An Empty Supermarket at Jannowitzbrücke

There’s a version of New Year’s Eve I’ve always wanted to avoid, and it goes like this: an outdoor stage, overpriced beer in a plastic cup, some half-dead cover band murdering "Imagine" in the cold, and thirty thousand people screaming themselves into the new year having experienced absolutely nothing. A stadium of ambient misery dressed up as celebration.

The alternative, for at least one December 31st, was a vacant supermarket near Jannowitzbrücke in Berlin. Someone called Charly and a loose crew of collaborators had found the space and filled it with a lineup that actually meant something: Bjarki, then cresting on the reputation that came with being Nina Kraviz’s protégé; Keith Carnal, Emmanuel, Charly Schaller, Francesco De Luca, Marco Shuttle, Wittes, and Jonathan Kavander. The whole thing was called Body Talks – NYE Warehouse, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Empty supermarkets make oddly good venues. The stripped-out bones of a room that used to sell yogurt and toilet paper, ceilings high enough to let the sound breathe, the faint institutional smell of a building relieved of its commercial purpose. A place that used to be about consumption, briefly repurposed for something else entirely. It felt right for midnight.