A Love Letter to Berghain (Part 3/8): Sweaty Panoramas
I can't believe there's a party this good every fucking weekend.
(This is part three of an eight-part series that begins with this article.)
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
I cannot tell you how much this series of posts has meant to me. As a fellow "Despacio Disciple", and through a desire to adhere to + apply core tenets to dancefloors I aim to create, reading YOUR firsthand accounts of these spaces is crucial. Last time I was in Germany was 2017, denied at Tresor on the first try and tried again 30 minutes later with success. Did not dare try Berghain and I know I would not have appreciated it. You care about the essence of the floor more than anyone I have ever met, and your diligence to uncovering and exulting the floors that fire on all cylinders is incredible. Keep it up, as you inspire more people than you could imagine.
This post is quite a read, so I'm only half-way through right now, just got to the section about connected dancefloors, and I'll drop comments as I go.
I wonder, how much do you feel that being on psychadelics influences that feeling of connected-ness? When I think back to those extremely rare moments when I felt truly connected with the people dancing around me, it was at least 5 or 6 hours into the dance and I was on at least 2 hits of LSD and a redose of MDMA by that point - and specifically LSD, mushrooms never made me feel as connected with the people around me (though it does make me feel more connected to nature).
Also, when you are dancing and not facing the DJ, where do you look? Except for a passing glance and a smile (which is a big part of feeling the magic, because it shows that we are sharing the same good vibes), it creeps me out to make prolonged eye contact with other people on the dancefloor - especially when I have my rage-face on. Obviously sunglasses help a lot in this regard. My two reasons for usually facing the DJ are, 1 it avoids eye contact with people, and 2 that's where the main speakers usually are. The exception being if there are multiple speaker stacks, in which case I usually dance facing one from 10 feet away, or if there is no space, then I will dance with my back against the speaker and facing out into the crowd (in NYC, speaker stacks are uncommon because dancefloors are so small, except at Nowadays and Danny T's STAX series... and maybe Basement, but I never go there)