FUCK BUTTONS
Berghain, Berlin | October 10th
As anyone who’s set foot inside the notorious club will tell you, the Berghain soundsystem is a thing to behold: six monolithic speaker stacks arranged in a full circle around a cavernous former turbine hall, its capacity to vibrate every inch of your body is matched only by low flying jet aircraft or middling bouts of tectonic activity.
But given that the club was built first and foremost as a temple for techno music, most people stepping through its fabled doors only ever experience the relentless ‘doof’ of an endlessly cycling kickdrum. Yet get away from the 72-hour stints of 4/4 worship at the weekends and you’ll finally get to experience everything you’d ever hoped—but never quite knew—that awesome soundsystem was capable of. Which is exactly what we found out when Fuck Buttons played last week.
After an auspicious double warm-up from fast-rising duo Forrests and electro-classical experimentalist Zan Lyons—the former teasing out lush, coruscating electronica somewhere between Yppah and early days Orbital, the latter pushing the avant-garde envelope via spectral synths and some hauntingly beautiful live violin—Buttons’ Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power take to the stage. With posters around the venue proudly proclaiming that this will be a 75-minute performance, our eardrums are already shitting themselves.
Launching straight into the gargantuan wash of Brainfreeze, opening track to the pair’s hugely acclaimed third album Slow Focus, bodies in the crowd begin to ebb and sway as the trancelike layers of synth gather in pace and intensity. With projected visuals spanning the entire wall behind, the effect is nothing short of complete sensory overload—the perfect backdrop to welcome in the thunderous kick of Surf Solar, the pair’s second number of the night. As its expectant, ominous chords thicken the air, pregnant with dread and foreboding, it dawns on us that this could very well be the soundtrack to the end of the world… and everyone is loving it.
Pulling back moments from the brink of meltdown, in drops the booming, tribal percussion of Colours Move, with Hung screaming like a primal deity into his microphone while Power flogs the life out of a floor drum in front of him. Moments later, a light opens above, and we find ourselves ushered into the euphoric brilliance of Olympians, with its reverent pipe organ lifting us out from the darkness for moment’s heavenly respite. If ever there was a group so capable of transporting you between points of salvation and annihilation, we’re truly yet to find them.
It doesn’t last long, however, and with those dying hopeful glimmers out step the twin leviathans of Sentients and The Red Wing, both bristling with a raw, saw-toothed ferocity that rattles the body like a sledgehammer to the sternum. Bruised, battered, and full of adrenaline, there’s just time to gather our senses before the climactic curtain of Hidden Xs is drawn, its compounding synth lines and clattering two-step drum pattern bringing the night to a truly epic finale that feels at once to have lasted a lifetime, yet be over in a heartbeat.
Ears ringing, we stumble toward the nearest strong drink. There aren’t many gigs that could effectively soundtrack the apocalypse, but Fuck Buttons at Berghain might have just been one of them. Thankfully, we survived to tell the tale.
– – – – – – – – – –
Words: Alex Gwilliam
CONNECT TO CRACK
