What a Berlin Night Could Be

The Berlin party scene in early 2010 had started believing its own mythology, which is the most reliable early sign that something good is about to go mediocre. The infrastructure was right—the venues, the soundsystems, the collective permission to stay out until Tuesday—but the actual music had drifted toward either relentless minimalism or irony-drenched indie that sounded like it had been programmed by someone who’d just read their first profile of !!! and wanted to seem informed. Cracked-out superclubs on one end, student-night twee on the other, nothing much in between.

What Simian Mobile Disco represented at that moment was a corrective. They took electronics seriously without treating the dancefloor as a conceptual exercise—their sets had structure and release and the basic courtesy of making people want to move, which shouldn’t be a radical proposition at a dance music event but somehow was. Metronomy occupied a different register: not quite dance, not quite pop, operating in the productive gap between the two with the deliberate strangeness of a band that hadn’t fully decided what it was yet, which is usually when bands are most interesting. Add Boy 8-Bit’s chiptune-inflected electronics to a night at the Haus am Kollnischen Park and you had something worth the trip in from wherever you were living.

Those were the nights Berlin’s reputation was actually built on—not the mythology, not the queue outside Berghain, but rooms where the lineup justified showing up and the music made the room feel like a physical event rather than an endurance exercise. Whether any given night actually delivered was always uncertain. But the possibility was real, and the possibility was enough.