House Is A Feeling

I watched Feiern last week, a documentary by Maja Classen about the German techno scene. It features a whole slew of famous DJs and producers, though it doesn’t heavily label who all of them are throughout the film. Suffice to say, My My, Villalobos, Luciano, Ewan Pearson, André Galluzi (I think), and many more, are featured.

The film is basically a set of interviews with miscellaneous members of the underground techno scene, some DJs, some producers, and plenty of randomers. It’s at times difficult to tell who is who, or if the person you’re watching is famous or not.

As the topics of the film change, you get everyone’s two cents, on drugs, hedonism, excess, the Berlin gay scene, and techno itself. Inevitably, with this kind of roundtable approach, some of the people interviewed say some really stupid things, but it’s nice that few if any of the annoying interviewees are DJs or producers.

It’s worth a look if you enjoy German dance music, but it is a flawed film. For starters, there’s a whole heap of 90s style eulogising about the nightclub as a religious edifice and a sanctuary, the kind of thing you thought you’d never hear again. I’m in two minds about this sort of wistful romanticism about techno. Is it the sign of a scene that’s booming and genuinely causing people to fail spectacularly (but at least try) in their attempts to describe it? Or is it just the leftovers of sociology and journalism’s failure to comprehend techno during the 90s, regurgitated by fans in the 00s.

But leaving that aside, the film excels as an account of a very specific subculture of hedonism, with plenty of famous German techno institutions getting name checked along the way. Outsiders get a real sense of what a strong and protective attitude towards the scene exists in Berlin.

Make no mistake, this is a city with a longer and deeper tradition of serious purist techno than anyone living elsewhere can imagine. Some of the people featured carry rave medals or scars, in the form of tattoos, earrings and wrinkles, like veterans of a war.

Unlike the relatively gentrified techno scenes in Britain or Ireland, Feiern suggests that techno in Berlin seems to still retain a certain madness. Perhaps this hardcore approach is the reason why so much of the best music has been coming from there in recent years.

But with this German purism comes a hedonism that’s a strong recurring theme throughout the film. Feiern certainly attempts to explore the rationale behind the kind of reckless recreational drug taking that forms the backbone of the techno scene.

There are some really interesting stories, including Carsten Klemann’s poignant description of how he became a heroin addict in his mid teens. But one point which seems to emerge is the extent to which the self destructive behaviour of these Berliners seems to go hand in hand with their musical purism.

They do this because this is their culture, and 72 hour parties are what you do. You give yourself to this scene and then you are defined by it, it becomes your life. It’s blind devotion. If it was just to music, there might be no harm, but when you unequivocally adopt a culture into your life which is fuelled also by drugs, your behaviour becomes damaging.

Yet is it this potentially damaging behaviour that separates real purists from casuals? The hardcore from people who go to clubs simply to blab about it afterwards? In techno, drugs and damaging yourself and hurling hours and days into the void are probably as eulogised a part of this subculture as the music. And you can’t fake failure, ever.

That’s the romanticism of any hedonistic scene like this, of the characters in Feiern and their war stories. But when purism and authenticity and being hardcore mean this loop of damaging oneself, is it just a race to the bottom? Is this where authenticity ultimately ends?

Ultimately, does adopting the vices of your chosen religion so strictly and to the letter mean that you just destroy yourself? Perhaps the musicians, whose art is the beauty in this world of self harm, are the only ones who escape.

As for me, well, I don’t take drugs much anymore (I served my time) but then choosing to play and write about a sliver of techno for a living is only marginally less masochistic.