One Song Each

The concept refuses to be complicated: a hundred people, each plays exactly one song. No sets, no warm-ups, no self-indulgent twenty-minute excursions. You get one track, you play it, you step aside. The 100 Schönsten DJs der Stadt—"the hundred most beautiful DJs in the city," a title worn with visible irony—had been doing this in Berlin for a while, and every edition felt like a distillation of what made the city’s music culture actually interesting: the refusal to take itself too seriously while taking the music completely seriously.

The December 2016 edition was at Gretchen, put together by the people at Mit Vergnügen and Stil vor Talent. The lineup covered the full spectrum of Berlin music-nerd taxonomy: DJ Hell, Oliver Koletzki, Klangkarussell, Phonique, Einmusik, Teenage Mutants, Simina Kalkbrenner. Names ranging from genuine techno institution to beloved scene character to person who clearly just has excellent taste in one very specific corner of the universe.

But the thing everyone was actually there for was Nina Hagen—Germany’s most gloriously unhinged punk icon, a woman who has spent four decades doing exactly what she wants and somehow getting more interesting rather than less. She performed live with Adamski, the British producer best known for Killer, his 1990 track with Seal that managed to be genuinely strange and massively popular at the same time. The pairing had the logic of a fever dream, which is the only logic Nina Hagen has ever respected. One song. Then done.