Two Brits Alone in Berlin

The Ting Tings packed up and went to Berlin to make a record, and they did it without anyone watching over their shoulders. Jules De Martino and Katie White, the two-piece who’d already lodged "That’s Not My Name" permanently into the part of your brain that refuses to forget things, chose the city as the site for their follow-up album Kunst—German for "art," which is either confident or deadpan, depending on how you hold it.

There’s something I like about the idea of two people from Manchester taking themselves to another country specifically to work alone. Berlin has that quality—it absorbs people who need space to be weird without explanation. The album they made there turned out stranger and more combative than their debut, which probably confused half their audience and delighted the other half.

They brought Kunst back to Berlin for a show at the E-Werk, sharing the night with Peaches doing a DJ set, Treasure Fingers, Fan Death, and Michi Beck from Die Fantastischen Vier, Germany’s long-running hip-hop institution. That’s an odd and interesting lineup—and the kind of bill that doesn’t happen when a brand isn’t paying for it. A fragrance campaign funded the evening, which is fine. Weirder things have been bankrolled for worse reasons.

What stays with me is the image of the two of them in a Berlin studio with no one telling them what the single should sound like. Whether the album justified that freedom or not is almost beside the point. The decision to go was the thing.