The Elevator by Block 32

The night started as a skateboarding event. The World Cup Skateboarding Tour finals were at Berlin’s Velodrom in December 2009, and the place was full of video game consoles, foosball tables, and skater girls with dreadlocks and cropped tops. Australian Renton Millar, Brazilian Carlos de Andrade, and a fifteen-year-old named Axel Cruyberghs had taken the main prizes. Puppetmastaz did their unsettling puppet-rap thing. Blumentopf were solid. It was a good night—and then it became a better one when we got into the wrong elevator.

The elevator near Block 32 leads backstage. I’m passing this on as a public service. We were looking for somewhere quiet, hit the wrong button, and emerged in the production zone just as Deichkind were preparing to go on. Deichkind are a Hamburg group who play somewhere in the territory between hip-hop, electronic music, and sustained theatrical chaos—their sets involve rubber dolls, inflatable boats, umbrellas, neon everything, and enough vodka-orange circulating backstage to fill the inflatable boats. Stumbling into the middle of their props and encountering two band members returning from the toilet was not a planned approach. It worked out anyway.

Security, confused by a large camera and credentials that looked just plausible enough, decided we obviously belonged at the front of the stage. So that’s where we stood for the entire set—directly in the blast zone of the neon, the confetti, the inflatables descending on the crowd like expensive weather. Afterward someone from the crew handed us vodka-oranges. Several more rounds followed. We left through the coat check somehow covered in feathers—genuinely, from the show, I have no full explanation—and blinked into the Berlin night like two dazed chickens who couldn’t account for their own luck.