar, which are fairly obvious to the naked ear. The extra beat echos can be heard most clearly in the first 15 seconds of the above clip, where afterimages of the staccato percussives can be heard ricocheting, undermining the drama of the pre-drop buildup, stealing energy from the dancefloor.

This isn't how the track sounds in the livestream nor is it what the DJs intended it to sound like. It's just sound splashing around, and it's typical of poorly designed systems. It's not a reverb -- which can make cavernous spaces sound cool. It's just a sloppy spillover; a drunk sloshing their drink on the dancefloor.

I'm not an audio engineer or some kind of golden-eared hi-fi geek. I've got normal ears, and my normal ears could hear these flaws clearly. Over the span of this 3.5-hour set, and for another hour during Tiesto's set the next day, I moved around the floor of Quasar looking for locations where the sound issue didn't happen, and I found very few "sweet spots” where the issue wasn’t immersion-breaking.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

If everyone on the floor is hearing a different track thanks to sound splash, echo, and other unwanted artifacts, we're no longer a connected dancefloor moving our bodies together on the same beat. Even people just 10 or 20 feet apart might hear a very different sound, and might step to very different rhythms.

What's more, in some parts of the Quasar field, the sound situation chases people away. These rotten zones caused people who wanted to dance to lose their groove and feel less energized by the music. Oftentimes, folks would just move out of these zones into another zone, but more often than not, the new zone would be just as rotten. After a few tries to find the groove, folks would leave the set entirely. By the end of the night, 90% of dancers had left this stage.

I've danced to 2manydjs in Miami (at Sound Nightclub), in Ibiza (at Pacha), in San Francisco (at Audio SF), in Los Angeles (at Los Lobos), and at various Despacio pop-ups. I've never heard them play in such a bad soundsystem. The Dewaele brothers’ magic can only do so much to hold a floor together. I imagine that the experience for them must have been frustrating -- they were selecting the tunes and mixing them together like they always do, and normally this would have been enough to hold a room of dancers in rapt, locked-in attention. But at Quasar, the room emptied out and I don't think the DJs really had a good feel for why that was happening.

NOT JUST THE AUDIO -- TOO MANY DJS

To be fair, it wasn't just the audio that was a problem. Having four DJs share the decks for a 3.5-hour set is just too many DJs for a cohesive story to be told through selection and mixing. Brothers Dave and Steph have worked together for some 30+ years and they blend their tracks together like chocolate and peanut butter, espresso and ice cream, twigs and berries. They’re a unit and they're always making choices that work and complement each other, whereas Barry Can't Swim and Salute were switching up the vibe somewhat haphazardly — needing to play the hits that their crowds had come to the show for. It felt like the Belgian national football (soccer) team playing against a couple of blokes recruited from regional English clubs to play together for the first time. The Belgian team ran circles around the team from England.

At times, it felt like the only thing holding the set together was 2manydjs. They were the adults in the room, or, to use a more Coachella analogy, they played the role of Four Tet to Fred Again and Skrillex. They didn't have to go in and correct the mix, per se, but their choices and mixing did help the set cohere.

SONG IDS (PARTIAL LIST)

• Backlash by Wehbba

• Mouth to Mouth (Boys Noize Remix) by Audion

• Raindrops (Two Face Cervantes Remix) by Berval

• Hyperconscious by Not a Scientist

• Diligent by VAEN

• Walk With Me by DJ Eclipse

• Second Story by Mark Knight

• No Mercy by Mark Boson

• It Doesn't Matter by Gary Burrows

• Breadholes (Stefano Kosa Remix) by Angel Stoxx

• Got the Funk by Low Steppa & Capri

• For a Feeling (feat. RHODES) [Layton Giordani Remix] by CamelPhat & ARTBAT

• Needin U (feat. The Face) [Radio Edit] by David Morales

• Raw (Tony Romera Remix) by Julio Navas, Gustavo Bravetti & David Amo

• Throw (Slam's RTM Remix) by Paperclip People

• Replay Silence by Elektrostyle

• Anonymous by Redlight

• Far l'amore by Bob Sinclar & Raffaella Carrà

• A Madame Cottin by Volière

• Saxobeat by Wanderson XVR

• Dub City by Andrea Frisina & Irregular Synth

• Believe (feat. Jocelyn Brown) [Mark Knight Remix] by Ministers De La Funk

• Only Solution by Landmark

• The DBG (Mark Broom Remix) by Shadow Child

• Don't Start Now (Dom Dolla Remix) by Dua Lipa

• Reach Me by Luca De-Santo

• Odity (Enjoy Mix) by The Houzelab

• Retro on the Street (Bonus Song) by DJ Electrix G

• Despechá - Tech House by Gabi Mujica

• Freshen Up by AVISION

• Dusty Palace by Allen (Italy) & Filix

• Materie Prima (Nanel002) by Unknown Artist ‎

• Motocross Madness by Soul Grabber & Paul Jacobs

• House of God by DHS

• Easy by Tiga

• Machine lernt by Distant Sun

• Listen by Max Chapman & Georgie Marshall

• Born Free by Joe Mesmar

• When I Push (Edit) by Eli Brown, Layton Giordani & OFFAIAH

• Sunsleeper by Barry Can't Swim

• Wolf by Juan Bernardo ruvalcaba torres

• Dark Forces by Robert Babicz

• It's a Fine Day (ATB Club Remix) by Miss Jane

• Big Shot (Paco Osuna Remix) by AVISION

• Woman by Kimani Wilson

• Orange Juice (Extended Mix) by Danny Parton

• Sugarphoria (Extended Mix) by Richard Durand

• Electric Dreams by Joe Montana

• Capricorn (Skream Remix) by Elderbrook

• Oh Le Oh Le by Azzurri Balo Beat

• Airwave (Radio Vocal Edit) by Rank 1

• Alla Consolle (Mucha Cossa feat. La Madama Radio) by Mimmo Amerelli

• Peach by salute & Sammy Virji

• Underground by JMAC (AU)

EXTENDED SET FOR AN ADHD GENERATION

Quasar was designed to be a place where so-called “extended” sets could be played (vs. typical festival fare), but here, four DJs shared 206 minutes between them, averaging to less than an hour per DJ. That’s less playtime than each would have received had they been booked solo. When 2manydjs and James Murphy get together for Despacio, the three DJs play for six hours per day, three days in a row. Other DJs play extended sets of 6, 8, 10, or even 24 at other venues around the world. Quasar's "extended" sets feel lightweight and inconsequential in comparison to true extended sets. Perhaps these psuedo extended sets are a sop to Coachella's FOMO-afflicted attendees. This booking feels like the programming team arranged everyone’s favorite snacks on a wooden plate and called it charcuterie.

COACHELLA'S "SOUL FEELS INCREASINGLY ABSENT"

Reggie Watts weighed in on Coachella with a blistering rant. He wrote, "while the scale is impressive, the soul feels increasingly absent." Most people, he said, "move like walking credit cards, pinging from one branded experience to the next." The real moments of connection between people and music are "buried beneath the logistics, the brand activations, the overpriced everything."

I’d never felt this way until experiencing the shitty sound at Quasar for a second year in a row. As I stood on the Quasar lawn, dismayed to watch it empty out, I turned in circles, looking for the placement of speaker stacks, of reflective surfaces, and for anything that would offer any clue. My eyes lit on the Red Bull branding, prominently displayed.

Back in my tent later that night and early the next morning, I caught up on my messages from friends who had watched the Quasar stream the night before. One friend, watching the official live stream, wrote, "We are LOVING this Quasar set. Serious FOMO."

Suddenly, it made more sense. Coachella's livestreams are an important tool for Goldenvoice to increase the brand equity of the Coachella brand. Coachella is now an international destination, and how something looks on a livestream is perhaps more important than how it feels to those of us on the ground. The Quasar stage, with its beautiful set design and prominent sponsor branding carefully placed in the line of sight of cameras, was built for the streaming era. It’s a stage made for virtual consumption and for building the Coachella brand online.

Coachella seems to have made some effort to be subtle with the brand sponsorship, but the Red Bull marketing team know what they're doing.

Because I like to count, I re-watched the entire 206-minute set, and counted approximately 45 inclusions of the Red Bull logo in the video stream. That averages out to one brand placement every 4.6 minutes. Having worked on brand contracts for video streams, I'm willing to bet that these placements were part of the contractual obligation between Coachella and Red Bull.

What’s more, I’m willing to bet that the Red Bull logo was placed strategically so that camera shots of the talent could simultaneously include the logo, an implied endorsement of Red Bull by the DJs on the stage. (Note to DJs and the business people who represent them: I hope you're getting paid for that implied endorsement -- there should be extra compensation that comes with playing the Quasar stage, as the DJ's image is being mixed together with the Red Bull branding.)

THE SCORECARD

This is the lowest score I've ever given a dancefloor. I absolutely love 2manydjs, and Barry Can't Swim delivered perhaps my favorite set of Coachella '24, and I have no complaints about Salute's selections or mixing, but this stage's soundsystem and questionable design choices sunk the whole performance. Maybe Goldenvoice will get it right next year.

"Man is reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of his world, the real dangers of it; he shrinks back from losing himself in the all-consuming appetites of others, from spinning out of control in the clutchings and clawings of men, beasts and machines. As an animal organism man senses the kind of planet he has been put down on, the nightmarish, demonic frenzy in which nature has unleashed billions of individual organismic appetites of all kinds..." -- Ernest Becker (in The Denial of Death)

This post is paid because I share things about myself I've never shared with anyone else ever and that's a bit scary. I don't really want this freely available without some sort of door between the public internet and the private place where I spill myself out on the page writing about what I did on my first visit to Berghain's famed darkroom.

I'm not putting the paywall here for money, I'm putting it here for safety and discretion. My darkroom visit was pretty tame compared to what normally transpires there, so please don’t see this as an Only Fans-style invitation to locate the tissue box and unbuckle your pants. There will be some explicit bits, but they’re not the main point of this article.

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DPARTI Scorecard --

• (D) DJ -- 8/10: Lake's massive, bassy drops undergird artful pop remixes for a hardcore dance party. Want some bass with that singalong energy? How about a juicy side of Sammy Virji (who surprise guested)? Lake mixes quickly -- not a lot of layering; he makes his magic in the studio where he produces tracks for dream rooms like this one.

• (P) People -- 7/10: The social media industrial complex has deeply infested Coachella: too many kids performing "I'm at Coachella" for their Insta-friends, coupled with Lake's drop-heavy style results in some 20% - 60% standing still with phones aloft, four or five times per hour. The crowd does stow their phones to dance once tracks get rolling, and some of these beautiful people bring amazing dancefloor energy.

• (A) Acoustics -- 9/10: Ace sound production that has us inserting ear protection 100 yards from center thanks to field repeaters. Sounded amazing in the center of the tent, where the system aced the "hand on heart" test (bass reverb in my chest vibrated my fingertips and palms). Major win. No notes.

• (R) Rules/Governance -- 7/10: The camp entry fiasco (some people took 10+ hours to get in on Thursday) suggests Goldenvoice's ambitions exceeded operations capabilities. But once the party was rolling, all was forgiven because the event itself (never mind getting to it) couldn't have been better produced. If they hammer out the kinks by weekend 2, this component could be a 9.

• (T) THEATRICALS -- 6.5/10: Undercooked. Lighting underwhelmed due to spillover light from nearby food vendors. 100+ moving heads (Robe MegaPointes?) should've produced wow, but their beams were washed out by ambient light, and amatuerish, repeat patterns. Strobe and laser afterimages faded more quickly than they would have done in a properly dark tent. On this windless night, a near total absence of dust was no help either. Laser patterns on the round ceiling have potential for truly trippy effects. With some upgrades and fixes, this could be a 9.

• (I) Intentionality & Infrastructure -- 8.5/10: Goldenvoice's focus on innovation (last year Quasar, this year Desert Sky) show why Coachella continues to sell a few hundred thousand expensive wristbands every year. It's one of the best festival-style dance parties on Earth. Comfortable facilities, professional, ample health and safety support, and thoughtful design touches abound. Con: the stage-centric design of Desert Sky pushes this particular experience into concert in the concert vs. dancefloor continuum. Deemphasize the DJ and zhuzh the lighting to pick up a point.

A WHIRLWIND TOUR

As I take you deeper into the nine circles of Berghain, a short geography lesson will orient readers who are new to this journey.

After the queue, the snake, and the decision (described in prior entries), you enter Berghain's security and ticket room. Your bags and belongings are inspected for contraband, and you're given a casual pat down.

Quick aside regarding Berghain's commercial model: twice, at the security room stage, I had snacks confiscated. Sealed packages of beef jerky and dried mango were removed from my possession. Best I can put together, Berghain's policy is to confiscate anything too substantive as it competes with Eisbar (the in-club snack bar) for revenues, but smaller, less substantive snacks (e.g., cheese sticks, small packets of nuts, bananas, oranges) are allowed in. This is the only time I felt nickel-and-dimed at Berghain, though the 2019 implementation of the €5 fee for re-entry did meet some criticism and even an organized boycott.

In the security room where the "no photos" sign warns entrants not to use their phone cameras, your phone's front and rear cameras receive simple, round stickers.

You then proceed to the ticket counter and pay an entry fee of €25 to €30. The ticket seller places a plastic bracelet tightly around your wrist (one of several measures employed to foil bracelet cheating).

You exit the security room through a hanging plastic curtain of the sort found in walk-in freezers and enter the garderobe (cloak room) area, where couches along a wall allow you to sit while putting on your party gear. Most folks shed clothing, but some are strapping things on. It feels like an all-gender locker room where street costumes are sloughed off like snake skins to reveal shiny party skin underneath.

The garderobe runs with German efficiency. Hand over your items (€2.50 each, cash only) and receive a uniquely numbered metal dog tag on a durable nylon lanyard for each item. If you're unfashionable like me, you put the lanyards around your neck. The garderobe also sells small conveniences such as mints and gum. They even sell commemorative books now and then.

Outfit sorted, bags checked, you next enter a lobby connected to a bar and hangout area known as Saule (with a sometimes-open connection to Berghain's male-only Lab.oratory sex party space). If you're not lingering in Saule, you head up a double-wide metal staircase to the main floor. On the main floor, behind a beautiful glass curtain wall to the right, lies a bar. On the floor above this bar is the famous Eisbar that serves gelato, prepared foods, smoothies, and the like. You get there by walking around a platform suspended on chains (that’s sometimes swinging with the motion of folks having sex on it) and climbing a narrow, twisting staircase.

We’ll return to Eisbar later, when we’re in need of refreshment. Back down to the main floor. The soaring sixty-foot ceilings and the walls made of glass, concrete, and steel give this room a feeling of substantiality and seriousness -- looking at the photo below makes me emotional all over again, so good was the time I had there. This beautiful, serious room hosts some of the best techno DJs in the world for the best dance parties in the world — and somehow they do it every weekend.

The stairs on the left-hand side of this room lead up to a balcony where I spent at least an hour enthralled by the pulsing throng below. The lighting and sound guys inhabit half the balcony. There's another bar and restroom at the bottom of these stairs, and underneath the balcony, to the left of the main floor, are the darkrooms purpose-built to help men easily find other men for casual, anonymous sex. Some hetero couples also use the dark rooms, though they're in the minority and a lively debate rages on amongst regulars about whether they're welcome there at all.

Follow the passageway up the stairs and to the left of the main floor's balcony to enter the space belonging to Panorama Bar, Berghain's dancefloor dedicated to happier, housier vibes. The Panorama Bar’s main room contains the eponymous bar and, more importantly, a magical dancefloor. There are some cubbies big enough for two to four people around back of the dancefloor and bar -- this is where friends sit and cuddle, nap, fuck, or just get into deep conversations.

North of the Panorama Bar floor, a large hallway opens and branches out. The leftmost branch leads to another bar, beyond which lies a smoking area (go here for the cleanest air in Berghain, because during my three visits to this room I never encountered a smoker in it). Take a hard right to ascend stairs up to the FLINTA toilets (for Females, Lesbians, Inter*, Non-binary, Trans* & Agender people). Just beyond lie the famed Panorama Bar bathrooms. Above the Panorama Bar bathrooms lies an upper level where tired dancers lounge, smoke, chat, and recuperate on a sprawling jungle-gym of couches. South of the lounge area, down a hallway, lies another darkroom of sorts, opening out onto a balcony that overlooks the Panorama dancefloor. There’s a sturdy railing here for you to hold onto while you watch the dancers below.

(Aside: I’m still stunned that people are trusted not to toss their empties off this balcony onto the dancers below. German clubs are just built different.)

Now you've been oriented to the main spaces that were open on the nights I attended Berghain. I'll focus the rest of this post on my time in Panorama Bar (which I'll abbreviate in subsequent mentions to Pano, just for economy). Here's what Pano looks like shortly after its architects finished the space. Most importantly, in this image you can see the large, south-southwest-facing windows that look out on Berlin. Take note of these glorious windows, they'll make a dramatic reappearance near the end of this article.

SUZANNE CIANI

On my first night in Berghain, we arrive early enough to catch Suzanne Ciani perform live on the main floor. The opportunity to see this legendary synth hero, now 78, perform live on a Buchla Quadrophonic Synth was a key motivator when I booked tickets from Los Angeles to Berlin for the Sound Metaphors event.

The doors to Pano are still locked when we arrive, so the Berghain main floor is the only thing going on. Ciani takes the stage, but the crowd are disrespectful: the hum of their chatter overwhelms the quiet builds of the first part of her set, so rather than work myself into a lather about crowd behavior, I continue to explore. Soon, I’ve found the adjacent Klo Bar, where "Together," an art installation by Joseph Marr features X-rated sculptures made from cola-flavored sugar.

Marr describes his sculpture as "a progression of togetherness in all its sensual and lustful forms, some violently sexual, others extremely sensual until a moment where the needs of lust are satiated and a new kind of loving togetherness is desired.”

I have no cash, so I pick up an empty, abandoned water bottle and go to the restroom to rinse it off and refill it. I hold the hefty bottle in my hand and marvel that the water bottles, beer bottles, and Club Mate bottles are all made of glass, and that they’re served with bottle caps on them. In the United States, I'd become accustomed to water being served in tiny, flimsy plastic bottles with the caps removed -- so that they can't be turned into weapons or projectiles. The half-liter glass bottles at Berghain would have been turned into flying bricks or jagged glass daggers in the hands of the unruly crowds back home, and I suddenly feel safer in this environment. I’m holding tangible proof that violence isn’t so big a problem here that people can’t be trusted with a bit of glass.

I refill my bottle in the bathroom tap, and return to the Ciani performance, where the yappers have finally settled into a hushed reverence as the maestra coaxes otherworldly sounds out of her Buchla synth.

In a Reddit post, one head described her performance as "beautiful sequences and sounds from the 70's till now over noise wooshes, visceral bass that even surprised her in the middle of the set, voice-like sounds and playing retro leads on top with so much of that glorious glide that it takes you on a rollercoaster… and so many spatial elements. Take note kids, electronic music is more than boom boom in mono. All supported by minimal lights which fit the music perfectly that swirled around me and swallowed me up."

If you really want to geek out on how Ciani performs her Quadrophonic sets, I'd suggest the video below.

As Ciani wraps her set to extended applause and yields the stage to Konduku, the doors to Panorama Bar open and we flow in to the freshly opened space, where Pem & Mr. Sian warm the soundsystem up.

PANORAMA BAR VIRGIN

Describing the split between Pano and Berghain, Nick Höppner, who oversaw the administration of Berghain's Ostgut Ton record label until its (likely Pandemic-related) closure in December 2021, told Pitchfork, "The simple division is that Panorama Bar more or less caters to house in all its variety, including minimal ... and Berghain is really the platform for purist techno. I can't put my finger on what the exact Berghain sound is because everyone's playing something different. … I think the Berghain is a bit more serious and more focused, and deeper in a way-- though not in a deep-house sense-- whereas upstairs it can be a lot lighter and happier, more diverse. More hedonistic, in a way."

Or, as writer Tobias Rapp more succinctly put it, "Upstairs is house and straight, downstairs hard and gay."

The Pano crowd on Friday night at 11 pm is a mix of Berghain regulars and Berghain virgins like myself. On entry, I struggle to understand the space at first. There are windows. There's the DJ booth. And — oh! — there's the Panorama Bar.

"Let's get drinks," I say to my friend Valerie (name changed to protect the innocent), a young DJ from the Despacio community who’s brave enough to travel from NYC to join me for the weekend. I need the caffeine but have no cash on me, so Valerie buys an espresso for me, and some sort of fancy cocktail for herself.

The barman fucks up my espresso -- the cup is full of coffee grounds, but he gracefully apologizes and offers to remake it or simply gift me the flawed cup. I choose the gift; I consume coffee for the caffeine, and coffee grounds in the cup are just free bonus drugs. I pour a bit of cold water into the half-full cup and down it in two gulps. I pour more water into the cup, swirl it to catch the stray grounds clinging to the side of the cup, and greedily knock that cup back as well, the equivalent of turning one’s drug bag inside out and licking it clean. I've abstained from caffeine for 10 days prior to this trip to ensure an extra-nice caffeine come-up.

Properly dosed, I shove off from the bar like I’m kicking off from a dock into open water, and spin myself onto the Pano dancefloor. It’s rammed. I take my first dance steps. My body begins to warm up, but before things get too warm, I reach into my underpants and fish my mushroom-enhanced chocolate out from where I'd tucked it against my taint. I unwrap and eat the gooey chocolate. Two nights later, for Klubnacht, I would drop two tabs of acid. Other than the psychedelics and the caffeine, I stay away from drugs (including alcohol — nasty stuff that). I don’t do those drugs; I’m California sober.

A TALE OF TWO CROWDS

It was the best of crowds, it was the worst of crowds...

As noted previously, the Sound Metaphors 10th Anniversary event was a ticketed affair, meaning that anybody who could scrape together €30 could attend, assuming they didn't act like a complete cunt at the door, a marked difference from how Berghain's door typically operates.

I'd been warned by the message boards and friends that the crowd vibes would likely be somewhat "off" in comparison to the "true" Berghain experience of Klubnacht, which wouldn't begin until midnight the following night.

But a big part of why I wanted to attend the Sound Metaphors party before attending Klubnacht was so that I could compare the effect of a night where money was the only barrier to entry, and a night where the security team's infamous face control would be in effect. I expected a big difference, and wasn't disappointed.

The Sound Metaphors crowd in Pano on Friday night into Saturday morning demonstrates somewhat typical dancefloor behavior. The crowd on this night, early on, has a strong orientation towards the DJ, not only facing the DJ at all times, but also not facing each other much at all. They’re typical, in this way, of people who attend events they call "shows."

A live music show is something an audience watches. The audience might wiggle a bit, or hop up and down in place, but their attention remains fixed on the lights and the performer, or on their phones so that they can keep the performer in frame. DJs who perform shows have learned that they had better give the crowd something visually interesting to watch, so they caper about like circus monkeys, striking christ poses, throwing cakes, cutely lip synching the words to their ghost-produced songs, and so on. It’s all part of the playbook of the commercial model that books DJs based on Instagram follower counts.

The more social media followers a DJ accrues, the bigger the stages they’re booked to play. These DJs have sold their souls to become brands, and Instagram followers are monetizable proof of their brand equity. The Instagram DJs can sell stadium quantities of tickets. That’s where the real money is, especially for the large corporate conglomerates that own the stadium venues and book the Instagram DJs to co-market the events there.

The commercial model regresses a dancefloor into a show. Instead of dancers, passive audiences go to see a heavily marketed and branded DJ perform on a stage. Attendees don’t go to dance with other attendees. The last two decades of rockstarification of dance music in clubs and raves has undermined the ability of dancers to connect with each other, and that's exactly what I experienced in my first few hours of time spent in Pano -- the crowd was fundamentally there to see the DJ put on a show. As a result, early on this first night, Pano feels more like a concert than a dance party. The fact that most of the attendees are drinking (and not doing the fun stuff) exacerbates this feeling that everyone is disconnected.

Because the door was allowing ticket-holders in about as quickly as they arrived, Pano is packed by midnight, putting everyone in the room in an adversarial position against each other. There’s a lot of pushing and jostling to get to the "front" of the room so that people can be next to the DJ booth, because they’ve taught by the concerts they typically attend that this is what one does at a live event. Getting to the rail or front of a room makes it possible to watch and film the DJ up close. This is the place to be if you’re hoping to make Instagram content with the potential to go viral.

I find myself being constantly shoved by people who feel entitled to be at the front of Pano. They show little concern for personal space — their need to be in front trumps everyone else’s desire to dance. They fight to be in the part of the room that they’ve been taught (by the social media music & industry industrial complex) is the "best" part of the room.

My own personal rule for moving through a dancefloor is that I need to be able to dance to where I’m going, and if I can't dance into a spot with fairly minimal bumping into others, I shouldn't move into that spot.

After about an hour of this ridiculous dancefloor rugby, my friend Valerie retreats to the outskirts of the dancefloor where she can get some breathing room. I’m stubborn and a lot bigger than she is, so I stay put in the center of the floor, treading water constantly against the steady stream of jerks driving to the front. I feel like a fish in a stream — it takes lots of butt wiggling and struggle just to stay in one spot.

I observe that many of those who selfishly drive to the front don’t know what to do once they get there; they’re like dogs who finally catch the duck they’ve been chasing. They grab onto the rail and look around like, “now what?” In any other club they would’ve reached the front and pulled their phones out to film the DJ, film themselves performatively dancing and being "sexy" near the DJ, and film the crowd. All this filming provides content for their Instagram stories to prove that they'd been there, that they were at the club, proof of their cool raver identities.

(Below, a video showing fairly typical behavior of entitled phone users at dance music events. Where phones go, enshittification grows. I challenge you to watch this video and not get at least a little bit ill.)

At Berghain, these people are lost because the whole underlying motive of pushing to the front had been decoupled from the payoff of being able to create social media content once there, thanks to the photo ban. These folks don’t last long. Without their phones to occupy their minds, they constantly sip their drinks until they need to go in search of another drink. They’re even ruder as they push their way back to the bar.

These unpleasant dancefloor dynamics gradually dissipate as the night wears on. People mellow out as their drugs kick in and as the drinkers -- typically the worst behaved in any club -- fail to muster the stamina to go all night and all morning. By six on Saturday morning the Pano dancefloor starts to find its footing. There’s less shoving, less fighting for the front, and far more interaction between people on the dancefloor. Even so, the dancefloor on Saturday morning pales in comparison to the dancefloor on Klubnacht, when dancing socially and kindly with each other becomes the norm.

To be clear, the Pano dancefloor on the Sound Metaphors night wasn't terrible in comparison to other dancefloors, but early on -- from 11 pm to about 6 am, it took a lot of energy to just be present in that crowd. It's said a key difference between introverts and extroverts is that the former are energized by being alone whereas the latter are energized by being in the company of others. Truly great dancefloors are fundamentally extroverted — everyone in love with each other and energizing each other with pro-social, friendly behavior.

Rough dancefloors, on the other hand, require us to set aside some portion of our energy and awareness to vigilant self preservation. Other humans become barriers, frictions, and dangers, siphoning off energies that could have been dedicated to dance and self expression.

On a continuum from magical to mundane, the Pano dancefloor in these first few hours of the ticketed event felt like a decent party in many ways. The crowd's behavior was suboptimal only in comparison to what I subsequently experienced on Klubnacht, especially in the 2 am to 7 am slot on Monday morning, when Panorama Bar’s magic opened up like a night blossom.

CIS-HET MEN DANCING

One of the differences between the nights had to do with the quantity of hetero men on the dancefloor. Night one had many of them, nights two and three had far fewer. Hetero men are the worst for dancefloor vibes. Not all hetero men, to be fair. Plenty know how to behave, but the ones that don't give the rest a bad name.

If they're single, they're often on the prowl, and tend to move around looking for single women to engage with. For these lonely, horny men, Berghain isn't the best place to go looking for love, and yet they were there, in significant numbers, thinking they'd entered a land of milk and honey where sex would be plentiful for them.

A woman writing about these men on this specific weekend posted to Reddit about “straight guys with no boundaries.” She wrote that she “kept running into guys who wouldn’t take a hint—staring, talking way too much when I wasn’t engaging, and even touching without any sign of my consent… over hours, it really started to feel like a low-level form of harassment. I just wanted to dance and lose myself in the music, but instead, I found myself constantly on guard.”

If, on the other hand, the straight men aren’t single, and they’ve got their date with them, they're often ultra-protective, positioning themselves as a cage around the very delicate flower they brought to the dance, heads on a swivel scanning for threats, their bodies used offensively to create space for their partners. Chivalry is alive and well, but it’s not great for dancefloors.

My experience of dancing next to hetero men and occasionally colliding with them is that they respond in one of two ways. They shy away from touch or treat any touch as an invitation to fight. They don't want to touch another man, so they homophobically recoil from flesh-to-flesh contact or interpret touch as an attempt to encroach on territory, and step up to battle over the territorial threat.

During the absolutely packed Mad Professor set, a deeply psychedelic dub set that tickled the tumblers of my mushroom-altered mind like a key in a lock, there was no room at all to move on the dancefloor. Everyone was bumping everyone else.

I’ve noticed that when I bump into a gay man, the bumps tend to be softer because we're both typically dancing on the 2s and 4s in a 4/4 piece of house (or dub music). The softer bumps feel more like accidents or brushes and the gay men I bumped into on the Pano dancefloor tended to take the bumps in stride. No biggie; no harm, no foul. The straight men, however, are often clumsier dancers, often dancing on the 1s and 3s, so bumps are not only more frequent, but harder because these men tend to interpret bumps as a threat to either their sexuality or their space and territory. The latter threat they met with force -- for example, attempting to hip- or shoulder-check me whenever the beat swung our bodies together.

I'm pansexual on the dancefloor -- everybody and every body is sexy to me. Humans in motion are beautiful and bumps feel like confirmation that we’re alive and that we're in this together. At least, that is, until someone repeats a bump and puts a message into it. Sometimes the message is "give me space," and sometimes it's "this space you thought was yours is mine now," and sometimes it's "I liked that, let's do it again," and sometimes it's "ew, keep your sweat away from me," and sometimes it's "hello, and well met!" and sometimes the message is, "back off, fag." I've received all of these messages in a series of bumps, and on night one, the bumps from the hetero crowd are decidedly negative in tone.

Back to the Mad Professor, who performed an absolutely wild set, with what sounded to my ears like live toasting from a young female vocalist. Her raw yet melodic voice pierces through the fatty low frequencies like lime juice squeezed over roast pork. I'm psychedelically melting into the music and the crowd is flowing together — we’re one body moving and sweating together. I'm using my fan to cool off people in my vicinity whenever the music hits a lull, and I'm making friends.

Then, a cis-het bro barrels into my zone with a beer in each hand. He plants himself exactly where I’m dancing; he wants to take my space for himself, but I will not yield. So turn my back to him and he retaliates by leaning into my space with his ass and back, trying to shove me away as he bounces in place. Typical. Sometimes, this situation requires reciprocating the masculine energy and agreeing to fight for the space, two bulls ass-butting each other for pasture rights.

But on this occasion, due to the dub music and the mushrooms and the good vibes, I’m feeling mellow, so I instead decide to dislodge him with a different tactic. I melt into him, changing my rhythm to match his, pressing my back and ass against his back and ass. We’re perfectly in step for two beats. On the third beat he hesitates. On the fourth beat, I feel his body grow stiff with fear, then I feel him recoil, worried that he might have just been gay on the dancefloor. I never feel his touch again because he swaps places with his woman. She’s much nicer to dance next to; polite even. And her beau isn’t concerned about me dancing near her because he’s convinced I’m gay. Victory.

On Monday morning, when Pano is in full swing, I have another occasion to do this same move with a different man. We’re in each other’s space because it’s crowded, and I melt into him. He reciprocates by melting into me, and next thing I know we’re back to back pushing against each other for a good thirty seconds, just two 200-pound men swinging our bodies in time to the music, the heat building where our backs touch, the feeling of solidness a comfort -- before the musical phrase changes and we break it off. Each of us spins around at that point and we make eye contact and there's a little nod we give each other that says, "that was nice." It felt like brotherhood.

That's the key difference between these two nights -- the quantity of hetero men. They're somewhat dominant on night one, and they're in the minority -- or significantly socialized -- by night three. And the difference between these nights came down to the door policy. On night one, they allowed anybody in. On nights two and three, the security team decided who got in.

I know of no greater testament to the value of Berghain's door policy than how the policy manifests on the dancefloor. Friday night's crowd was fairly typical for a mixed dancefloor. But Sunday night and Monday morning were exquisite in comparison.

At one point on night one, after being bumped rudely again by someone in a hurry to get to the DJ booth, I took stock of the situation and looked around the room. I saw the group of five partiers from Italy wearing sparkly swim caps. I'd tried to talk to them in line at the Pano toilets, but they had been standoffish and insular. I saw a man wearing a USA basketball jersey, a pack of hetero bros looking like wolves on the prowl for meat, a man standing and barely dancing with a too-cool-for-school smirk on his face, a woman with her head bent down to her device, texting friends with her cell phone screen on full brightness when the dancefloor was dark, multiple amateurs without ear protection, a woman wearing a GAP logo'ed baseball cap, a het couple on Molly eating each others' faces… and I knew that many of these ticketed folks were going to try again the next day, and that the next day's queue would be a bloodbath.

A sharp pain like a bee sting jolts me back into my body. Someone had smushed the lit end of their cigarette into my bare shoulder. I yell ouch and look at them and they quickly apologize. They hadn't meant anything by it, and such injuries can be expected on a packed floor where it seems at times that more than half the room has a lit cigarette. Later, on the plane ride home, I look out the window and touch the wound from the burn fondly. The ache reminds me of Berghain.

FAN MAN

As another example of the playfulness that infuses Pano, On Saturday night, I saw a man pull one of the sturdy plastic crates used to collect glass bottles out from under the Pano DJ station. He inverts the empty crate and stands on it, having made his own podium. He dances above our heads -- lots of arm movement, very little foot movement -- for a couple of songs, then tires of his podium and tucks it away. At any other venue, he'd have been dragged off the crate by security within seconds, but here, such gentle rule breaking seems normal or even expected.

I file the crate trick away in my head unsure when I’ll want to get on a podium. Then, on Sunday night, when Pano was especially crowded and sweaty, a woman approaches me and asks to borrow my fan. She wants to take it back to her group, half a dancefloor away. I don't let my fan out of my sight, and I’m about to deny her the request when I remember the crate trick. I reach under the bar, grab an empty crate, and drag it to the middle of the dancefloor. I climb on top of it, and for a good five minutes, turned circles on the crate while fanning with all of my might. My fan is very big, and my endurance for repetitive fanning motions is, how to say this delicately, rather legendary thanks to many years spent pre-divorce in sexless marriage. I cool off the woman's friends, and another dozen people besides, and when I can fan no more I climb down off the crate and put it back.

The woman finds me later to give me a hug and thank me. She asks me if I want to go to the bathroom with her and her friends while she holds her thumb to one side of her nose and sniffs loudly. I’m always grateful for such generosity, so I thank her but decline -- I've got all I need in me already.

Whenever I need to exit the Pano dancefloor to get water, which I do every hour or two, I use my fan to part the crowd. An unexpected cool breeze causes people to turn and pivot and they create a gap for me to dance through. I feel like Moses parting the Red Sea. On my way back into the dancefloor, pockets open up for me because everyone wants to have the fan near them. I bring a breeze, and with the breeze, life.

During Gene on Earth's set, I see the DJ looking warm, so I send a breeze to the DJ now and then. When I bump into Gene later on the dancefloor during Paquita Gordon's set, he thanks me for the fanning and for bringing so much energy to his dancefloor.

During Paquita Gordon's closing Pano set, a woman grabs my arm and pulls me towards the DJ booth. She's friends with the DJ, and she drags me to the front to fan Paquita during a specific song. I kick up a breeze until my right arm screams for a break. Then I fan with my left arm. The DJ gives her friend and me a smile and gratitude hands (🙏). Mission accomplished, we fade back into mass of bodies. The woman explains to me that the song or the DJ was about the four elements and this particular moment called for the air element to be employed. I don't understand her, really, but she seems thrilled to have connected with her DJ friend in this way through me, so I just smile and return her hug.

The fan also proves useful as a toy. On Klubnacht, a man in his 50s wearing a flirty Valentine's Day dress (white lace, red lace, glittery hearts) dances next to me. I make eye contact and smile, and my eye is immediately drawn to the tiara sparkling on his bald head. Stainless steel links broken up by block words -- I can’t quite make them out in the dim lighting, so I lean in and touch his head to let him know where I am in my reading journey. He helpfully rotates so that I can make out the whole sentence: "SPANK ME DADDY I'VE BEEN BAD."

With his back to me, he cranes his head around and gestured with his eyes at his ass, which he’s presented to me. Ok, no problem. I give him a smack with my hand. I’m not satisfied -- I don't feel like that was a strong enough smack for someone who’s been bad. He starts to turn back around, but I grab his shoulder and keep him rotated away from me while I pull out my fan, rear back, and give him two sharp and satisfying smacks with my bamboo fan. I'm sure these smacks will leave welts. I let go of his shoulder and he turns and gives me a smile of thanks. We dance together for a bit before going our separate ways.

Another time I'm fanning energetically and someone with their back to me lifts a hand holding a cigarette into the air. My fan hits the end of their cigarette just so and a shower of sparks arcs across the dancefloor, as if someone had shot a roman candle firework into the crowd. Everyone in the flight path of the sparks looks up, stunned for a beat, but nobody’s hair is on fire. The smoker quickly puffs at the cigarette to relight it, grins at me, and we all go back to dancing.

I meet another exotic species thanks to my fan. I'll call them the giraffe. I don't notice the giraffe until I'm fanning some friends and my fan grazes their shoulder. I turn around to apologize and they're cringing away from me as if I'd just threatened them with a baseball bat, their eyes and look of horror communicating the most dramatic look of "how could you hurt me?" that I've ever received on a dancefloor, and I'm somewhat taken aback by it. To give them some distance, I move ten feet away and dance, while keeping an eye on this curious creature.

In their six-inch platform boots, they're at least seven feet tall and thin as a runway model. The giraffe’s hair is beautifully done -- shiny brown curls that wouldn't look out of place on a bride's head. Their makeup accentuates their high cheekbones. Their lips pout between puffs on a thin, hand-rolled cigarette. Their hoop earrings dangle and glint in the low light with every head toss.

They're wearing a leopard print shawl around their elegant shoulders which they flip coquettishly while looking down their patrician nose at all of us who are getting sweaty on the dancefloor. The giraffe does not sweat because the giraffe does not dance. They're neurotic, not cool, constantly touching their hair to make sure the ringlets are arranged just so, adjusting their purse strap, setting their shawl to lay just so on their shoulders -- not so high that it hides their long, alabaster neck, not so low that it slips off their shoulders. Anytime someone gets too close or dances too energetically in the vicinity of the giraffe, they shrink violently away, hands clutching at their throat, as if the dancers are lepers or cockroaches, and then they fix their hair again.

It is then that I understand the horror at being grazed by my fan is their thing -- they're here to be untouchably pretty and stand tall above the crowd. I’m curious, so I decide to count. They touch their hair 23 times in the course of a single song, each touch accompanied by a look of hurt or disgust at someone on the dancefloor. The drama!

I normally resent people who get onto a dancefloor and refuse to dance, but this pearl-clutching giraffe adds so much color and flavor to the floor that I feel lucky to have danced in their presence.

Later, over the course of perhaps an hour, a man who is very grateful for my fan work shares a new cheesy pun with me after every bout of fanning. After I fan myself and the folks near me, he leans into my ear and says, with the deepest sincerity, "That feels FANtastic." I don’t even notice the pun.

Three minutes later, after I've fanned again, he hits me with "you blow me away." Then I get it, and I'm just looking for excuses to fan him and his group. I fan again. "I'm your biggest fan," he says. I fan again. "You're a breeze of fresh air," he says. Again. "Fancy seeing you here," he says. I'm loving having my own personal cheerleading section and I fan again and again and again until the hot spots on my hand are threatening to become full-grown blisters. I think he's as disappointed as I am when I have to go get water.

CONNECTION ON THE DANCEFLOOR

The Pano dancefloor on Klubnacht is the most connected dancefloor I've ever experienced, bar Despacio. What do I mean by "connected?" The "connection" I seek on dancefloors isn't about trading phone numbers or Instagram accounts or whatever. I'm not looking to make friends, necessarily, though friendship often blossoms on connected dancefloors.

I'm looking for the feeling of being connected to others through the act of dancing together. When my body moves with another body, or hundreds of other bodies, we become one body -- our mirror neurons fire together and we become one in the shared space. The boundaries between me and thee soften and we become an "us."

Connection doesn't happen as deeply on unidirectional dancefloors where everyone's staring at the performer and where people dance shoulder-to-shoulder while staring at the backs of the people in front of them. Without seeing each others' faces, and without opening our bodies to each other, we remain closed off and cocooned safely in the shell of introverted aloneness.

In contrast, on a pro-social dancefloor like Panorama Bar's, we feel the energy of others dancing near us. We then enter into a negotiation. As a dancer, I must figure out how to move my body while others move near me without too much (or any) bumping. Sharing space is connecting.

Connecting happens when I pick up the moves someone else is laying down and put my own spin on those moves. I can then watch as others who are near me and in the mood to connect pick up on my movement change and mirror some of those moves. Like a game of telephone, sometimes a move will ripple across a dancefloor, mutating from person to person. Suddenly, we're all dancing with our hands in the air, or with our hands dangling towards the floor, or we're pedaling our hands and backing our asses up. This is connecting.

When someone near me goes hard, it inspires me to go hard. Then there's a pocket of the floor going hard and our go-hard energy infects those around us. Smiles, whoops, and hollers erupt from this pocket. That's connecting on the dancefloor.

When I fan a group of sweaty people on ecstasy, they fucking love it and feel so happy to be fanned and cooled off. On ecstasy in the midst of a sweaty dancefloor, everyone's love language is a cool breeze. Connection.

When I offer some gum or a hard candy to someone who looks like they might be chewing their lips off, that's connecting. I've been offered a lollipop at just the right moment, and I still remember the face of the woman who handed it to me on the dancefloor of Despacio in Miami two years ago. I gave out hard candies on the Pano dancefloor, and watch as gurning faces turn into grinning faces.

And there are moments when I encounter someone who's really feeling this track or this moment and who starts moving in a bigger, more expressive way. When I compromise my own movements to make room for someone else's bigger movements, that's connecting.

In his excellent writeup of the first night of Pano's opening (October 15, 2004), Daniel Wang wrote of the party that night, "It is about the human body, the present moment -- stamina, bliss, perpetual motion. It is much closer to a primitive tribal pow-wow than most anything one finds nowadays. There is no sophisticated, complicated dancing. No one asks what the DJ is playing. It is just a mass of people, drunk on beer or high on who knows what, struck with an irresistible urge to move, to shake, to touch each other's skin."

MORE PANORAMA MEMORIES

More snapshots of moments in Pano follow. These are but a fraction of the moments I experienced, but I hope that the overwhelming nature of them gives some sense of the way this party felt to me on this particular night.

Also on Klubnacht, I reach overhead with both hands to stretch during a low-energy break in the music. Both hands overhead, standing on tiptoes, my shirt rides up over my belly button as I arch towards the ceiling. Suddenly, someone’s jammed a finger into my belly button. My hands shoot down to protect my belly but the impish man who’d poked me is already scampering away backwards out of reach, the finger he'd used now jabbing in my direction with the beat. The dancefloor is full of jesters.

At one point, I encounter a woman standing still as a statue in the heart of the dancefloor. Her eyes are closed, her face held in a calm smile. Her hands are held in the air at chest height, the palms upturned, the tips of her middle fingers and thumbs pressed together on each hand. She’s standing in a meditation pose, and she holds it for at least the duration of a song, perhaps two songs. Her stillness in the swirling, bouncing bodies feels radical. Is she k-holing? Is she meditating? When she snaps out of her trance, she resumes dancing as if nothing had happened.

A woman naked above the waist save some chains wrapped around her torso dances in the area where there's a bit more room to maneuver and where most of the naked people I encounter over the weekend tend to dance. She throws her arms around, making huge shapes as if she's in a mosh pit. Her huge breasts swing around too, often on a different trajectory than her arms, like poi flow toys, extending further than her elbows at the apex of their arcs. They move like a second pair of arms. She's a dance warrior in motion, a viking goddess, a mammalian martial artist. I'm still tripping, and for a moment I believe she might be Goro from Mortal Kombat preparing to wrap one of her breasts around someone's neck to perform a fatality. I keep my distance.

On Klubnacht, some friends of mine from Berlin are present. A few of them are Berghain regulars -- and when I see the way their social networks extend across the dancefloor, I'm in awe of the beauty of it all. I fall into chatting with several of them and they're intrigued by my book project. They're curious to know how Berghain measures up to other "magical dancefloors" I've experienced, but their curiosity comes from a place of confidence because they know how good they've got it, they're just wondering if any other place in the world even approaches Berghain in terms of quality. As we talk, we're frequently interrupted by their friends and acquaintances coming up to us and giving them hugs. I get a feeling of how tight-knit and small this community is. This is the moment when the seed of a dream takes root -- one day I hope to move to Berlin and come to this club regularly.

It's 4 am on Saturday morning. I'm dancing blissfully when I notice that a man next to me has stopped dancing and is now holding his phone to his face. He's trying to have an actual conversation in the middle of the dancefloor. He's holding a beer in his other hand while he sticks a finger in his ear to better hear the conversation. Another minute of this and he moves off the dancefloor, colliding with everyone on his way out. Such rude behavior is common on most dancefloors, but is notable here because it stands in such contrast to the behavior on Monday morning, where the drunks have failed to go the distance and Pano feels like the politest, most loving dancefloor I've ever encountered.

On another occasion, I'm trying to dance my way past a naked man who dances with his arms out wide while wearing a vinyl dog mask that marks him as a member of the pup play community. He's in the "shirtless gay muscle bears" zone of the above diagram, and as I try to slip past him, he clocks me in the chest with his fist. He didn’t mean to do it and his body language suggests he’s sorry. If he had a tail, it would have been tucked between his legs. I didn't have the presence of mind to scold, "bad dog,” it being a situation where I'd already made more contact than intended, and I didn't want to accidentally invite my leg to be humped, being unschooled with the etiquette of pup play. It had been my fault anyway, and way back in high school, a friend’s dog came on my leg under a dinner table because I’d been too polite to move my leg. I don’t have a great track record with horny pups, so I move on.

THE SOUND SYSTEM

As noted above, Mad Professor completely changed my understanding of what a good dub set sounds like. I now understand the value of dub reverb because I experienced it under the influence of shrooms on a decent soundsystem, a first for me.

That said, Mad Professor did have one track bomb. Near the end of his set, he dropped Sister Nancy's Bam Bam, one of my favorite songs ever, and an absolute reggae anthem. This was the moment when, nearing the end of my third hour in Pano, I had an epiphany about the Pano soundsystem: it's just not that good. The bass was criminally underpowered for Bam Bam -- in the middle of the floor, where it should have been best, it lacked the low end punch necessary to do the song justice. I still enjoyed dancing to it, but I've heard the track sound better on car stereos.

Turns out, the Panorama Bar's soundsystem is just not that great. It's good and loud, it's got clarity, but the bass frequencies are severely underdeveloped. There are two spots on the floor where the bass approaches (but still doesn’t reach!) adequacy: up on the Pano balcony and down on the floor in the “leather daddy” area. In these two locations, the higher-frequency sounds are somewhat diminished relative to the bass, and the bass frequencies have picked up some form of resonance. I could feel the hairs on my body moving, and could feel the beginnings of a rumble in the belly.

According to DJ Mag, Pano's 2017 soundsystem renovation saw the installation of a custom system from from Studt-Akustik consisting of a "four-point linear array with six additional high-performance subwoofers, allowing for vertical stackability."

Whatever it is in Pano, it's too quiet on the low end, but sounds nice most of the time, assuming the DJs play tracks that are appropriately recorded, mixed, and mastered. There were only two moments where it sounded bad enough to break my immersion: the aforementioned Bam Bam drop from the Mad Professor, and a second moment that I'll detail below.

ONE WEAK SET

The weakest DJs to play Pano during my weekend in Berlin shall go unnamed. I don't want to shame anyone, but I will note three problems with their work. This happened during the Sound Metaphors night:

• One: they played back-to-back disco-ish songs featuring strong female vocals in the mezzo-soprano vocal range (think Donna Summer). The juxtaposition invites comparison, and in that comparison the second vocalist sounds like the weaker singer. I immediately feel fatigue from the similarity of the two tracks. To me, this feels like an unforced selection error. It’s a better idea to select a palate-cleansing instrumental track to follow a vocal track, or a male vocalist after a female vocalist, or at least, if the vocalists are the same gender, their vocal ranges shouldn’t heavily overlap.

• Two: two of their tracks were quieter, duller, and from a different era of mastering. They lacked the clarity of modern tracks, and the DJs apparently didn't notice this and fix it using the compressor setting on the DJM V10 mixer, which is designed specifically to address this issue with older tracks. The room sounded dull and boring, like someone had thrown a blanket over it.

• Three: they played a track that the DJ just before them had played. It was a different version or edit, sure, but the repeat sucked the energy right out of the room because a good number of us had been dancing to the same tune less than an hour earlier.

I spent about an hour dancing to this set trying to make it work, but the dead sound, the questionable selection, and the sequencing were so disappointing that I left Pano for the Berghain main floor. I'll write about my impressions of the main floor in subsequent installments in this series, because before we leave Pano, I want to talk about several more parts of it that I fell in love with.

Palms Trax, Ffan, Marie Montexier, Gene on Earth, Paquita Gordon

Every DJ over the course of the weekend, bar one (noted above), played quite well. But some DJs stood out as especially excellent.

Palms Trax -- (Sound Metaphors Anniversary Party, Saturday, 4 am - 6 am). Tracks, if Shazam is to believed, included:

• Sunrise by Samvel T

• Dead Can Trance by Technical Service

• Humancity by Daylight

• Starfruit Supernova (Pillars of Creation Mix) by Celeste Strawberry Jam & catapillie

• Our Origin by Armin van Buuren & Trilogy

• Waiting for You by Nugen

• She Wants to Be by Ann Lee

• 1001 by Mattheis

• One by 5udo

• Sussy Tanz by Lami

• Out of Your Mind by Green Prize

• God is a DJ (Extended Mix) by Dream Dance Alliance

• On&On&On by Kza (Force of Nature)

• A Sort of Homecoming by Paul Keeley

• Gazer (Extended Mix) by Pretty Pink

• La Pachetada by Patrice d’Angelo

Ffan -- (Sound Metaphors Anniversary Party, Saturday, 8 am - 10 am) - DJ ffan, a Seoul underground DJ who I hadn't heard of before booking my trip to Berlin, played my favorite set of Saturday morning. By 8 am, I was already stone cold sober, but he gave me my favorite sequence when he played "I Feel Love (Club Mix)" by Kevin McKay & Start the Party into “Good Morning (Saint Etienne Remix)” by the Time & Space Machine. I'm gonna bookmark this moment and will circle back to it in the final section of this post, as the climax deserves more space than I want to dedicate to it right here.

Marie Montexier (Klubnatcht, Sunday, 4 am - 8 am) -- After listening to the vinyl mix she performed at Nowadays NYC (Feb 9, 2025), I was excited for this set. Several tracks from the Nowadays performance made their way into her mix for Klubnacht, including my personal favorite, "This is My Life (Bontan Remix)" by HoneyLuv and Roland Clark.

Gene on Earth (Klubnacht, Sunday, 8 pm - 12 am) -- I was excited to dance to Gene on Earth's set after friends on various Discord servers told me not to miss his work, and I'm glad I did. Gene's backstory is interesting. He'd been to Berghain 200 plus times in his 20s before first playing Berghain in September 2022. I don't know shit, but this set felt like the quintessential "Panorama Bar" sound and I could not leave the floor. I'd been dancing to his music for two hours and had been out of water for an hour when I couldn't take the thirst anymore and sprinted to the bathroom for water before hurrying back. I couldn't bear to miss any of it. The climax of this set for me came when he played "I'll Be Here (Morales "Dark & Lovely" Mix)" by Automagic Featuring Nashom. The song sounded perfect on this system and the sweetly-voiced lyrics layered on top of acid-sounding synths sent me into overdrive on the dancefloor. Gene runs a fun Discord server where he's got some innovative schemes going on.

Paquita Gordon (Klubnacht closing set, Monday 12 am - 8am) -- I had no idea of who this dynamic powerhouse was prior to dancing in her room, but every time I could steal myself away from Len Faki, who she was programmed against, I found myself in love with her selection and mixing, all of it on vinyl. An eight-hour, all-vinyl set in a room as energetic as Pano is impressive as fuck, and I didn't hear a clunky mix in the hours I spent in this room.

According to her booking agency bio, Paquita Gordon's sets, "can be divided through two main kinds, a cosmic one and an earthly one." Her Earth Dance playlist includes mixes she performed for Bassiani, Dekmantel, and Trax Magazine, and is the sound that was most like what we heard her play for her Pano closing set, which she self-describes as going "from house and techno to dnb and trance."

PANO BATHROOMS

As much as I'd have liked to dance without a break, I needed water regularly. Panorama’s sauna-like conditions made me sweat buckets. I made about 15 trips to the restroom for water over the course of my 30 hours inside Berghain, and typically drank a half liter of water per trip. I brought along electrolyte drops and put them into my water bottle with every refill to make sure my muscles wouldn't lock up, having learned the hard way over the years that water alone isn't enough.

The bathroom visits gave me an opportunity to experience Berghain's insanely good facilities and gather a few stories from there. Pano's bathrooms were, by far, the best of the restrooms due to the social dynamics that take place there.

Here are some of my favorite moments.

After spending 13+ hours in Berghain for the Sound Metaphors party, something in my diet or lifestyle isn’t agreeing with me. I need to use the bathroom for its intended purpose, and have a close call where a last-minute clench saves me from literally shitting myself on the dancefloor. I wisely decide to stop dancing and get myself to the toilets before a biohazard situation occurs.

I'd passed through the restrooms many times on my trips to the urinal trough and hand-washing trough, but this was to be my first attempt to use a stall, and I’m disappointed to learn that there’s quite a queue. My urgency is high, but the line is the line, so I strike up conversations to keep my mind off of the pain while keeping my cheeks firmly clenched.

I speak to a man from Italy about literature. We discuss the short stories and novels of Alan Moore, and I insist he read “Hypothetical Lizard,” while he convinces me to read Moore's The Great When. One thing leads to another, and the gent soon shares with me the plot of the murder thriller he’s writing between trips to Berghain, and I share with him a bit about my Magical Dancefloors book.

It’s his turn, and the Italian goes enters the stall with five of his closest friends. I next talk to a boy who couldn't have been older than 20.

Waifish and bare-chested, made up in heavy eyeliner and homemade gothic rags consisting of strips of fur from roadkill he'd tanned and dyed and sewn together himself, he confesses to me a mephedrone habit that had him going through 30 grams a month of the stuff, but "not one gram per day, of course." I do some quick math (which was hard, given that I was simultaneously high and focused on clenching my ass), and it seems that his habit did in fact average out to about one gram a day, so I'm not sure we’re seeing eye to eye on the mephedrone math. But he’s beautiful and nice and his costume skills are clearly exceptional, so I make a point of saying hi to him every time I bump into him that night — he’s always running from one restroom to the next; I never encounter him on the dancefloor.

Every time a group goes into a stall to do drugs, I ask if they’ll allow me to shit while they do their drugs near me. Three groups decline my generous offer before it’s finally my turn to enter the stall. As I enter, I magnanimously offer the next guy in line the opportunity to share the stall with me. “If you’re in a rush, you can do your drugs while I use the shitter.”

"Not my kink, unfortunately," the Brit says, giving me a smile full of gold teeth.

“Your loss!” I wink and shrug, and enter the stall.

Reader, I did terrible things in that toilet stall, and I'll save you the details except to say that I'm glad I'd brought my water bottle into the stall with me. It serves as an emergency bidet, and I leave the stall cleaner than I found it, with a freshly washed bottom.

Now relieved of my terrible burden, I’m able to see again, and I look around the Pano restrooms and take it all in. I've never met a more wonderful restroom. The benches next to the toilets are always full of groups of people (of all genders) waiting for the toilets. One end of the bench extends past the toilet cubbies and looks directly at the piss trough, where anybody sitting on the bench can look down the line of penises pissing while they're waiting for a stall to open up. At first, this made me a bit pee-shy, to be honest, but by my second trip to the trough, I’m warm to the idea and take the spot closest to the bench. On that trip and every trip thereafter, mid stream, I quickly look to my left and see if I can catch anybody in the act of watching. I never do catch anyone, so my fantasy of making uncomfortably deep eye contact while stop-starting my stream in a show of dominance is never fulfilled. Maybe next trip.

While peeing, I meet a man who knows me from Reddit. How bizarre. How does he know? Was it the shape of my penis that suggested I was an incorrigible shitposter? Is it my California sun-kissed skin, a rarity in Berlin this time of year? More likely, it’s my US accent. I don’t meet any Californians the entire weekend.

I never encounter Berghain’s mythical piss goblin. Legend says that the piss goblin was once a man — now a Smeagol-like shadow of a man — who chains himself to the urinals and lies on the floor, offering his open mouth as an alternate piss trough. I'm disappointed, because I would have surely gone for it, just for the story.

By 9 pm on Sunday evening, the hand soap in the Pano restrooms has been depleted. The ops team recently implemented some fancy new dry soap dispensers that were apparently a throwback to pre-Wall times, but the quantity of soap that they could hold was insufficient for the needs of a throng who occasionally need to scrub their whole fist clean, if you know what I mean.

While washing up, I encounter a woman who is very thirsty, but who doesn’t want to use one of the spare empty bottles lying around. Her friends are trying to convince her that it will be ok to use a discarded bottle, and they recruit me into the task of convincing her.

"Tell her it's going to be ok." They’re all laughing, and it seems innocent enough, so I say in my most reassuring, dad-like tone, "it's going to be ok!" The friends all cheer and say, "see, it's going to be ok!" as they fill up a water bottle for her, but she is still very reluctant to take it from them. They’re still arguing with her about whether it’s going to be OK when I leave the restroom.

Hours later, I see her on the dancefloor and say, "it's going to be OK!" as a friendly callback to the bathroom moment, but her face falls, she stops dancing, and she leaves the dancefloor. Oops. I guess she had been really bent out of shape about the whole water bottle thing. I feel bad, but I don’t take it personally. People be tripping.

On one Pano bathroom trip, I decide to take the stairs next to the restrooms to see what’s up there. I reach the top of the landing and stand in awe of the scene before me. A terrain of couches, including one very long couch some forty feet long, hosts some fifty people lounging, dranking, smoking, and cuddling. The room is full of cigarette smoke, and the soft overhead lights give the scene the soft sfumato effect seen in renaissance art. Everyone looks absolutely beautiful in this light, and the arrangement of bodies, piled this way and that, speaks to a freedom and ease that makes my heart ache. It's a gorgeous scene.

Attached to this room, off a little hallway to the right, lies a balcony overlooking the Pano dancefloor. There are couches in this area, and I remember the Reddit threads where people discuss whether this room is dark enough for proper darkroom activities. It is, but in all the time I spend in the Pano balcony -- some four hours -- I only ever saw dancing and cuddling.

I stand on this balcony and surveill the dancefloor below me. From here, I can watch the DJ mix, watch the decibel meter jump around between 93dB and 107dB, and observe the crowd while dancing myself. Due to its position above the Pano dancefloor, near the ceiling of Panorama Bar, this area feels like a swamp -- humid and at least 10 degrees hotter than the dancefloor itself, but the people watching opportunities make the heat worth suffering.

On that balcony, I meet Aurora, a 20-something Au Pair from the US living in Spain. She’s the most consistently energetic dancer I encounter in my entire time at Berghain. She goes for hours at a time with dips, spins, fanning, head tossing and more, inspiring me to try to keep up. I cannot keep up; she makes me feel old. She’s one of the few people I meet that had purchased a ticket for the Sound Metaphors night who also made it in to Klubnacht. She claims she got in because she insisted to the bouncer that she needed to see Marie Montexier.

THE SUN DISTRACTS OUR ATTENTION

In the dance party scorecard I use to evaluate dancefloors, one of the key factors that makes a floor magical is how well it uses the tools of theater to transport dancers to other places -- other rooms, other climates, other periods in time, other dimensions. Lighting is the most widely employed and versatile theatrical tool, but darkness, fog, drapery, paint, and mirrored surfaces (not least of which: mirror balls) are part of the toolkit as well. Theatrical elements are sometimes undermined by safety features. For example, fire departments often require lighted exit signage; good for safety, bad for total darkness.

Panorama Bar's lighting mixes antique fixtures and ultramodern ones. For example, there are several massive (perhaps 2.5' across at their widest point) aluminum reflector cones containing single incandescent bulbs that are used to wash the room in a warm glow at key moments. Sometimes these fixtures flash and strobe the room with a comforting, yellow-orange light. These fixtures feel analog, ancient, and classic -- like they might have been used on theatrical stages in the 1970s or 1960s.

Then there are the seven square fixtures affixed to the ceiling -- IVL Dice from Minuit One. You'd think these are the stars of the Panorama show because they're spectacular, but you'd be wrong. Square fixtures, about 15 inches per side, they put out a wide spectrum of vivid colors that defined the room -- sometimes filling it with shapes and planes of light, sometimes suffusing it more gently with washes of color.

The light from the Dice fixtures was sometimes used to paint a square grid like lines on graph paper onto the dancefloor. -- two-inch thick lines of light pulsed in tightening and expanding movements. At times, the floor was so packed that the lines couldn't reach the floor. At other times, there was enough room for me to cavort and spin about in my own box. On two occasions, when the atmospherics of cigarette smoke and fog were thick in the air, the Dice fixtures filled the room with undulating planes of blue and blue-green light with a strong vertical effect, conjuring an underwater kelp forest, or a coral reef with jellyfish lazily undulating over our heads. At these moments, I felt like a fish in a shoal, loosely swirling together with other bodies as waves passed overhead, pelvic fins and pectoral fins fluttering, mouths alternating between fishy gapes and grins.

Panorama Bar can’t maintain a thick, soup-like fog like some rooms can. Pikes Ibiza, for example, is able to fill its cavelike room with fog so thick that you can't see your own hand five inches in front of your face, even during high-strobe moments. Completely disorienting and glorious. Pano's atmospheric effects were never so intense -- fog is sent in, and fog quickly disperses. It's a weak point in the Pano theatrics. Pano never really gets that dark either -- at its darkest it was much brighter than Despacio and Pikes, two dancefloors that are often dark enough to serve as makeshift darkrooms.

But Pano has a trick up its sleeves. It uses sunlight in a spectacular fashion.

No matter what we can achieve with man-made lighting effects, nature often puts us to shame. Nothing beats sunrise, sunset, or a moonlit night for conjuring awe. The primal rhythms of nature complement the rhythms of music, making them seem more important, more grand, more profound.

There's a desert rave I like to attend in Southern California. It's typically held in the middle of the night to take advantage of the glory of a full moon. You might think this some California woo-woo bullshit, but I believe that moonlight -- especially when coupled with amplified music -- has the power to dredge out of us buried emotions, repressed dreams, and alternate consciousnesses. The combination of mother nature's most beautiful light shows and humanity's most beautiful music opens a rift in the space-time fabric and through that rift weird stuff travels.

Panorama Bar is named for the fact that its high-floor windows have an unobstructed view of the cityscape south-southwest of the building. As the sky lightens, motorized shutters descend over the windows to keep the daylight at bay and to prolong the night-time party vibes. Light tends to kill dancefloors and sunlight is a disinfectant that can drive bacchanalian wildness into hiding or hibernation. It makes perfect sense that shutters would descend over the windows to keep daylight out.

And yet -- to my great surprise, when DJ ffan played Good Morning (Saint Etienne Remix) by the Time & Space Machine, the lighting guy had his finger on the button of the shutters and opened them all at once on phrase when the song's breathy "Good Morning" chorus arrived at the climax of the song.

Suddenly, the room was awash in daylight and everyone faced the windows overlooking Berlin and we greeted the morning with a joyful dance in soft, cloud-filtered morning light. The cheeky bastard must have coordinated this moment with the lighting guy beforehand, because the timing was absolutely perfect. Then, with another press of the button, the shutters closed and we were back in darkness. I cried.

The moment reminded me of a quote from my favorite book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker:

"What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer-bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out.... Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness."

DJ ffan's “Good Morning” finale is allowed to play out all the way. The crowd whoops and claps for a long time. Then Courtney Bailey b2b Tornado Wallace take over. There are two more hours of party before we're all pushed out of this place to face the day.

PANORAMA WRECKAGE

By the end of the night, Panorama Bar and surrounding environs are a bit of a wreck. Glass bottles have fallen and shattered in places, despite the best efforts of the shirtless men who roam the facility collecting empties. A condom full of semen left on top of the Pano urinals has sat there for six hours -- and was still sitting there when I left the restroom for the last time on Saturday morning. The floor is a sticky mess -- it grabs at my shoes in places. I sometimes feel as if I'm dancing in molasses. I do not envy the crew that will reset this place over the next 12 hours to ready it for Klubnacht.

My mushrooms have long since worn off and I'm too sore to continue to dance, so I head up to the Pano balcony -- every stair step an effort, and sprawl out on one of the couches there. A Korean couple to my left are cuddling and smoking. Opposite them, a Russian woman is deeply engrossed in a Whatsapp message thread. I dump my memories into my notes app on my phone and soak up the beats from the comfort of my sofa above Pano.

THE SCORECARD, PANORAMA BAR AT BERGHAIN

Click here for part 4.

(This is part two of an eight-part series that begins with this article.)

THE WALL AND THE DOOR

Erected overnight, the Berlin Wall divided Berlin, kettling East Germans inside a communist "workers paradise" that was so restrictive, surveilled, and difficult that about 100,000 people risked their lives to find a way over, under, or through the wall. About 5,000 people -- or 5% -- made it through. More than 100 died, shot by border guards during their attempts.

There are echoes of the wall in Berghain's famous door. Beyond the door lies an Eden of sorts. The door keeps the rest of the world kettled in its dreary workaday world characterized by omnipresent surveillance capitalism, restrictive anti-nudity regulations, and an oppressive hetero-normative gender regime. About 12 milllion tourists visit Berlin each year, but Berghain only admits around 2,000 lucky souls per weekend to enter its walled garden where a better life can be found.

Is it any wonder, then, that the single most-asked question about Berghain is how to get in?

To be clear, I don't know the answers. But I did manage to piece together a few things before getting on a plane from Los Angeles to spend three nights inside this garden of earthly delights. I'll share here part of what I figured out.

For the attention-span-deprived, here's the short answer on how to get in. I'm going to skip past the basics you've probably already heard (wear black, don't go in large groups, don't be loud or noisy in the queue, etc.) and instead skip to the advanced tactics.

In a nutshell, here's the formula for how to get in:

1. Tattoo your face and neck in at least two places

2. Spend at least $2,000 on a full-body latex suit

3. Wear authentic German Rave Kandi

Once you've knocked this todo list out, you can go queue up in Berlin. No need to continue reading. Give Sven a cheery "Hallo!" from us.

Ok, now that we've sent the short attention-span folks off to do their shopping and body modifications and it's just the real ones, let me explain that the path to Berghain is littered with the bodies of folks who have followed guides on how to get in. Some of the guidance is not terrible, but most of it fails to start with perhaps the most important advice about getting in, which is to get your head on straight about why you want to attend at all.

WHY ARE YOU GOING?

There's no one right reason to go. There are multiple legitimate reasons, and there are multiple illegitimate reasons. I believe the bouncers are basically trying to admit folks that are there for the right reasons and reject those that are there for the wrong reasons.

My reasons for attending were twofold.

First and foremost, I love a good dance party and have found that specific dance parties have transformed my life in positive ways. I needed to dance for hours and hours in Berghain, and would not be deterred from this mission. I have questions about life and what the fuck I'm doing here, and dancing to music provides me with the answer.

Second, I'm writing a book about dance music and about those rarified events that are so good that they achieve that ineffable quality of "magic." I had heard that Berghain is a magical place, but needed to see it directly to write about it, because -- for all the ink spilled on the topic -- there's not a lot of writing that meets my bar in terms of detail, verisimilitude, and emotion. In reviewing what had been written, I sensed a hole that I could uniquely fill with my pen and the ink that would surely gush out of it after a stimulating weekend in Berghain.

THE SNAKE AND THE DECISION

As people get close to Berghain, there's a section of queue called "the snake" where, it's said, the door team starts to eye those who would gain entry. As folks snake through the queue, the door staff are able to evaluate dress, demeanor, behavior, and energy. They can suss out whether someone's too drunk or high already, whether a large group has split into multiple groups to increase their chances of getting in, and whether folks seem comfortable in their own skins, or whether they're tugging uncomfortably at the costumes they wore for this moment.

Then it's your turn. You stand some 10 feet from the doorman and he asks you a couple of questions in German or English (your choice). He wants to know how many are in your party. He might also ask which artist you're here for. Then you'll be allowed in or receive a verbal rejection -- often in the form of "heute leider nicht" ("Unfortunately not today").

The bouncers have the job of figuring out who fits and doesn't fit the vibe that they're trying to create inside the club. To do this, they'll run through a list of criteria that nobody on the inside has ever spelled out, but that can be pieced together by observing the anecdotes and history of decisions.

Easy rejections include:

• too drunk

• too rowdy

• rude or disrespectful behavior while in queue

These are the sorts of rejections any decent bar or club should have at the door. Then we get into the realm of much more subjective criteria: what you're wearing, how you carry yourself, whether you seem to be a fit for the vibe of the club, and so on. Even though this is a much more subjective set of criteria, there are still some obvious faux pas signals that one can send:

• Wearing some poorly-made, ill-fitting getup you purchased on Amazon or Shein and that you're clearly uncomfortable in -- i.e., a costume that's not authentic to who you are

• Wearing stereotypical kandified "rave festival outfits" (the EDC / Tomorrowland / Ultra look) that are just culturally miles away from the vibe of Berghain

A recent academic paper summarized the door in a flowchart that boils the "selection" process (the right-most branch in the diagram to:

• assess customer readiness

• assess fit to social atmosphere

• assess unique contribution to the customer cohort

They're not looking for a bunch of clones, all dressed in black, all wearing the same look of nihilistic ennui, all smoking the same hand-rolled cigarettes. They're looking to assemble a party with diversity and tension. They're looking to keep the place true to its roots as a club for gay men, and (more broadly) gay and queer folk.

Most of the advice you'll encounter online completely misses the point as it focuses on appearances. You can't fake a lifestyle, and if we dress a pig in leather harnesses, it's still obviously a pig. Please permit me to torture this metaphor for a second. The pig would stand a better chance at the door if it owned the sexiness of its body, the fatty belly lined with 10 pairs of pencil-eraser pink nipples, even the pleasure of the bacon it might offer should it wish to submit to the lusty pleasure-seekers who invited it to the Berghain BBQ. It shouldn't pretend to answer the doorman's questions in German, it should politely and confidently oink.

It's no accident that at least two of Berghain's doormen -- Mischa Fanghaenel and the aforementioned Sven Marquardt -- are photographers. Photographers who exhibit, who are good enough to earn a living from their art, who do black and white portraiture (this describes both of them) are more likely to have an eye that can pierce the facade in order to see into the heart of a person.

"When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!” -- Ted Grant, photojournalist

I believe the photographer's eye wielded by these two doormen (and perhaps others within the security team) give them the ability to assess whether each person before them might make a "unique contribution to the customer cohort," as the flowchart puts it.

When manning the door, Mischa has said as much, "I only get a brief glimpse of a person at the door and hope to see beyond their exterior to create a great environment."

Sven has said something similar, though in different words, "I don’t mind letting in the odd lawyer in a double-breasted suit with his Gucci-Prada wife. If they make a good impression, let them in. We also take guys in masks and kilts, or Pamela Anderson blondes in run-of-the-mill high-street outfits who tag along with bearded blokes, licking the sweat off each others’ armpits.”

I believe they're putting together a party -- and a good party is like a good zoo -- full of exotic animals ready to fuck or (nonviolently) eat each other, or at the very least sniff each other's butts between stops at the communal watering hole. They're looking for snakes to crawl in the cracks of the place, apes to swing from the rafters, graceful gazelles, ungainly giraffes, and the occasional tough-as-nails rhinocerous, with the swagger and confidence of a horn that can impale anything.

"It is celebrating our differences and the feeling of everyone being together, completely unprejudiced. That is electronic music to me. It doesn’t matter where you come from or who you are," said Mischa.

Of course Berghain's heritage requires ongoing respects paid (by the door selectors) to the fact that Berghain emerged from Berlin's gay culture, so a heaping quantity of gayness is part of the door selection process, resulting in this wonderful feeling (on the inside) that being gay is the norm, and anybody that's not gay is an outsider, even after they've been let in.

"I feel like I have a responsibility to make Berghain a safe place for people who come purely to enjoy the music and celebrate—to preserve it as a place where people can forget about space and time for a little while and enjoy themselves. The club evolved from the gay scene in Berlin in the nineties. It’s important to me we preserve some of that heritage, that it still feels like a welcoming place for the original sort of club-goers. If we were just a club full of models, pretty people all dressed in black, it would be nice to look at for a half an hour, but god, that would be boring. It would feel less tolerant, too." -- Sven Marquardt in GQ

ERRORS OF THE DOOR

All that idealism aside, the door has an error rate big enough to drive a panzer packed with clowns through it -- those are the false positives -- the absolute clownish assholes who know how to get in, but don't know how to behave once they're inside. You'll read more about some of these folks in subsequent entries in this series because a good many found their way in via the ticketed event, while far fewer made their way past the door on the following night (Klubnacht), when the door policy was in effect.

In a recent, alarming example of a false positive that made headline news, a man with a "big Berghain tattoo on his neck right above his Adam's apple" allegedly raped someone in the Panorama Bar toilets on Sunday, March 2, 2025, according to a Reddit thread that soon snowballed into a police investigation. Rapists don't look a certain way, so it's not realistic to for any of us to expect the folks at the door to somehow see their dark souls and keep them out, but perhaps that very prominent tattoo was a factor in his admittance -- suggesting that at least one sexual predator has figured out how to crack the door game in the way that the sexual predators of the Catholic Church learned that if they wore the vestments of the sheep they could wolvishly run rampant amongst their flocks.

And then there are the false negatives -- folks rejected despite seeming to be a great fit. For example, one DJ who played Berghain three times was subsequently rejected. As another example, Felix da Housecat was denied entry. Sometimes folks who are a fit are rejected simply because too many people who look just like them had already entered that shift. Sometimes frequent attendees are regularly rejected by one bouncer (e.g., Matrix) but never by another bouncer (e.g., Mischa). If there were consistency to the policy, this sort of pattern wouldn't happen.

Not that famous folks should have an automatic in -- the fact that they face the same egalitarian selection process is a credit to Berghain, but it's still a bit strange that being good enough to DJ Berghain doesn't make you cool enough to actually party in Berghain. We should expect that venn diagram to overlap nearly 100% if the talent booking team and the door team are on the same page. Which they can't be, because it's ultimately a very subjective process.

It's also entirely possible that some of the rejections of famous folks are the result of the famous showing up to the door with a sense of entitlement or having not made enough of an effort to present themselves in a culturally sensitive way. Take, as my favorite example of this, the story of David Blaine's rejection at Berghain's door, as shared by Redditor xaphextwinx:

"So my boyfriend and I reach the front of the line and as we approach the very front position, waiting on the bouncer to wave us in or away, none other than DAVID BLAINE approaches the guest list line. For those who don’t know, David Blaine is this American magician (yes like card tricks and bunny out of a top hat) who had his own show on national television. I would say about 75% of Americans know who the man is.

The bouncer sees him come up and immediately says, “man I told you not to fucking come back, we don’t want you or your money tricks."

David Blaine then holds up a deck of cards and holds them in the bouncer's face and says, “this isn’t money, these are cards.”

I had to try so hard not to laugh and am sure I am visibly shaking.

The bouncer replies with, “TAKE YOUR CARDS AND SHOVE THEM UP YOUR ASS."

So at this point the bouncer calls on his other bouncer backup friends and the bouncers are just getting closer and closer to David, looking as if they’re about to forcefully remove him. The main bouncer, distracted, then turns around to me, barely even looks at me, doesn’t say a word and waves us in.

I have pondered writing David Blaine a thank you note."

And sometimes, people are just so culturally foreign that the door doesn't know how to read them.

In what I believe is an example of the latter, Brian Behlendorf, the guy who founded hyperreal.org (an important entity in West Coast rave culture in the 1990s), a leader in the open source software movement, and a DJ himself for decades, looks like a stereotypical California tech hippie with his ponytail, sunless complexion, and clean-shaven babyface. He was rejected at the door, according to a Tweet he made (and has since removed). I'm no doorman, but based on my review of his contributions to rave culture, I'm fairly certain that Behlendorf knows how to to party and would have been an add to Berghain's party on the night he tried to enter. But he didn't look the part -- which I'm guessing led to the false negative.

There's simply no way for a cursory evaluation at the door to make perfect decisions every time.

And yet ...

The door is a key element of what makes Berghain truly wonderful. I was lucky enough to attend Berghain on a night with no door policy and the following night when the door policy was in full effect, and the difference between these two nights was massive, as I'll be detailing in the rest of this series of articles.

LEGITIMACY

I mentioned earlier that there are legitimate and illegitimate reasons why someone should want to go to Berghain.

Legitimate reasons to go to Berghain: to perform as a DJ, to dance to the music, to enjoy a great party, for the freedom of being in a gay, sex-positive space, to lick armpits, to cruise the dark room, to fuck or be fucked on the dancefloor, to do drugs in the bathroom stalls with friends, to introspect, to trip, to make new friends, to deepen your relationship with existing friends, to make up for lost time, to come out in the most spectacular way possible, to have sex with 20 strangers in a weekend, to piss into a stranger's mouth, to combine any or all of these activities into a single weekend. It's a wild party and there's no one right way to party.

But there are wrong ways to party, and the list of illegitimate ways to do Berghain includes: to take photographic souvenirs for the social media clout race, to gawp at gays having sex, to be a tourist rather than a participant, to stand on the dancefloor with your nose in your phone messages, to take rather than give, to rape or assault, to spike drinks, to harm yourself or others, to vandalize or break shit, to steal others' possessions, to bring others down.

One of the reasons "how to get in to Berghain" articles are so hated is that they increase the chances that someone looking to engage in illegitimate behaviors will sneak past the door. This is obviously problematic -- if these guides worked, writing and sharing them would be the equivalent of throwing open the gates of Troy to people who not only aren't invited, but are almost certainly going to fuck the vibe up for everyone inside -- those that appreciate what a truly special place Berghain is.

One of the most salient worries is the ratio of straight people to gay people. As more straight folks make their way in, the less free the space feels, the less vibrant the party, the less Berghain. This anecdote from a Reddit post illustrates the peril of allowing people that are too straight to gain entry to Berghain:

"A few months ago I was dancing on the plateau at Berghain and one guy (I assume) was giving the other a BJ right next to me. I couldn’t care less but the girl next to me said, 'Eeewww, what are they doing? There are spaces to do that!' My answer, 'This is literally the time and place to do it. Especially because this club is actually a gay club!' She turned away and kept on dancing."

I'm not trying to make that problem worse -- because I fell in love with Berghain and felt it to be a truly free and freeing environment. On the other hand, I know that anybody that's hung in there for the 4,000 words (so far) of this post is literate, open-minded, and not likely to be the problem.

Back to the formula, I facetiously shared above:

1. Tattoo your face and neck in at least two places

2. Spend at least $2,000 on a full-body latex suit

3. Wear authentic German Rave Kandi

There's an underlying truth to each of these items. I'll now translate the formula to make these truths more evident:

1. Face tattoos demonstrate real commitment to living outside normie boundaries. In his GQ interview, Sven said, "I’ve never regretted [my face tattoos]. I mean, it was pretty much clear I wasn’t going to go into banking." You don't need a face tattoo, but I believe that the door crew are looking for some credible sign of commitment that can't be purchased on Shein or Amazon.

2. The truth is that there are multiple sub cultures within Berghain, and if you legitimately belong to one of these subcultures, be it Tom of Finland-style leather daddies or the head-to-toe latex crew, or the pups who wear vinyl dog masks, you'll likely find your door rate to be much higher because legitimate involvement in sub-cultures isn't something that can be easily faked. People might be able to "buy the look" wholesale, but the outfit won't sit easily on them, and you can believe that anybody with a sharp eye -- such as the doormen who are also photographers -- will see right through the flimsy facade. Of course there's no guarantee that the glint of latex peeking out from under your coat will stay the doorman's execution of your ego, but your odds are much, much better.

3. German Rave Kandi, as opposed to the cheesy American version, isn't plastic beads strung together for some sort of PLUR ritual. It's face piercings, ball closure rings accentuating your nipples through your tshirt, a Prince Albert barbell distorting the fabric of your short shorts, stainless steel chokers, and chunky rings on your fingers. At least, that's what Instagram's advertising algorithm started showing me ads for once it had recorded my location as Berghain.

In short, the answer to "how to get in to Berghain" is to be culturally aware and to make an effort to fit in -- not out of a desire to pretend to be what you're not, but out of respect for the scene. To get in, be true to who you are, and if your truth isn't aligned to one of the legitimate uses of the space, then expect to be rejected.

Click here for part 3.

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“Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.” [What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.] -- Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning

Under a full moon, with Mercury in retrograde, on a weekend so inauspicious it's nicknamed the Ides of March, I spent 30 glorious hours dancing, sweating, hallucinating, and fever-dreaming.

Thirty hours may sound like a lot of time for a weekend, but I'm a relative neophyte compared to the hardcore who spend that much time in this revered club every weekend, week after week, year after year. And yet, due to the magic of Berghain's clockless nowever and a heady cocktail of full moon energy, lysergic acid, psilocybin, and good old C. arabica, I lived multitudes of lives within this 30-hour weekend.

What's more, the confluence of these supernatural, pharmacological, psychological, chronological and physiological forces has shaped this series of posts into what may be the weirdest review you've ever read of a dancefloor. I'll ease you into it -- it won't get truly weird until part four.

I count myself lucky that I live 5,800 (straight-line) miles away from Berghain's siren song, for I would surely splinter the ship of my body upon its hedonistic shores were I not tied by obligations to the mast of sanity back in my home state of California.

About four hours from the end of my time in Berghain, I stood on the steel balcony overlooking the main floor just taking it all in. Len Faki filled my ears, a properly fogged room shot-through with blue lancets of light seared after-images into my retinas, and the half-naked bodies in the room below writhed and bounced in perfect time with the beat. I couldn't stop grinning and I must have looked mad -- the occipitofrontalis muscle was cramping with the effort of holding a grin that would not leave my face. And yet, even as I smiled and bounced to the beat from my balcony perch, I found myself crying with gratitude and awe at the overwhelming beauty of this perfectly imperfect place, this den of moral sinfulness, this mountain grove that sits on flat land in a city, this Berghain.

Because I (of course!) obeyed Berghain's rules around no photography, I have no photos to remember Berghain by, but I took frequent breaks to take notes, and this review is the product of my notes. Some of the images are burned brightly into my mind's eye -- seared by the intensity and novelty of experience as surely as if a white-hot cattle brand had been thrust into my eye socket to directly sear the image onto my brain. I will never forget these scenes, and hope that I might be able to write about some of them here in a way that conjures them up for you.

I've divided this review into parts to make it more digestible. In total, I expect to spill some 20,000 words here, but some parts of this experience will remain unpublished, being saved for my book on magical dancefloors -- a first draft of which is due to be completed this year. I've also put two especially vulnerable parts of this review -- about the infamous dark rooms -- behind a paywall as a sort of doorman to bounce the unserious from touristically strolling through work that took immense courage and vulnerability to write.

Here's what you'll find inside. Each of these sections will be linked when the corresponding piece is published -- pieces will be spaced a few days apart for the next several weeks. Hit the "subscribe" button to receive a notification when each part goes live.

1. INTRO - You're here now

2. Getting in (published 27 March, 2025)

3. Sweaty Panoramas (published 4 April, 2025)

4. Baby’s first darkroom visit (published 12 April, 2025)

5. The Berghain floor (published 22 April, 2025)

6. 🆕 Berghain itself (published 4 May, 2025)

7. My dark room experience (part 2)

8. How to get in to Berghain (part 2)

THE DOOR

Imagine you're standing there now, on a chilly night under a full moon that silvers the edges of the mountainous building that stands alone in the distance. Warmly bundled supplicants queue in the cold, quietly shuffling forward on the hard-packed dirt path to meet their fate at the hands of its feared doormen whose names and nicknames are whispered by the lips and tapped out by the fingertips of those who obsessively discuss how not to get rejected by them -- Mischa, Septum, Lars, Braids, Beard, Mustache, Blonde, Matrix, and Sven.

This last one is the patriarch of the door crew. At age 63, he's been running the security team since Berghain opened its doors in 2004.

In interviews I watched before venturing to Berghain from Los Angeles, I remember my first reaction to hearing Sven's voice: he's a soft-spoken, thoughtful man whose slight lisp and higher vocal register undermine the tough exterior of tattoos and piercings.

Countless videos, blogs, articles, and tweets have been written about how to make it through the infamous door gauntlet to win admission to Berghain's hallowed grounds.

The obsession with Berghain's door seems warranted. It can be heartbreaking to buy into the hype of Berghain -- "best party on earth" and so on -- only to be turned away at the door. It can undermine an ego-fragile person's constructed identity -- are you really cool enough, sexy enough, queer enough, enough-enough if you were turned away at the door? Did you wear the right quantity of nihilistic ennui on your brow, and carry yourself with the correct quantity of je ne sais quoi in your step? Did you wear enough black?

I'll tackle these questions in the next post. But I don't want to sow doubt where none belongs: yes, of course you're enough. The door is great, but it's got an error rate, and that means people that belong get denied even as people who really shouldn't be there get admitted. More on this in the next post.

To wrap this intro up, I'll share some more info about the events I attended the weekend of March 13 - 16.

SOUND METAPHORS ANNIVERSARY PARTY

I was idly perusing the Berghain website one day when I spotted this event and sat upright in my chair because it was a rare ticketed event (read: nearly guaranteed entry) with a wonderful lineup. I figured the worst-case scenario is that I would fly from Los Angeles to Berlin to attend this event inside Berghain for a single night and I would come away with some understanding of what makes the place legendary, even if I failed to get in on the subsequent night.

On this night, I attended ~13.5 hours, from ~10:15PM Friday, March 13 to ~11:45AM on Sat, March 14. Most of my time was spent enjoying the work of these artists:

• Suzanne Ciani

• Palms Trax

• ffan

• Mad Professor

• Pem & Mr. Sian

• Sound Metaphors DJs

• Konduku

• 69db

• DJ Stingray 313

• Interstellar Funk

A full review of this experience will be included in the subsequent posts of this series.

The following night, I attended Berghain's famous Klubnacht.

KLUBNACHT

This is the party Berghain's most famous for. I knew of only Len Faki, Quiet Husband, and Marie Montexier before setting foot in Berlin. I was mostly attending on faith that Berghain's booking team doesn't slip up.

For Klubnacht, I attended a total of about ~16.5 hours (from ~1:15AM to ~2:00AM on Sunday morning, again from ~3:30AM to 8:10AM on Sunday morning, and finally from ~8:10PM Sunday until 7:05AM Monday).

Most of these hours were spent in the company of these artists:

• Len Faki

• Gene on Earth

• Paquita Gordon

• Marie Montexier

• Francois X

Again, I'll be writing too many words about my Klubnacht experience in a subsequent post here. I’ve got a couple days to get that post ready — stay tuned.

I'll conclude with one more note. I'm not here to help tourists or Instagram influencers get into Berghain. I'm writing this out of a deep love for this place that has changed me forever, and I'm writing it as part of my project to describe magical dancefloors of the world, of which Berghain is certainly one. My hope in writing about Berghain is that what I write here will inspire dancers to demand more from their dancefloors, teach organizers (the ones who bother to read this, anyway) something about what makes dancefloors magical, and perhaps even influence the future of dancefloors.

Click here for part 2