The Night Simian Mobile Disco Was Going to Fix Everything

For a few days in March 2010 it seemed genuinely possible: win a competition, secure the budget, book the acts, and on April 23rd the Haus am Kollnischen Park would be full of people and Simian Mobile Disco would be playing and everything would be fine.

The lineup was good. Simian Mobile Disco had moved past the moment when Attack Decay Sustain Release settled into classic status and were building toward something harder and more industrial—the live set from that period was relentless in the best way, all corroded basslines and mechanical kick drums, nothing like the relatively friendly dance music they’d started as. Metronomy were three years away from The English Riviera and still running on the nervous, neon-lit energy of Nights Out, which remains one of the better arguments for why British electronic music was so interesting in that small window. Boy 8-Bit was making chiptune-influenced work that felt genuinely urgent before it became a genre shorthand. A good card for a Berlin night in 2010.

Whether the party actually happened, I honestly don’t remember with certainty. What I remember is what it felt like to put that lineup on paper and imagine it in that venue—the specific anticipatory pleasure of a bill that makes sense, that has a logic to it, where each act flows into the next and you can already hear the night in your head before it begins.

Berlin in 2010 had a specific relationship to British electronic music—a city that had long exported its own sounds watching the imports arrive with the enthusiasm that goes both ways. Acts like Simian and Metronomy fit somewhere between the cold precision of German techno and the melodic chaos of post-punk, and Berlin made room for that. The Haus am Kollnischen Park was the kind of venue that felt important regardless of what was on. Concrete floors, high ceilings, the particular smell of a building that has hosted a thousand nights just like this one and will host a thousand more.