Marcel Winatschek

The Brewery, the Dinosaur, the Night

There’s something specifically right about putting electronic music inside an old brewery. The stone, the wood, the dimensions designed for fermentation rather than performance—it resists the sound in ways that make the sound work harder. The Lederer Kulturbrauerei in Nuremberg, the oldest brewery in the city, got that treatment in July 2011 when the Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour moved through it with Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, D.I.M., and Optimus Maximus on the bill.

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs—Orlando Higginbottom’s project name being itself a small argument for not taking any of this too seriously—was at that point one of the more genuinely interesting things happening in UK electronic music. A sound that didn’t quite belong to any single room type but worked across all of them. The collision of Franconian brewery architecture and a DJ called Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs made exactly the kind of absurd sense that good nights are built on.