Terre Thaemlitz on Queer Nightlife: The Unabridged Interview

© 2004 Comatonse Recordings, with gracious permission from T. Thaemlitz

o, last week, an article of mine was published on Resident Advisor, entitled “An alternate history of sexuality in club culture.” It’s success was truly surprising—especially considering that the whole thing ran well over 8,000 words long! Despite its exceptional length, one of the hardest challenges I had in writing this article was to keep it short(er), because there was just so much to write about. That’s also a good thing, in the sense that it means that there’s still a lot to say about queer nightlife and club culture, but I was especially pained to have only included a few brief quotes from the fantastic email-interview I did with Terre Thaemlitz/DJ Sprinkles. Despite being a very busy producer, speaker, alternative historian, etc., she was immensely generous with her time,  answering all of my questions in great detail. It seemed a tragedy that most of the interview wouldn’t make it into the RA article, so I’ve arranged to have the full interview published here

Resonances: Music, Affect, and the City

Header taken from the “Resonances” poster

ast week, I organized a two-day conference here in Berlin, which took the affective dimensions of urban soundscapes as its central theme. Running November 7^th–8^th at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, the conference featured a mix of scholarly presentations and discussion panels that included professionals out of Berlin’s local music scene, as well as  music/sound-related evening events  (see the conference program at the end of this post).  I’m still recovering from the whole thing (as well as from an opportunistic flu that jumped into my body as soon as the conference came to a close), but I wanted to post some of my impressions of the conference, while they are still vivid in my memory. Considering the vanishingly small operating budget and a similarly tight planning period, I’m somewhat amazed I was able to pull it off at all.

Plans for this conference first arose last July,

Talking Culture, Money, and Music: Anti-GEMA Protests

The view from somewhere near the stage, back over Boxhagener Platz

esterday, there was yet another anti-GEMA demonstration held at Boxhagener Platz in Friedrichshain, just in front of the bar/club Stereo 33. There have been an ongoing series of these demonstrations in Berlin since at least late spring, but this event was interesting for how it mixed music and talk, as well as themes of culture and money.

For those of you who haven’t been living in Germany over the past year and haven’t been bombarded with

Happy Calendar-Reboot!

espite having just flown back from Canada two days ago, I’m already back into the nocturnal rhythms of Berlin. In fact, I used jet-lag to my advantage: I got home in the early morning, slept during the day, got up at 8pm, and then got ready for a night at Watergate (the Vakant + Dumb Unit label night). And then, the same routine the next day for the Final Friday night at Panorama Bar, with Margaret Dygas, Cassy, and Dinky (and Matthew Styles). Now, I’m making use of a brief pocket of quiet while my houseguest sleeps to post this message. In a couple of hours, we’ll have dinner, count down to midnight at a friend’s house, nap until 6am, and then head out to the insane Silvester party at Berghain/Panoramabar. The line-up features primarily the nightclub’s resident DJs, but there are also a few guests (e.g., Soundstream, Deetron) and even a few surprises (i.e., Andrew Butler of Hercules and Love Affair). The whole thing runs from Saturday midnight until late Monday, and will require a couple of cycles of dance+go home+nap+eat+dance.

It’s been interesting to see how the massive influx of tourists has impacted Berlin’s nightlife in these past days. Thursday night at Watergate involved a ridiculously long line (for a Thursday) and a crowd that seemed to be primarily populated by tourists (including tourists from other parts of Germany, mind you). I made the acquaintance of two guys from Munich, one from Beirut (Lebanon), one from Chile, and several American ex-pats (now living in Berlin). And, of course, there were French- and Italian-speakers everywhere, mostly making themselves noticeable because they can’t seem to resist the temptation to try to jump the queue for the door, the bathrooms, the bar, etc.

Friday at Panoramabar was similar but different: there were tons of tourists in the queue for the door, but proportionally less of them seemed to make it in—or, rather, only certain kinds of tourists seemed to make it past the bouncers. The queue was insanely long when we arrived around 1am (which was admittedly far too early for Berliners and part of the reason why the proportion of tourists was so high), running all the way back to where the taxis were. The wait would probably be 1.5-2 hours. I was with 3 friends, so I left two of them at the back of the line, and then I went to the door with one of my friends and approached the door. Since I’ve been something of a regular at the place, I was relatively confident that I could walk directly to the door and the doormen would wave me in, but I was less certain that I could bring in 3 other people. So, my strategy was to approach the door with one other person, and then ask if I could bring in two more people. As I expected, the doorman Andrej saw me and waved me in. “A quick question,” I said in German, “I still have two other friends stuck at the back of the line. Could I bring them in with me?” “Only two?” he said, sternly. “Yes, yes. Just two more people.” “OK, fine.” And, with that, I ran back to the far end of the line, picked up my other 2 friends, and went in. The rest of the night was too long and crazy to relate here, but suffice it to say that I met a lot of locals, non-local Germans, local ex-pats, frequent visitors, and tourists.

OK, time to go gird my loins! I have a lot of hard work ahead of me.

Chapter 4. Thickening Something: Music, Affect, and the Sense of the Social

Detroit Electronic Music Festival, 2010

kay. It’s been nearly three months since my dissertation defense, two months since my graduation, and two weeks since I moved to Berlin. Things have been crazy busy, but I’m still determined to finish this series of chapter summaries. It’s a surprising amount of work to summarize this gigantic, sprawling thing as a series of “plain English” blog posts. Anyway, here comes the affect!

(NOTE: This is the seventh installment of a series where I summarize my dissertation through blog posts. You can find the inaugural post here.)

This chapter is about tracing the connections between intensity and togetherness. The full version of this chapter wades into a fair bit of theory, but I’ll try to keep things streamlined here. Essentially, this is how I go about tracing the connections:

Checking in from Berlin

I think that's my name as a graffiti tag, on some sort of electrical box on Sonnenallee in Neukölln.

K, OK. I know that it’s been a while since I’ve checked in on here (since Grenada!) but here’s what I’ve been up to in the past month or so:

• Travel to and from Grenada
• Attempt to sell off most of my furniture and my car
• Get my !@#$ing PhD diploma and attend Convocation with my parents
• Pack my entire life into boxes, load it into a U-Haul truck while some guy yells at us about blocking the alleyway, and then drive it 8 hours to Canada
• Store most of my crap at my parents’ place and try to shove the remaining articles into 3 pieces of luggage
• Remind Canada’s bureaucracy of my continuing existence
• Spend a week in Toronto seeing friends, visiting old haunts, and having meetings at my alma mater
• Spend about 20 hours in 3 flights taking me from my hometown to Berlin-town. Screaming babies were a bonus feature
• Eat roasted chicken from City Chicken (Neukölln) and get plastered on wine and Sekt before finally crashing on my friend’s floor
• Make a deposit at my Hauptmieterin’s (sublessor) bank account and retrieve the keys to my apartment
• Schlep my numerous bags to my new apartment and settle in
• Begin the long process of announcing my presence to the German bureaucracy
• Struggle endlessly to unlock my iPhone 4 so I can use a reasonably-priced German SIM card
• Re-stock the kitchen
• Oversee repairs to the bathroom of my new apartment, which seems to involve plaster and sweaty men (not the sexy kind)
• Orchestrate and attend reunions with overlapping circles of friends (and attempt not to alienate anyone in the process)
• Sleep, eventually.

And now I’m in Berlin.

Introduction, Part 1: The State of EDM Studies

Peeps Hunting Trophy, Shit Show 01, DEMF @ Detroit, 2010

his is the second installment in my series of posts summarizing my dissertation, chapter by chapter. In the first post, I gave an overview of my dissertation project, elucidating the main research questions, highlighting some overarching themes, and giving an overview of the chapters to follow. Today’s post covers the introductory chapter, where I review previous scholarship on similar topics, introduce and describe my main fieldwork sites (i.e., Paris, Chicago, and Berlin), and outline my methods for conducting research. This chapter also includes the chapter-structure of the rest of the dissertation, but since that was already covered in my previous post, I’ll skip over that here.

Brief Recap: this dissertation aims mostly to make sense of scenes like this,

Back to Blogging & the DissertationDistraction Podcast

Somewhere in Chicago

‘m back! Well, sort of.

 

As you probably noticed, I’ve been rather silent on this blog for the past couple of months. Sometime around mid-April, I realized that the deadlines for the submission of the final draft of my dissertation aligned with travel plans for both me and my committee members in such a way that I needed to either defend my dissertation in mid-June (with plenty of time to revise post-defense) or in mid-July (with barely a week to do all revisions). I went into Emergency Dissertation-Finishing Mode

Podcast: Berlin, Summer of 2008

o, just a few days after posting the request for tracks for the “Berlin Summer of 2010” podcast, I finally made good on the initial 2008 project. So, here is the set on Soundcloud:

Suggestions Needed: Berlin, Summer of 2010 tracks

erhaps it’s too late for your hazy memories, but: what were your tracks of the summer of 2010? Much like the project I started last year, I’m planning to put together a DJ mix that reflects the sounds of my recent trip to Berlin. This is primarily directed at folks who were in Berlin last summer and were hearing the same tracks I was, but I’m still happy to have suggestions to people who were partying elsewhere. If you were hearing a track all over the place during the summer, post it in the comments! Here’s my preliminary list:

• The Gathering. “In My System (Jeff K System Mix).” Silver Network. [Marc Schneider & Jan Krueger played the fuck outta this track that summer]
• Axel Boman. “Purple Drank.” Pampa. [“I woke up with your name on my lipsssss…”]
• Laserkraft 3D. “Nein Mann.” Sme Music. [OK, not really; this wasn’t on any of the dancefloors where I went, but the track made the rounds of all of the Berlin party kids]
• Akabu. “Another World (Andre Lodemann Mix).” Z Records. [I could be wrong, but I believe there’s a bit of Debussy’s La Mer on here.]
• Kink. “E79.” Ovum.
• Maya Jane Coles. “What They Say.” RealTone Records. [Apparently, the vocal sample is from a DJ Sneak track]
• DJ Koze. “Blume der Nacht.” Pampa. [As featured on Superpitcher’s amazing RA Podcast]
• Davide Squillace. “The Other Side of the Bed.” Desolat.