Elegant Venue, Scrapyard Energy

Munich has a defensiveness about it that Berlin never needed to develop—it knows the comparison exists and has spent years trying to make the question irrelevant. The Beck’s Mix Fusion Party was doing something like that in miniature: take the Alte Börse on Lenbachplatz, a room built for the solemn transfer of money, and fill it with the deliberately incongruous. Sexy atmosphere meets rocking junkyard was the actual billing. Which, if you squint at it, is just a description of any good party—the container and its contents working against each other in productive tension. Whether the premise survived contact with an August crowd in Bavaria is another matter entirely.