THE INNERVISIONS ÜBERBALL

You can’t win at the door in Berghain. The girls in front of us were politely informed that the club was not for them, so we sat tight dressed in black not saying jack, looking moody, slightly worse for wear at 6am, thinking, ‘there is no fucking way I want to go to bed now.’ We slip past the black bomber-jacket clad security guard who says: “You can grin you know!” See? Can’t fucking win. Go looking like you’re jazzed up for the night you’ll be turned away in a heartbeat, go dressed looking the master of androgyny they tell you to cheer up. Either way, we ventured inside for a healthy 12-hour dose of the Innervisions Überball.

Like any 12-hour stint in one place it’s often good to mix things up a bit, so, considering the time of the morning, Crack nestled in for a good old deep and meaningful with one’s nearest and dearest downstairs on the bottom floor of the club while numerous men clad in Adidas short shorts and nothing else scuttled past us, which, considering our surroundings, seemed perfectly normal.

Avoiding all darkened passageways we proceeded to the belly of the Berghain beast to catch the last two hours of Surgeon – a man whom we revere as much as anyone associated with British techno. His set is far from Berghain’s distorted kick staple and contained more than a splattering of melody, yet it still punished as one could only hope in what is surely the most aesthetically pleasing main room you could ever wish to be lost in. Even though the temptation is to go upstairs and let some light in, we’re a full two hours into our Berghain experience before we go and catch Dixon midway through a five hour set in Panorama Bar.

Unless you’re ‘ardcore (and we’re nearly 30 so we’re not ‘alf as ‘ardcore as we used to be), spending 24 hours in a nightclub is quite a feat these days, so we just picked the 12 hours that best suited us, and Dixon in Panorama Bar pretty much epitomised what we wanted to do with our bodies at this hour. His depthy set reached a crescendo with some friends we’d made in the club and dance floor camaraderie at a peak, the Innervisions sound that so characterised last year sounding as relevant and as club friendly at 10am as any festival we saw him at last year.

The magic of this club is coherently defined by the fact that you can leave the place at any point during the 30 odd hours it’s open and there will still be a queue of up to 300+ hungry music fans outside. No club in the world can boast this devotion to the cause and every time you feel lucky to be on the inside. Mingling with regulars, exploring new cavities you never knew existed and partying with the most open-minded connoisseurs of the music on display, the beauty of each area of the club is that it offers a slightly different experience all within the realms of sub-cultural deviancy.

Going into the afternoon, Omar-S’s foray into Detroit house is definitely what the P-Bar needed after Alex From Tokyo’s rather fluffy house set. Soul with a tougher exterior, the party was sufficiently moving and sardine-like going into Innversions understudy Marcus Worgull.

Final set of the weekend went to young gun Alex.Do in Berghain, who again bypassed the stereotype of things being too tough, with a set that claimed a progressive territory as much as any. Utilising records with space in a club that has a shit load of space can only be recommended, and his set offers a dynamism that others might lose in favour of the rougher stuff. When we left there was still roughly 13 hours to go and it was an absolute heartbreak to leave it all behind. The queue was huge outside.

Once again we came, once again it was unreal, and two weeks later we’re still reminiscing about it.

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 Words: Thomas Frost